Fetid Dog Love

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around May, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My last two months in Taipei were tinted with fear, as I heard more and more rumors of Mainland China's plan to either invade or bomb Taiwan. I've written about this already, out of sequence, in A Cacophonous Nudge. It was right about the same time as the solar eclipse in mid-April that my father told my Mother and I that we wouldn't be staying with him for much longer. The Army was shipping out large numbers of dependents to get them out of harm's way.

Our departure was set for the middle of May. I would miss the last couple of weeks of school. Ordinarily I wouldn't have minded, but the next thing I knew our class was having a spelling bee as part of a school-wide contest, and I won, and the teacher said I did so well I might easily win the whole contest. The 1st prize would be a pair of binoculars. Oh, man, I wanted those binoculars. Stupid Army Brat life, I thought. Every time something good comes along, you have to move away, I thought.

My Mother and I were booked on a great-circle flight to Seattle by way of Anchorage.

Up to this time in my life I was lukewarm toward the dog, Koko. He didn't particularly care one way or another about me either. But a funny thing happened when they said we couldn't afford to take him back to the States with us. All of the sudden I couldn't take it. It wasn't like they were going to put him down or sell him for meat. They arranged for the the magician and his wife to keep him. But I broke down into tears in front of them and hugged the dog and told my parents they were horrible, and I couldn't stand to lose him.

I didn't know at the time what came over me. Now I get it. Enough other over-reactions of that sort have happened since. I had experienced too much neglect and emotional abandonment from my parents. Their plan to abandon Koko recalled it all.

My Father made it up to me by buying me a pair of binoculars. He figured, better buy them in Taiwan at the low prices there, than pay two or three times as much back home.

The flight seemed to take days. The stop at the Anchorage airport was notable only in the fact that it was snowing in May.

My Mother and I wound up back in Seattle living in the garage behind my Grandmother's house again. We were there maybe one week at most when we got word that Koko would be arriving by freight plane at Boeing field in a couple of days. Having seen my emotional outburst over losing Koko, the magician and his wife decided to spend their own money to reunite us.

We were driven to the airport by one of my cousins. Koko was delivered in a box with holes for breathing. One whiff, and I began to regret I'd made such a scene back in Taipei. He reeked of his own feces and urine, not having been let out of the box for the whole trip. We took him home and did all the things people will recommend, baths with shampoo, baths of milk, baths of tomato juice. We shaved him completely, and tried it all over again. Nothing worked. That was one stinky dog. He lived more than 8 years after that and we never got rid of the smell.

Still, I thought of him more as a brother from then on. My parents hadn't succeeded in getting rid of him either.

Very Bad Night, Part II

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened the night of my Mother's birthday in February, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The house was quiet for about half an hour. I was still upset from all the screaming, and was lying awake in bed with the lights off, when I heard my Mother coming up the stairs, and then she opened the door to my room and asked me if I was awake. I tried pretending I was asleep, but she knew I wasn't and told me to get up and come to her bedroom.

On the way I could look over the railing and see my Father passed out on the floor of the living room.

In the bedroom my Mother first had me help her out of the dress she fought so hard to get into hours earlier. Then she told me she wanted me to lie down with her to keep her company. For a few minutes we just lay there, hugging each other, nothing else happening. I was still in my pajamas, she was in her underwear.

Then she insisted that it would be better if we both took our clothes off. I didn't see how it would be better at all, but she insisted she needed to be closer, to help her get over what she'd been through that night. I still resisted; she got me to agree finally by offering to turn the lights out right away.

So we got naked, she turned out the lights, and for a few minutes we were in bed hugging in the dark. Then she began fondling me and telling me she wanted me.

That was totally absurd. I was 8 and a half. Sure, I had been over-sexed following the first major head injury, but that effect had run its course at least three years before. Not to mention that I didn't know what intercourse was.

When she realized that I wasn't going to be physically able to have intercourse with her she acted as though it were a tragedy for me. her attitude was "You poor thing, I'll have to do something for you." It didn't make any sense to me. Just seconds before she was the one with the sexual need. Now I was supposed to be in need. It was so confusing I didn't know what to say.

She got out of bed, grabbed a swirled tapered candle off her dresser, and said, "I'll take care of you in the bathroom."

In the bathroom she pushed me down on my hands and knees and raped me with the candle.

It hurt and I begged her to stop. She laughed and kept at it. When I continued to cry and beg, she eventually became angry. "I know it doesn't hurt. Stop being a crybaby"

Finally she let me go and I ran to my bedroom and the imagined security of my own bed. She let me lie there in the dark by myself long enough for her to smoke a cigarette. Then she popped her head in and said, angrily, "I know it didn't hurt, you filthy liar." And she left, slamming the door.

