Couples

Walking along the river bank I noticed that the wild geese living on the empty lot next to the parking lot already have three kids.  One duckling is out of the frame because it is far away from daddy and mommy.

All the cafes in Newark are already ready for pedestrian cafes

From the Cherry Blossom Festival, some participated in dressing up as Japanese pop singers or geisha.  These two just bought a pair of umbrella.

A pair of windows on an old building in Newark

They stand side by side weather everything under the sun.

Green Flowers

Opposite to NJPAC, across the street, is a fenced parking lot.  Along the fence are shrubs that I do not know the name.  These shrubs are cut and trimmed into hedges.  In the fall the hedges are bright red very attractive.  In the last few weeks if it is not cold or very wet or very hot (one week) so I do not take my usual lunch time walk.  Last two days the weather is nice I walk around Newark and by NJPAC.  The hedges along the fence is vivid green.  The shrubs have tiny green flowers.  I try to take a close up and larger picture (the first picture) but my camera sensor cannot pick up the flowers, just the leaves.  The second picture I took in early spring when I went to the meeting in Jersey City.  These clustered flowers may be mistaken as young leaves.  I guess they are oak flowers but not sure.  In front of my train station waiting room there is a large tree, last year spring, with proper temperature the tree bloomed fully.  The entire tree was covered profusely with these flowers.  The last two pictures are of green dogwood.  I have been in love with its look for a while but just learn of its name.  Green flowers and blue flowers always get my attention.

Last Wednesday, lunch time, I hopped on subway train headed to Branch Brook park.  I wanted to go to the Basilica Sacred Heart of Newark which was two blocks from the park to listen to the church’s music given to the public only on Wednesday.  Walking at the rim of the park I noticed that a few pine trees were very short as if they were very young however they had a lot of pine cones on their tops.  I had noticed that pine cones were clustering more on the tree’s top but I did not know the reasons.  Cones can stay on the tree for a very long time.  Perhaps there are people collect pine cones to sell?  Or maybe because cones on the lower parts of the tree fell first because they were older?

When I was little and lived in Vietnam, outside of my elementary school sometimes I saw peddlers selling cards.   The peddlers spread the cards on a small plastic sheet.  I often stood there admiring the cards.  Most of them were Christmas cards with some drawings, sketches, or photographs of cardinal birds, poinsettas, Christmas socks, English stone houses, and pine cones.  On the drawings and sketches there was a brush stroke of gold or silver glittering paint or glue to make them sparkling.  When my older brother gave me some pocket money I boutght a card, not to give it to any body but just to keep it and watch it.

Since then, I always like the look of pine cones.  When my relatives see me taking pictures of pine cones, they think I am silly.  They say pine cones look freaky.  In every walk in my life, I always slow down to view the pine cones if I happen to pass by them although I do not feel I need to buy them or collect them.  Sometimes I want to collect a few pine cones and paint them, decorate them, make them look pretty and photograph them.  They smell pretty when they are fresh too. 

When I was little, pine cones were the images of a far away place and a promise of an adventure into some unknown culture and climate.  Now pine cones indeed bring me back to my childhood when I was a little poor kid standing at the peddler's stall with a dream to wander.

Every two weeks, Wednesday and Thursday I go to project meetings.  One is near my home just about 10-minute drive on back road. The other is in Jersey City.  Wednesday is the day I go to the project near my home.  I get up same time as I normally go to the office.  Then I read or write until 8:30 A.M. and drive to the meeting.  The meeting starts at 9:00 A.M.  However recently my boss pulled me aside and said to me: “I hate to do this to you but I want you to drive into the office, get a company car and drive to the meeting.”  I am a boss fearing person so I do not argue with my boss.  I follow his order.  I am in the office about 10 minutes before 8:00 A.M.  I get the company car and drive to the meeting.  The drive takes an hour if the traffic is normal.  I cannot take the train because it is slower.  The Construction Manager refuses to meet later because he has another meeting right after my meeting.  The meeting last about an hour and I drive back.  It is inefficient.  I lose two hours driving and the company lose gas and wear and tear on the car.  My boss is a reasonable person.  I think he has a reason behind that decision but he cannot tell me.

