In the Company of Strangers

Reading it reminds you of some of your dad’s stories. How your grandfather used to walk door to door after work, selling sweet sticky rice steamed in banana leaves in order to pay your father’s school tuition. How your father used to get up early in the morning to feed the chickens. His mother sold the eggs in the market. How your father spent his first two years in the states working as a nurse’s aide, until he got his U.S. certification. These are the sorts of stories your father tells you when you ask for a new game for your Nintendo Wii. — from “Ten Fold Path” After they’d said goodbye, Sal walked slowly down the stairs, not even holding his nose. He had grown accustomed to the smell, he realized. But his knees still ached by the time he got to the bottom. At the front door, he paused, thinking through the words he might use to explain what Cely wanted. He didn’t even know how the Italian man looked or what his name was. Sighing, Sal fingered the rosary in his pocket, for luck, and opened the door. — from “The Company of Strangers” There is something of their frugality, their inability to waste in me. I often have two huge bags of cans and bottles and other plastic ware for recycling sitting in my kitchen. Every time I need to get a plate or spoon or mug, I have to shift the bags around. By my front door are piles of newspapers and my children’s old, graded homework papers and school flyers. On top of those are corrugated boxes and egg cartons. “We don’t have to recycle everything,” my husband tells me. “If you throw it in the trash it goes to the H-Power plant,” which is where the trash is burned to generate electricity. But I always thought burning trash, which we had to do in Olongapo because of the irregular garbage collection schedule, was polluting. And if everything is burned, why is there a landfill near my house? — from “The Old Man’s Head { A Memoir }”