February 3, 2009

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  I always sleep on my left side.  If I wake up at night and want to know the time I will lift up my head, just slightly to pass his shoulder and glance to the right.  There I will see the red glow of the digital alarm clock.  If I look straight, out of my bedroom window, above all the trees without leaves, very far up in the sky, I always see a lone star if the sky is clear.  Even when there is moon light I still can see it.  Bright.  Twinkle.  If I look at it for a long time, I may see it moving up and down or tilting side way and tilting back.  Sometimes I see two stars, but that is because my eyes are blurry by sleepiness or maybe I mistake with the light of a plane.  The same star but it has two names.  In the evening before I go to bed, it is “Hôm” or evening star.  When I wake up its name is “Mai” or morning star.  I forgot the name of the poet, but remember a verse “Buổi tối anh là sao Hôm, buổi sáng anh là sao Mai, và em mơ theo anh suốt sáng suốt chiều.”  Literally it means “In the evening, you are evening star, in the morning you are morning star and I am dreaming of you from morning to evening.”

  This morning I did not see my star because it was cloudy.  My back yard had a thin layer of snow but my drive way was totally black.  I sat on the train, snow fell steadily.  The trees were white.  The tracks were black at certain locations such as the bottom of the rails or the gaps of the ties where snow could not get in yet.  The air was gray and misty.  But in the city, streets were wet and snow flew horizontally.  At lunch time I stared outside of my window, Manhattan was dark.  All the buildings were behind a dark grey curtain.  A whole day I was very tired.  I wanted to find a corner with a thick blanket and doze off.

  When I got home, snow fell steadily and more heavily. It was wet, soft, and fluffy.  All the trees and bushes were white.  I snapped a few pictures as the light was waning.  There were about two inches of snow on my car.  As I cleaned it up I tested the winking lights.  My 106000-mile car is not very healthy.  If it is too cold or too hot the flash lights do not work.  They worked, tonight.

  In Vietnam people have to go up to the mountain and only once in a while up in the mountain they see snow.  Some people will be very happy because it is a special occasion for them.  Local mountainous people will be miserable with the cold because they do not have warm clothes.  This year here we have a lot of snow.  It snows almost every week.  The snow last week still covered the ground.  There is so much shoveling and I am always afraid of falling and break an arm or a leg.

  Everyone have different feeling toward snow.  Orhan Pamuk  in “Snow” saw snow as pure, innocent and poetic.  Khaled Hosseini in “The Kite Runner” talked of the muffle noise, and fluffy snow tapped into the window made him feel peaceful.  The snow in the Lord of the Rings of Tolkien always made people think of misery, war, and death.  Robert Creely heard the caw of a raven and the sound of snow falling out of the branches and his feeling about previous situation changed.  Another poet said the difference of the prose and poetry is the same as seeing a bird gradually covered by snow.  One minute it looked like a handful of snow.  The next minute the handful of snow flew up into the sky.  Some people are happy to see snow.  Others think of all the cleaning and shoveling await tomorrow morning.  Snow brings us all that is within it: beauty, danger, hard work, peace, etc.
  
   

  • 9:52 pm
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