Wicked Good Time

I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the miraculous resurrection of my iPod on the train (could’ve used that on the Sri Lanka-Bangkok leg, but oh well good thing it happened at all). Maybe it was the Clap your Hands and Say Yeah song, followed by the Faces song. Maybe the light on the steps when you're climbing out of the T. Or just an unexplainable spring in my step. Could’ve been the messages from old friends on the voicemail. Or the friend that I thought I’d never see again that just emailed me out of the blue. But it definitely had to do with walking to Brook street at 6.30 in the evening, when the sun’s beginning to set, and the day starts to cool down. People come out on their porches after getting home from a long day, put on their afternoon clothes, mix the kid some Kool-Aide, crack open a Sam Adams and watch people like me go by. On the street, their trash is neatly separated in their recycling bins and Whole Foods bags and great old furniture. I forgot how Boston always had great trash days that put any L.A. thrift shop to shame. In the SL camps, there was nothing old. Everything was new and built quickly if it hadn’t been destroyed. I thought of the first time I came to Boston, from Austria, I was sixteen, and I went to the Emerson Library. I was excited to have books in English, so many of them. I looked for a book on the Philippine Revolution and found one that said my parents were arms dealers. From the same book, I also found out they were never married, dad had another family, I had two sisters and three more brothers I didn’t know, and my sister and I were illegitimate children. Maybe it was me cross legged on the library floor this afternoon, twenty-eight, looking at books of Thai design, Lucian Freud Paintings, and Arabic poetry. Maybe it was the UPS man who smiled at me in his snug little shorts. Or the oatmeal cookie dough cold stone ice cream. Or that I wore my first T-shirt I ever designed that was ever made, and two out of three said “cool shirt”. It’s a silhouette of a bird fading yellow to green. Below it is written “MEACE OF PIND”. Maybe it was that the T had a free seat for me that wasn’t facing backwards. I dunno what it was. And I dont know ehy. But I just can’t remember for the life of me, the last time I was ever this happy.