It had hurt. It still hurt then. I didn't lie.

Very Bad Night, Part I

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened the night of my Mother's birthday in February, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

During most of the six weeks my Father was at the Mountain my Mother subjected me to moderate but almost daily sexual abuse. It subsided as she began her preparations for the romantic evening to celebrate his return.

In spite of all the sexual abuse I knew next to nothing about sex, really. In fact I wouldn't have called anything my Mother did to me sexual at the time. Sex was something else. It was what Mommies and Daddies did in their bedrooms at night. I didn't know what that was, but I was sure my Mother missed it and that what she did to me was at least partly an inadequate substitute. It wasn't the real thing, it was a poor imitation.

My theory was that when people get to be really, really, grownup, like 13 or 14, they start to need this sex thing and have to have partners to help them with it (touching yourself makes you sick, Mommy said) and if the partners they get aren't around or they spend all their time being mad then they start hurting. And to fix the hurt they need to do things to their kids that are icky. But it's not their fault, it's nature's fault. Nature makes grownups sick.

[Below: The same person, before and after puberty. Note the "bedroom eyes" on the right.]

So I felt sorry for my Mother, and I was really hoping that when my Father came home and saw how pretty she was in that dress and saw what a great dinner she made for him and how nice she smelled, and how I said I loved him and then excused myself and didn't cause any trouble for the rest of the night, that he wouldn't shout or anything, and they'd end up in bed and have sex, whatever that is, and Mommy would be all better.

He was supposed to get home at 6 PM. He actually called at 6:30 or so to tell us he got delayed and wouldn't make it until 8 PM. So that was nice.

But after 8 he wasn't there, and he also wasn't there at 9, 10, and 11 PM. There were no more calls to apologize for being late.

I stayed up late with my Mother. It was a Friday so I didn't have to get up early the next morning. She cried off and on for hours. I said, maybe something bad happened to him. She said, "Sure." But she didn't bother making any emergency phone calls.

He came to the front gate at about Midnight. After my Mother unlocked the gate a couple of other officers walked him to the door of the house and put him in a chair. He was only able to stand with support.

He was supposed to come straight home after getting back to Taipei, but instead he spent 6 hours in bars with his buddies.

As he was brought in the door I said, "I love you Daddy," just like we rehearsed it. Then my Mother gave me a sign to get the hell up to my room. I listened from the top of the stairs.

The dinner had already been done away with. My Mother started out explaining that. Dad muttered something like, "That's nice." She then tried, "Do you want to go upstairs or do you want to have fun down here?"

He said, "Why don't you get me a beer?" About then, my Mother started screaming. I don't remember a lot of what she screamed. Then she broke out into sobbing, and she said, "You don't love me anymore." Then she screamed at him some more. Then there was more sobbing.

It went on for about an hour. There were sounds of dishes being smashed. By the time it was over I had retreated to my room for real and was trying to deny that anything important was happening.

Dictatorship & Thievery

The Republic of China took over Taiwan after the half-century Japanese occupation ended with the end of WW II. In 1949, the ROC was driven from the mainland to Taiwan in the Chinese Civil War. The capital of the ROC thus passed from Nanjing to Taipei under Chiang Kai-shek's rule. There was one political party, the Kuomintang, and the country developed under the martial law that already had existed earlier in the civil war, under the "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion." Martial law was in effect legally until 1987.

Today all that sounds that ancient history, but I was there in 1957, only 8 years later, when it wasn't ancient at all. There were a few ways that the political reality made itself felt. There were pictures of Chiang Kai-shek everywhere. One of the buildings at the start of our dirt road housed businesses and had hole-in-the-wall hovels in back where poor people lived. They cooked their meals and ate in the road, squatting around the fire. (I tried to learn that trick. Imagine not needing chairs, ever.) Behind and above them, always, the windowless wall of the building they lived in was wall-papered with dozens of identical posters of Chiang Kai-shek.

Military police directed traffic at all the busiest intersections. They all carried automatic rifles. My Mother and I were instructed to always be deferential to the Chinese, whether in uniform or not. There was a sense that the Kuomintang was insecure. They were trapped on an island and not sure they could even hold that. So there was a great deal of propaganda. In addition to posters there were speeches broadcast by loudspeakers around the city.

There were rumors of war. My Father confirmed nothing, but other children talked about military activities going on, such as shellings of off-shore islands. Some activities were evident but impossible to interpret, like the long convoys that would snake through the city, sometimes ROC convoys, sometimes US Army convoys.

The rumors of shelling may have just been out of date stories circulating about the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954-1955).

