Search for refuge, tales told in 6 words
With last week’s threats to the DACA program, the subject matter of “Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity and Coming to America” couldn’t be more timely. Larry Smith, author of the book and creator, in 2006, of the Six-Word Memoirs project, in which writers try to describe their lives in six words, is scheduled to be at Booksmith on Wednesday, Sept. 13, and Diesel/East Bay Books in Oakland on Thursday, Sept. 14. Some of the Bay Area contributors to the book — including Huong Nguyen, who told her story in six emojis — will speak at these events, filling in the stories alluded to in the six-word statements.
Meanwhile, a sampling of statements from Bay Area respondents: “Sister pretends she can’t use chopsticks” (Yukari Iwatani Kane); “Czechoslovakia. The unbearable lightness of fleeing” (Theresa Ralston); “Welcome, my newly mispronounced last name” (Lena Briddonneau); “My name is not mamacita, okay? (Dori N.). Among the book’s other inclusions: “Was a refugee, now a restaurateur” (Exion Huynh), and several from well-known people, including “My accent has become my voice” (M. Night Shyamalan) and “In 1948, I was a refugee” (Madeleine Albright).
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Don’t ask Mom, she won’t buy those for you. You have to buy your own condoms.” Young woman talking to teenage brother, overheard at Target in Colma by Camryn Hollarsmith
Covering all bases: On Sept. 29, three days after a Sept. 26 Pig Roast in Palo Alto, Delfina restaurant is featuring a special Yom Kippur dinner menu. Although that holy day is reserved for fasting, the meal is offered for “erev Yom Kippur,” the night before, when the Jewish day starts. The three-course menu “gets you fed before the sun sets (6:54 p.m.),” says the precise notice, adding that if you’re “Not observing? Good news, we’ll have it all night.”
Aboard a cruise ship on the way to Costa Rica, Eileen Alexander was seated with a Wyoming couple who’d brought their own bottle of wine, which they handed to a waiter so that he could serve it. At an appropriate time in the meal, the waiter approached, unscrewed the top and handed it to the gentleman to sniff.
Russ Stanaland, who emailed that he’d just reread Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Decline and Fall,” says one of the characters is “a wealthy, ill-mannered lout whose actions left havoc in his wake.” The name of the character is Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington.
Margarita Landazuri was outside the North Point Shopping Center when she overheard a panhandler say to a companion, “So I have to supervise the business.” When a man of the streets who liked to nest in the alley next to a San Francisco Victorian was warned that the next day that workmen doing home repairs would be trampling through the space, he said he’d write that down on his calendar. And when I asked someone sitting on the sidewalk next to our garden to please not leave cigarette butts behind, he promised he wouldn’t (a promise he kept). “My father,” he said, “always told me to leave a place the way I found it.”
This to say that “homeless” is a broad term that encompasses all sorts of people, and many of their experiences and ways of life, in some form or another, are just like those of us who have the luxury of living under roofs.
Keeping a close watch on Grateful Dead history — there are so many devoted fans that there ought to be a TV history channel just for the Dead — Bob Davis emailed last week to say that “Touch of Grey” made it to the Billboard pop chart as No. 9, not No. 6, as had been stated by Mickey Hart. Responding to Davis’ claim that the number was mis-cited, Hart shared his take on Dead history and Dead historians:
“When you’ve played your heart out and left it all on the stage, you have to let go, leave that experience behind . ... We leave it up to the fans and family to pass the memories down, so I can continue to create in the moment, in the now, knowing quite well that they will remember everything for me. If I ever want to know what happened on what night and where and for how long, I just ask. The legacy is in their hands.”