This morning, Tsong Mike, who lived next door, finally succumbed to one-year battle against cancer. He was 67 but he will fly a baby parachute to the skies. Among the many colors, he wore my favorite yellow, just like how my father’s skin was when he too flew a baby parachute 6 years ago.
The neighborhood today is a reminiscent of Russian architecture, in stark contrast with the first sunny day of the week. Death has a way of giving up colors but my father slipped on clear blue skies, too, Sunday, when FM stations only played the music of his youth. It’s harder to weep on sunny days. But old men love to leave on sunny days.
These old men die as I get older, one by one, in an array of cancer lottery, some as peacefully as a falling leaf, others as wild as the cold cyclones. But Tsong Mike was like a cyclone of falling leaves, squally when his body has given up on medicine, then serenely as he given up on life.
Right now, I am not taking his death lightly, because although he wasn’t anything paternal to me, he brought me back to one cold September morning, with that poignant confusion that only a son could feel, as he packs his bag and goes home to a dying father.
Death has a way of getting in to me, and boy, it sucks.
I happen to have a friend who’s bohemian. And just like the many beautiful tragedies of her life, she hardly recognizes that she is one.
As a matter of fact, among my friends, she’s the only one left who still believe she is normal, and by ‘normal’ I mean to refer to the rest of us: those who treat life like a serious threat to itself.
But she isn’t, though on the basis of first look alone, she would appear like a “delirious monochrome,” to which she would blindly agree if you just insist. Now, if you never exchanged pleasantries before, you would think, by the manner she walks, that she’s putting up a middle finger on you as you pass by, because she’s angsty, and petulant, or all that maybe because she doesn’t have a romantic alter ego. Either way, she comes to you with a thud, just like how the great John Joseph Theodore Rzeznik did on her. Stick a little and you would really wonder “What’s a bohemian doing on this boring part of this boring town?”
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20 something, quarter-life crisis, loss of love, name it, nothing's weird.
