Last Day of School, 2nd Grade.

I spent a night with Mom and Melissa, inside our new Park Place home (for more on Park Place, read previous entry). It was May 1987, and it was my last day at Burnett Elementary. This is what I remember.


1. Anh Ngon and Chi Bao picked me up in their tan Cutlass from school and dropped me off with Mom back at Park Place. "With or Without You" was playing on the radio as we passed by my soon-to-be new school, a place that could just as well have been a haunted house and it wouldn't have been a scarier site for me at the time.


2. All of my siblings were out doing their own last-day-of-school things with their respective friends, leaving me in our empty home with only Mom and Melissa present. 


Crazy note to include here: My roommate, Adam, a Northern English guy who recently arrived, was listening to his Ipod in our completely silent room as I was typing this. I could hear what was pumping through his headphones, where it came on just after me writing #2 - "With or Without You", of course. We were like, "Duuude..."


3. I wanted to venture out and explore the apartment. I walked by the steps that lead up to Grandma's unit, where a few days ago Anh Ngon, Chi Bao, Chi Ha, Chi Tram, Chi Thu, Anh Vien, Anh Hai, and Chi Thoa were all hanging out one night. I really wished they were there with me at that moment.  I sat down on the steps and pretended they were there around me. I got up to hang on the metal pipe banister doing pull-ups, impressing my imaginary family that were surrounding me.


4. One of the few pieces of furniture in the house was one of those collapsible plastic park/beach benches that have three parts to it, where it can stretch out to allow one to fully recline on it. Mom, Mel, and I fell asleep on it, and it wasn't very comfortable for me.


5. I woke up to the sun already setting and the house very dark. The electricity had went out for some reason. We walked to ABCO, a convenient store, to buy candles.


6. I asked Mom why we didn't just save a whole lot of money by using candles at night instead of the light bulb. (In Vietnamese) "Because we wouldn't really save that much money. It probably costs about 10 cents a day to power a light bulb. It's just too much trouble using a candle when it's that cheap to power a bulb." 


7. I asked if the light bulb was so cheap, then powering a fan was also probably cheap, so why don't we just buy a lot of fans for the house, one pointing in every direction, instead of using what I knew was the costlier A/C (since we rationed the usage of that). "You don't get cool with fans. Fans don't cool you down the way A/C's do."


8. I stared out the window, waiting to see Dad's station-wagon, signalling his arrival home. There was a U.S. Marine Corps sticker in the room window and I imagined the people living in the unit before us keeping a room filled with heavy artillery and camouflaged bedsheets. There were a lot of false alarms with cars coming in every few minutes, something I wasn't used to when we lived in our own separate house.


9. Dad came home first, and then the rest of the siblings slowly started filing in. By then, the electricity had turned on already. The house was buzzing the way it normally did. I wanted to let everyone know about the serious ennui I had to endure while they were gone, without directly telling them that I was miserable, but I didn't know how. I wanted to make them feel guilty for leaving me home alone, but other than directly saying so, which I didn't allow myself to do, I tried walking around sadly. I think they were coming down off of their last day of school highs themselves and couldn't notice.


10. I remember taking Lisa into the room to show her the U.S. Marine Corps sticker, reading it out to her. I wanted to make her envision this apartment as the armory I was sure it was before we came here. It's pronounced "CORE", not "CORPSE", she told me. She tried to take the sticker off but couldn't.