I do not need to drive to the meeting in Jersey City.  I take the Path train and walk about 10 minutes.  The train fare is $1.75 each trip.  In the beginning I paid the fare but one of my coworker told me if I presented my company pass Path would honor the pass and allow me to go without having to pay the fare.  And I did that.

In the Jersey City office there is a young secretary.  She is very nice and she calls me ahead of the time to remind me the meeting.  This morning she did not call and I went to the meeting as usually thinking she might forget to call.  I got to the meeting and did not see her so I asked about her.  The resident engineer told me she took a couple days off because her sister got murdered couple days ago.

I am shocked.  Although I hear of the news about people get killed daily I do not expect violent death could happen to coworker’s relatives.

I have to choose blogging or reading.  It is easy to write in Vietnamese.  In the last couple weeks I wrote three articles, all in Vietnamese.  Two articles, one about butterfly and the other about Yu Hua, were printed in a daily newspaper in California.  I was told, a newspaper in Dallas would print both of them in the same week too.  A Vietnamese literature magazine wanted to publish my review Yu Hua’s Brothers.  To me that was a small success.  I know I am able to write more and better if I have time and I have to shed a few inhibitions.

Someone says writing is like going up the hill.  The higher you go, the more stuff you have to leave at the bottom of the hill.  I always feel I am cramped with too much thinking, too self critical, and too self demanding.  I have to keep in mind that I am writing for my own enjoyment and so be it, warts and flaws.  I read and read, always feel there are more books I need to read to learn more about American culture and literature.  And it is like I keep stuffing and stuffing into my stomach and do not leave enough room and time for the food to be digested.  Each time I sit down to write all the different ideas pull me into many directions until I become invalid to lay out things I want to write.  On top of that all the self criticism I tell myself make writing even more difficult.

Let see what I just finish reading.  Frank Pope’s Dragon Sea.  In 2007, I went to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.  I went there because the museum was included in the visitor's traveling package.  I browsed without having any particular interests.  To me, all museums are the same if you can forgive my ignorance.  I asked the museum docent if there were any Vietnamese art items especially ceramics.  I was told to go to a very small and out of the way corridor and there I found a few Vietnamese potteries, some of them were broken.  I was sad to think that in the great museum that housed numerous magnificient ancient arts that represented the world civilization and representation of Vietnamese civilization has nothing but a few (no more than ten) broken pieces of ceramics.  They were white ceramics with cobalt blue decoration, similar to Ming China but coarser more stoneware than ceramics.

In the trip to Washington DC knowing I have only a morning to view museum I narrow my interest only in Freer Art Museum where I researched ahead so I knew there were Vietnamese ceramics.  At the museum door I asked where I could find Vietnamese ceramics.  The desk person searching in the computer but he told me there was none.  He fumbled a little more and told me I could see in the aisle 6A.  There I found a few pieces but this time they were not cobalt blue on white.

Back home I check with my local library to see if there is any literature about Vietnamese ceramics and I find Dragon Sea of Frank Pope. 

It is a very interesting book in terms of sea adventure, the danger of diving, treasure hunts, and the difficulty and expensive cost of deep sea excavation.  Frank took readers to the deep sea where divers excavated a sunk boat that was full of ceramics.  It is more an adventure and thriller than a book about ancient ceramics however Frank managed to include some historical background.   In 15 century a boat carried Vietnamese ceramics sunk off Hoi An coast where it was called Dragon Sea because many typhoons seemed to aggravate from there.  Fishermen accidentally caught many pieces of ceramics in their nets.  The pieces were bought with high price so they went back to retrieve more.  Without high tech instrument they resolved to nets and rakes therefore they broke a lot of those ceramic antiques.  In 1999, Mensun, a reknown archeologist teamed with  Ong So Hin, a Chinese-Korean financial backer, Vietnamese government to retrieve the treasure.  The cost of the excavation was multi million dollars according to the book.  Although a large number of ceramic pottery were uncovered, so many of them that they filled two large warehouses, Ong So Hin did not recover the cost of excavation (about 14 millions while the antiques sold only a little more than 2 millions). 

I am telling myself I need to go home to see them.