The slender maple

The slender maple

The slender maple tree reaches my third-floor window of the high rise in West Seattle. Sunshine. The branches and twigs are budding. This is the middle of April.

I am drinking tepid Lychee black tea. Its fragrance reminds me of the fruit of the Lychee trees on the outskirts of Guangzhou, or Canton as it was formerly called, so-named by foreigners who colonialized China. I led my school mates out there. They were city boys and I had come from the village. Although they had been there for nine or ten years as grade school children in their own birth city, they never ventured out to the city's outskirts, where the honey buckets were empties after wagons hauled them out to the farmers that surround this city, where also the Pearl River empties itself into sea. It is the world's 17^th largest river.

During the monsoon in May, the rice and water-chestnut paddies would be flooded, obfuscating the boundaries by covering the dikes that separate them. We would steal some of the Lychee fruit. It has a coarse shell you peel off, then you meet succulent white meat of the fruit covering a large brown pit. No one was out guarding the fruits of their labor.

I finished one large cup of tea and notice the small green and orange buds of the maple tree. I decided today not to walk to the library, a round trip which would be three miles that my heart doctor orders me to do. My father had died of a heart attack six years younger than my age now at sixty-nine. I have a pacemaker for complete right bundle block. It is a faulty electrical system of the heart. I won't bore you with it, except that under the circumstances, my heart is still good.

I feel rather alone in this high rise for seniors and disabled people with low income. I should fit right in because I am disabled, senior, and low income. But I don't because of my intellectual pretensions. I have not made a living with it. I am like a pertetual student. My father used to yelled at me, “Jack of all trades and master of none.” He also said that I was always doing things that don't needed to be done.

(to be continued...)

Koon Woon

April 10, 2018