I just came up with this story after I woke up on my birthday. After finishing reading this flash fiction, listen to the music link to complete the whole story. I hope you two beautiful ladies are having a beautiful day. It's snowing like end of the world here in New York. My co-worker made me drink a quarter bottle of Jameson last night as I smoked my first cigarette in a very long time. Afterward I went out and start laughing hysterically in the middle of the street because I was literally sinking deeper each step I took. Then I spontaneously did a snow angel and it looked like a deer got shot and was struggling and dragged out of the snow. After I continue to head back home, I realized that I lost my left hand glove so I proceed to go back to track my lost. But I ended up helping a stranger helping another stranger to push a car out of the snow for an hour.
There was this one childhood memory of some time ago that managed to linger in my mind like the very last apple on the tree long after harvest season. It has been so many years and this particular memory could very much be rotten from inside to out, but it never seemed to slipped away like most other events in my life. It is like the tangy taste in your mouth after a cup of tea that gets your tongue all worked up without really explaining why.
Earlier in my life, I worked in a celebrated film documentary company, my job was to travel around the world record and edit footage of documentation of other people’s lives. In a nutshell, what I do was repeatedly watch the lives of these people and mold their stories to fit our vision. It is, as if I was given the power, to deciding how these people should be remembered. The whole process sounded demeaning, but after a while, the process gets easier to digest and you eventually sleep better at night. And if you have done this job long enough like me, the phenomenon lives of others would start to blur together too and nothing would ever be significant enough to remember any more.
It has not occurred to me until much later that, I have worked most of my life documenting other people’s live but never really had any chance to be documented. My parents are dead years ago and never left me any photos of me growing up. Mom and dad were great loving parents, they always said we didn’t need any photographs to proof our love and our existences; it was what lied in our mind that count. So when they passed away and buried on top of their favorite hill in Boston, they took all the memories of me along with them down the grave like squirrels horde all the nuts for the winter.
All these did not bother me much until December 11th, 1997. Simon Jeffes, the composer for Penguin Cafe has passed away due to brain tumor. I didn’t know Simon in person, but he resonated in my mind for as long as I could remember.
It was a Sunday, I spent my 14th birthday by myself in Central Park New York. My parents were busy running around town finding a new apartment after weeks of living in hotel rooms. We moved from Boston to New York because father got hired to teach at NYU. I remember I was so against the transition that I locked myself in the bathroom for three days until the hungry strike grew too hungry to continue. It was during school’s winter break so I never had a chance to meet any friends to celebrate my birthday with, and instead of getting excited about spending time with family or friends, I decided to get mopey and went to Central Park so I can have another reason to be angry about my life. When I reached the upper east side, I’ve found myself wondered into a crowd full of people listening to a group of musicians played for the public. It was a group about 10 people, they sat in folding chairs with cheap music stands in front of them. There was a man in glasses sat in the middle of the group. He began to tap his fingers away on the piano as if each note was meant to play without a care in the world. As the notes became faster, string instruments joined in one by one. And at that moment, I closed eyes. I imagined myself running through the street as if I was chasing an invisible friend. I was running so fast I could barely keep count of my surroundings as I had no time to pay any attention to anything other than what was in front of me. There was a smile on face. I felt like I was really 14 and I remembered so clearly that it was the happiest moment I have ever experienced. The rest of the memory did not seemed so important after that. Years later, I’ve found out that the man that played the piano was Simon Jeffes and the band he played with was called the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
After Simon died, I realized that whenever I hear that song I heard so many years ago, my whole life flashes through my mind. It reminded me of all the things I have lost and the things I wished I should have done. But in the end, the flashing images always lead into that moment; the moment in the park when I imagined myself running as a 14 years old boy chasing what I what I believed was “hope”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E3znZoFnN8
