Friday, June 27, 2008

Flashback: Clarence and the Monkeys

One summer night in South Los Angeles, Richard, Reid and I sat on the porch and listened to our friend, Clarence, talk about monkeys in the Vietnamese jungle. Clarence would often stop by in the early evening, asking for a dollar to buy a hamburger at the corner burger joint, or a cup of juice. He lived in nearby boarding house and came by when he was hungry or bored, which was quite often. He was a huge man with a large round head, thick hands, and a crooked nose—the result of his years as a boxer, he said. Clarence acted like a kid at times, widening his round eyes as he asked for a cookie. At other times, those eyes would well up with tears as he told us about some of the things that he’d done during his tours in Vietnam. “I don’t think God can forgive me,” he said. Even if I had a collar on, I don’t think he would have believed me when I told him that God could forgive even the worst things. He just cried and ate his burger. Then he would suddenly snap out of it and act like nothing had happened. We didn’t know if he’d experienced a brain injury as a result of boxing, or using drugs after his tours of duty in Vietnam.

On that summer night, Clarence was especially lucid as he sipped his plastic cup of juice. “Have you ever eaten a monkey?” he asked us. We exchanged glances then shook our heads. "Barbecued monkeys,” he continued, “That's some good eatin'." When he was in Vietnam, the members of his squad were often out in the bush for extended periods, growing tired of MREs and hungry for meat. When desire outweighed inconvenience, they hunted monkeys. with their M16s. "They’re hard to catch, too. The big ones are smart and they fight back, throw sticks , scream. But when you catch 'em and put 'em on a rotisserie stick. Mmmm."

Maybe it was the summer heat, but we pictured ourselves with Clarence, half a world away. We sat there for a moment of silence and imagined Clarence savoring his dinner the way that he put away a cheeseburger and fries.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Commuter Snippets

At the bus stop an older man looks at me and we say hello.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Fine, thank you, but my arm is swollen.” He rubs his left arm and stares off into the distance. “I think it’s gout.”

* * * * *
A young man covered in tattoos (“562,” skulls, a web on both arms with a Shelob-like spider, others that I can’t recall) entered the train, sprawled in his seat and noticed a young woman seated across the aisle.

She was in the process of scraping off fluorescent orange from her nails.

“Do you know about the great stuff that comes in bottles and takes that stuff right off your nails…, nail polish remover?” he said in a droll manner.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” she replied.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Do You Believe in Miracles?

In the interest of counteracting an overwhelming desire to sulk, here are a couple of great amateur basketball moments.

Once upon a time, Debbie and a dear family friend, Trinh, played for the Florence Nightingale Middle School Nighthawks. Our family went to a Saturday tournament to give them moral support, but we expected to be home early. King Middle School, the tournament favorite, had a roster filled with taller and quicker players; some even honed their ball-handling skills in the Saturday Japanese-American League. What Nightingale lacked in height, they didn’t make up with experience. Some of the Nighthawks even played in tennis shoes. Needless to say, they weren’t supposed to succeed.

If memory serves, Nightingale overachieved and reached the championship game. They were outmatched in terms of skill and physical size, but the other team went cold went cold in the finals, missing lay-ups and getting frustrated. The score was incredibly low, in the teens, I think. In the second half, the game was close and the Nighthawks trailed by a point in the waning seconds. The crowd assumed it was over, but they got the ball back and someone put up a wild shot. Trinh jumped up, avoided the trees, and came down with a rebound in the paint. As she went up for a shot, she was fouled, and the ref blew his whistle. With three seconds on the clock, Trinh was going to the free throw line with a chance to win.

The opposing coach, with predictable gamesmanship, called timeout to ice her. There’s no way a junior high schooler can overcome the pressure, I thought. Maybe, just maybe, she could send the game to overtime. Trinh returned to the line after the timeout and calmly hit the first free throw to tie the game. Impossible! She got the ball back from the ref, bounced it, and sank the second free throw for the lead. We jumped up and down and rushed the court when time expired. Trinh, thanks for the memories. (Note: I spoke with Debbie today and she couldn't remember beating King.  Maybe it was a consolation game. By the way: I'd still trust Trinh to sink free throws in crunch time.)

Finally, this video from two years ago made me choke up. A friend from high school sent it to me the other day. It's a great story about an autistic boy who played an amazing game for his high school team.




Friday, June 13, 2008

Sometimes You Lose

Last night was one of the most painful nights in Laker history, no doubt about it. It was so awful to watch the end of the game that Lucy curled up in my arms. Daniel left the room and tried to watch the Cartoon Network. Caroline said, “Now I remember why I don’t like basketball.” I woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night and wondered if it had all been a bad dream. Unfortunately, the Lakers allowed the Celtics to come back from an unprecedented deficit in the NBA Finals. Wow, that smarts. I almost feel like Debbie after Miami lost to Penn State in the national championship game. (She went to her room and slammed the door after Vinny Testaverde threw an interception at the goal line to end a brilliant last minute drive.)

The loss brought back a bunch of bad memories. Maybe I need to forgive Larry Bird for waving the towel and McHale for grabbing Kurt Rambis by the neck and slamming him to the floor. I don’t remember if I cried when the Dodgers lost to Reggie Jackson and the Yankees in 1977, but I cringed when Daniel checked out a book on Mr. October a few months ago. My blood pressure rises when I see Bevo, Vince Young, or burnt orange. (No offense to any UT friends out there...) And I still can’t believe that USC lost to Stanford last year. I know that you win a few, but sometimes it’s true what Maime Trotter says to Galadriel Hopkins near the end of The Great Gilly Hopkins: “All that stuff about happy endings is lies.”