The US Army was expanding its role on the island, and that meant there needed to be good mess halls and servicemen's clubs. Over the Christmas break I was taken to such a club. My parents enjoyed a party while I and about a hundred other dependents were herded into a large ballroom to watch an American Western. Off to our right were windows maybe 6 feet high, for the length of the room, that had to be curtained during the movie. Before the curtains were drawn we had a view of a hole within which contractors were working to put a swimming pool.

Just before my Father left for the Mountain I found out that the swimming pool was what was keeping him at work late. He had discovered (surprise!) that graft was involved in its construction. The contractors were overcharging and my Father believed that Army officers who were supposed to monitor the contractors were taking bribes to look the other way. There were irregularities in accounting that appeared deliberate, and so forth. Dad was trying to get at who was responsible. There was fierce resistance and he was stressing out and drinking more, including after-work trips to bars with confidants.

My Father left for the Mountain right around Christmas. My Mother and I thought at the time that we wouldn't see him for the full six weeks, but just a week or 10 days later he was back in Taipei with a staff car to take us to the Mountain for a day, to see a USO show there.

Wrong and Right

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in December 1957, when I was 8. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The first few weeks in Taipei were hectic and bewildering, and just wrong.

One of the just wrong parts was the lecture my Mother and I got about how we were now targets for kidnap, torture, and ransom. Supposedly the Communist Chinese had spies all over the island and would want to interrogate us for secrets my Father might have let slip out at home. So there wouldn't be any slips, but they might do it anyway, and then try to ransom us. The lecture was basically to tell us to be "careful" and not to expect the ransom to be paid. This was without a doubt one of the most useless lectures I've ever endured. We still had to walk the dog, so we had to be out in the neighborhood. Thanks, Dad.

[Above: Peter Lorre as the generic international kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much might have been preferable to my Mother.]

Hectic and wrong was the homework. It was evil. I could barely carry all the books. There were no overnight lockers at school so all the books had to be hauled back and forth every day.

Also, with this new school I was finally introduced, for the first time, to the "read the chapter and then write essays on the questions numbered such and such at the end" method of quasi-educational torment. Most of these questions were unbelievably non-directive generalities demanding inappropriate specificities, that began with the phrase "compare and contrast", which, if properly answered, could be split into several thousand graduate student topics for people who had a graduate library to do the extra research required, but which an 8-year old with a twenty year-old textbook couldn't begin to answer. "Compare and contrast the social systems of Ancient Babylon and Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, giving concrete examples to illustrate your points." "Compare and contrast the chief resources and industries of the Southeastern United States and the Midwestern United States. Be specific." We were also required to turn in outlines of each chapter and graded on them. I never figured out what the basis for grading of the outlines was. I probably spent an hour every day just fretting over how much detail to include.

The 6 or 7 hours of homework per day could not be done by me alone. I had to be helped by my Mother (I'm sure the school took this into account in deciding how much homework to assign. They wanted to force parental tutoring.) With her help the homework time was reduced to about 4 hours, but her help also probably was one of several factors that triggered an increase in sexual abuse.

Another was just the fact that I was home so much with her. School let out for me by noon. I was bussed home, I walked the dog a couple of times, and that was my time outside the house. Fear of kidnapping meant I had to spend no more than twenty minutes at a time walking the dog. The theory was they couldn't prevent an abduction but they wanted to know when it happened as soon as possible.

There was a maid around but she stayed out of the way and only worked a couple hours per day.

To top it off, my Father started coming home later and later. I didn't know why at first. All I knew was that it was making my Mother sad and irritable.

So the fondling became more frequent and the frequent baths (because of the soot from the furnace) became frequent occasions for anal rape.

The ongoing rapes aggravated the existing bathroom phobias, making school that much worse.

As I've said the school day for me was a four hour shift. There was no lunch break per se -- you were supposed to get breakfast and lunch at home -- but there was one recess break in the middle of the four hours that allowed everyone to use the bathroom and eat a bagged snack and/or play in the walled playground area if there was still time. For me, in the first month, there was never time. The bathrooms were too crowded and unfamiliar (Chinese-style trench toilets) and I couldn't use them. So focusing in class the last two hours became nearly impossible, and that made trying to make sense of the homework harder, which put me in harms way with my Mother that much more.

Two brighter developments. A routine eye exam at school discovered that I couldn't read the board because I was near-sighted, not because I was illiterate, as the teacher had first assumed. So I got glasses.

My Father also signed me up for the Children's Book of the Month Club, and the first book in the mail was David & the Phoenix. The book came just when I needed it, on the heels of the disappointingly brief affair with Diana. It reinforced her world view beautifully. It was in some ways a 1957 precursor to the Harry Potter novels although much shorter.

In it a boy meets a Phoenix and receives instruction from him on practical matters of life, such as knowing the differences between Gryffins, Gryffons, and Gryffens, or what to do when you encounter a Chimaera. Then they have to fight an evil scientist who is after the one-of-a-kind bird and wants him dead or alive.

