McDonald's

Occasionally, I'm reminded of just how ironic and topsy-turvy life has been and will probably continue to be . . .

I've just moved to Chicago. I landed after a 20-hour Amtrak ride from NYC Penn Station, and took a few days off before starting work to haul boxes, marvel at the vast amount of space here compared to NYC, and re-learn how to ride a bus.

There is an overwhelming wildness of visions and dreams that comes with moving to a new locale. Things no longer move in a straight line, and surprises in people, places and situations abound. But, to further complicate things, this is the fourth time I've gone through a major relocation. This means that the self-revisioning that comes with moving isn't striking or dramatic. Rather than being struck first by how "opposite" things are here than how they used to be, I swim in a lot of "obliqueness". You move the first time and it feels like everything turned up-side-down. You move the second or third time and all the axes of life begin to randomly cross, defying each other and themselves, to the point where there is no longer much truth left to proclaim. For this reason, it's hard to fluently express what's going on inside my head. So instead, I'll write about McDonald's. Apparently, despite all my moves across space and culture, McDonald's continues to be a steadfast star shining overhead.

1) My new work building is in the heart of the Loop. There is a McDonald's next door and I went there with some colleagues for lunch today. This may seem ordinary but I haven't done it in years, if only because in the circles of Boston and in NYC that I walked, fast food embodied bad taste, bad health, a cultural no man's land, political oppression of workers, and for stupid tourists only. McDonald's, like WalMart, is the devil. But Chicago seems to be without that judgment, and in fact, some of the McDonald's here are downright big, clean, high-tech and fancy. So my co-workers and I put on our coats, took the elevator down, went through the electronic turnstiles, left the office building and went into McDonald's. With our wool coats and crisp shirts and nice shoes, we looked a little different from the "regular crowd". It wasn't lost on me that this crowd is the one I would have been in prior to life at an investment bank. Over a Big'n'Tasty, I realized that apparently, I had climbed over some wall.

2) Five days ago, I got really mad at my dad. He was visiting from California to help me move and settle in. After a long day at work, I wanted to take him out for dinner. I haven't gone out to dinner with my dad in years. We walked around the Loop, me not yet knowing that Loop is the desert of good eating out. I was thinking some Italian trattoria or warmly atmosphered bars, wanting to show him something different from his usual suburban Orange County excursions. It was also to share a piece of my years away from home in a new world, a world where $30 for one dinner is ordinary, service is attentive, and it's not silly to pay extra for good atmosphere. Suddenly he said, "Why don't we just go to McDonald's?". I haven't had dinner out with the man in years. On this big ocassion, he wants McDonald's!!

3) This doesn't make sense and yet it does (and maybe that's why it drives me crazy). Once, when we were sitting in a park in Orange County, Dad told me about the Vietnamese kids he used to meet when he was a bilingual aid in Westminster. Part of his duties at the elementary school where he worked was to supervise students at recess, when they poured out of classrooms to play basketball, tetherball, dodgeball and handball, or go on the swings, monkey bars and slides in the big sandbox. He said,

"You know, that year, I met a lot of families who were sad - Cambodian, Vietnamese and Thai families. Those kids were so lonely. I remember that at the school, the teachers gave kids red tickets if they saw them do something good like putting garbage into the trashcan. They would tear the red ticket in half, give half to the kid, and put the other half in a big glass jar in the Main Office. At the end of the month, during the school assembly, they would bring out the jar and Mr. Hill (the principal) stuck his hand in and picked out a ticket. Whoever had that ticket got to go to McDonald's with Mr. Hill. It is such a small thing, but it's pretty exciting for a kid to win a prize and especially to go with Mr. Hill. I remember these three Vietnamese siblings who'd just come to the U.S. They didn't know how to play basketball or handball, and the other kids didn't invite them to play anyway, so they would just hang around me at recess. And while other kids were playing American games, they would walk around the schoolyard by themselves and pick up trash. Because they saw a boy get a prize at the assembly, and he got to go to McDonald's. They wanted to go to McDonald's, but their family was too poor to afford it. So they wanted to get the red ticket, and they knew that the more red tickets you get, the higher chance you have to win. So while all the other kids played handball and basketball, they just went around picking up trash until the bell rang and recess ended."

Occasionally, I'm reminded of just how ironic and topsy-turvy life has been and will probably continue to be . . .

Discrete

She once thought that it should take a long time to write. When ideas came, she analyzed them out of habit, piece by piece, angle by angle, dug down to see where exactly they had come from. She wanted to get it "just right", so that whatever she wrote would be justified, perfect and invincible.

One day, she got tired because there were no results. Everything was swarming in her head but she couldn't see anything, couldn't touch anything, had produced nothing. At the same time, life occurred and visions continued to form. Images rushed past her from outside car windows on vacation, plane windows on work travel, bus windows in the chilly mornings, apartment windows on sunny and gray weekends alike. Late at night, numbers blinked at her from computer screens. There was too much information.

There was a park bench on a November morning. The parks are crowded in mornings, she thought. There are moving pieces everywhere, streams of people flowing in response to the directions of another. And horse carriages, and joggers, and suits flapping shiny black shoes on the ground as they paddle on to work. People come here as if following the wind, and they blow away. Nobody plans this. Nobody stops. What if I stayed to watch? Who would I see?

For some reason, she thought of him.

She went into the gift shop and bought a camera. This would be life. That was her craft, to capture things as they took even their first, most fledgling forms. It would not be chiseled or sharp, but rather frequently blurry and indeterminate. But that was the craft, to capture--not perfect--the pieces as they moved and morphed, and receded from her grasp. There would be feelings, memories unexpectedly arising at restaurant tables, on a park bench, while watching a film of a ruffled-hair boy drawing a name in the sand with his toes. In unforeseeable ways, the yearnings would be triggered. And maybe that was all that would be, a wind stirring about, opaque forms and images, a recognition arising purely from memory- from faith- that some synthesis has just occurred.

That would be life. Life is not a controlled experiment. Things happen outside, swarming around and disturbing things. Not everything we feel everyday is a discrete package of analysis, a report of observations, a chart showing definitive trends. There is no answer. At some point, the sense-making has to stop.