Thursday, June 12, 2008

June 12: Loving Day

At Fountain of Life Covenant Church, we have a large number of multiethnic families and nearly all of the married, engaged, and dating couples are interracial. I'd list them all, but there are already three examples within the Sato family. (And I'm not biased when I say that FOL has some of the cutest kids around!)

It's almost easy to take interracial families within a multiethnic church for granted, but this morning I heard a story on NPR and read a blog post by Edward Gilbreath, an author and editor at Christianity Today. (Read the post here and follow his links to other coverage.) Forty-one years ago today, anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia. Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred, a black woman, were banished from Virginia and threatened with imprisonment for violating the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Here's a quote from the act:

"It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act."

It's hard to believe, but California's own miscegenation laws were struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1948. Read a brief summary. It's harder to believe that Charleston High School in Mississippi held its first ever interracial prom just a few days ago.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Lakers in Six

“There’s absolutely nothing like a championship run to bring this city together,” said Lewis MacAdams on NPR’s “Day to Day” radio show. (Listen to the story.) He described the Laker flags on junky pick-up trucks and nice Mercedes-Benzes, fist bumps between poets and store clerks, and the general elation of Lakers fans around the city. Well, he probably wrote the story before the first two games of the series – and before the fight at Staples Center at the Game 2 screening (see the LA Observed post) — but I loved it anyway. Frankly, it’s true. People are quite willing to offer perspectives on Paul Pierce’s amazing recovery/healing, discuss the free throw disparity, and even cut people deals. (Back in 2001, a printer gave me a huge discount on a project and even rushed the delivery because we talked about the Lakers before we started doing business!) When the Lakers are doing well, it's easier to break the ice and cut across ethnic, class, and age divisions. A couple days ago, John and Becky saw a guy in a Kobe MVP jersey and had an evangelistic conversation right in their front yard. The power of connecting through powerful common interests cannot be underestimated.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Un-American?

We were on our way home from a baseball game when Lucy said that her best friend Erica, the only other Asian girl in the first grade Spanish immersion class, will be moving in the fall.

"Will you miss your friend Erica when she moves?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you tell her?"
“Yes," said Lucy, "She said, ‘Everyone’s going to miss me.’”

Caroline left for worship team practice and the kids and I sat down to dinner. When it was time to clear the table, clean up backpacks and clothes all over the place, and water the lawn, Caroline called to say that Barack Obama was about to give a speech after clinching the Democratic nomination. I was excited and anxious to hear what he would say, but since we don't have cable, we listened to the speech on KPCC and watched for a few minutes on ABC. I said something like, "Guys, this is an amazing moment in American history. For the first time, a black man is a major party's nominee for the president!" We chatted for a few minutes about the remaining months of the presidential race. Lucy exclaimed, "But Dad, you're not even American!" I tried to re-explain what Caroline had said a few days before about how it's not your ethnicity or skin color that defines a person as an American. Somehow we got on the topic of their classmates thinking that the kids were Chinese, or that Japan and China were the same country. That led to a discussion about the largest cities in the world. The conversation soon devolved into Lucy calling Daniel "Tokyo" for the rest of the evening.

Maybe were not doing a good job of helping the kids through ethnic identity issues. Among other things, Daniel thinks that Caroline's vegetarian chili is Japanese-American food.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

The Vacuum and the Marimba

One day, on a lovely morning in May, I tried to spend some time praying and reflecting at Starbucks. I attempted, quite unsuccessfully, to tune out the jazz soundtrack, even a lovely arrangement of “Maria” from West Side Story, conversations about expense accounts and boondoggles, and complaints about finals. I read Genesis for a bit and then finished my feeble attempts to listen to God.

After a few moments, I picked up Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water. She described being tired and injured with bruised ribs from a fall. She was recuperating between lectures when she had this experience:

"One afternoon I had a couple of hours to myself, and so I limped to the sea wall and stretched out and closed my eyes and tried to let go all my aches and pains and tiredness, to let go and simply be. And while I was lying there, eased by the cool breezes, the warm sun, bursts of bird song, I heard feet coming to me across the water. It was a sound I recognized, a familiar sound: the feet of Jesus coming towards me.

And then another noise broke in, and I was back in an aching body. But I had heard. For a moment in that hearing I was freed from the dirty devices of this world. I was more than I am. I was healed.

It was one of those impossibilities I believe in; and in believing, my own feet touch the surface of the lake, and I go to meet him, like Peter, walking on water. '(p. 197)

I finished the book, grabbed my coffee and walked out into the equivalent of silence in the city: street traffic. Instead of listening to NPR on the walk to work, I enjoyed a few moments of quiet. Suddenly, a memory grabbed hold of me as I waited for a traffic light. Once, as I walked around the neighborhood near 52nd and Crenshaw, in 1991, I was tired and a little depressed. I was walking and praying on a pretty little side street when I heard the sound of clanking armor all around me. I stopped walking and glanced to my left and right. No phalanx of angles appeared, but I was filled with a sense of peace and protection.

I felt that I understood more of what L’Engle meant about hearing Jesus walk towards her on the water. As I continued to walk to work, I passed the music school office and the drone of a vacuum cleaner interrupted my solitude. The noise was jarring, but as I continued, I began to hear a faint melody that increased in volume as I walked away from the office: the sound of a marimaba, skillfully played. The music was coming from behind the blinds of one of the practice rooms. Maybe I am an auditory learner because the lesson of the day formed in a prayer that came to mind: "Teach me Lord to hear your voice. Help me to be like Mary and choose the better portion. Help me to discern your voice in the midst of the storm."