It was done in humor but it had a clear message to me. If you reject imagination, you are really rejecting soul and humanity, and ultimately that leads to callousness.

American School

Within a day or two of seeing my new house, I was also going to my new school.

The new school was the Taipei American School. The online descriptions of this school tell you very little of what it was like in 1957. For one thing, it's moved since then. For another, back then it was so overcrowded that there were two shifts of students, a morning shift and an afternoon, each a fast-paced four hours. The same teachers that taught the mornings would teach afternoons. I drew the morning shift upon arrival, so I had to get up in the dark, dress, get breakfast, and walk to the highway, where a bus would come to pick up me and a handful of other American kids from my immediate neighborhood.

Even with the two shifts class sizes were enormous. My class had around 75 kids. We were in a long narrow classroom that had five files of desks extending away from the front and the blackboard back to the hinterlands. I was initially seated in the hinterlands but complained of not being able to read the writing on the board from there so I was moved to within 10 feet of the front. I could read the board there by squinting at it if the writing was large enough. Sometimes I had to get up and walk over to it.

To make up for only four hours of instruction the teacher gave us massive quantities of homework.

Once again, I had to prove myself. You would think, since almost every student there was a child of parents staying only temporarily in Taiwan, that there would be a culture that accepted new students easily. But no. The standing assumption by both teachers and other students is, you're a dunce until you prove otherwise. Even if the other students only arrived in the school 2 months before you.

The task was made worse by the Christmas show. The school had an annual Christmas show for the benefit of parents in an assembly hall, and my class was going to sing a song on stage. The song was We Three Kings. It was discovered that I didn't know the words of this universally beloved musical masterpiece. Ergo I was a dunce.

My parents were also stunned to learn that I didn't know We Three Kings. "You loved that song, and you used to sing it all the time." My Mother guessed eventually that it was probably part of the musical knowledge that was destroyed by the doctors in Maryland.

It didn't help that my speech was still slow. I was still laboring to speak by visualizing the written words as I went along, and I hadn't mastered inflection.

On top of all that I had become a fanatic about proof. Nothing convinces morons that you're dumber than they are than constantly demanding explanations from the morons for all their moronic pronouncements.

[Above: Nothing but maple trees in this Vermont park, as you can plainly see.]

An example of how I was treated as a moron: Our geography book had a section on New England states that I had to read for homework. The next day in class I pointed out that the book's statement that New England has mostly maple trees was wrong. I was asked what made me think I knew more than the authors of the book. I said that I'd lived in New England for over 4 years and while there were maples, most of the trees were other kinds. I was told with a smug smile that maybe I wasn't as observant as I should have been.

The breakthrough that earned me some respect happened after Christmas. My parents got me a globe that year. I had the instructions to the globe with me the day the teacher tried to tell the class during geography lessons that latitude lines go pole to pole and longitude lines run east-west parallel to the equator. Everyone laughed when I raised my hand to tell her it was the other way around. The teacher gave me an argument and when I asked her to look it up said with a smug smile she didn't have to, she KNEW she was right. So I got out the instructions to the globe, which included that piece of information, and that was the end of the smug smiles where I was concerned.

Every new school was like that. It would always take some minor demonstration that the squirrel spinning the wheel in my head wasn't dead.

Soot and Codes

The house we moved into in Taipei was a rental that passed from one US military family to the next. I know because along the outside of the house there was a pile of garbage that had been left by previous occupants that contained old American magazines going back a couple of years.

The house was very Chinese, I think. It was two stories, not counting the basement, which only held the coal furnace. The first floor had picture windows that looked out into a small yard. the yard was enclosed by a wall topped with broken glass embedded into the concrete, to discourage thieves. The entrance through the wall was through a gate at a corner.

The flooring throughout the house was cement. There was a drain in every room. This turned out to make a lot of sense. The coal we got to supply our furnace was bituminous, and the operation of the furnace filled the house with soot every morning. We'd wake up each day looking like we belonged in a minstrel show. The floors and walls would also be covered with soot.

There was no way my Mother was going to clean a house like that. Fortunately, maids were cheap. We got a Taiwanese maid. She simply threw buckets of water on the walls and floors and swept it down the drains, which dumped the soot and water soup into the river behind the house.

What I thought was so Chinese about the house was the way the upper story rooms were arrayed along a balconied walkway that looked down on the living room. It's a design that I've only seen in Western houses built since WW II created an interest in Asian designs. It meant the living room had about an 17 or 18 foot ceiling, instead of an 8 foot ceiling. You almost felt as if you were still outdoors. If it weren't for the walls and the cement floor, and the missing sky light, and the fact that there are no windows other than the one big one one the side facing the yard.

We'd barely settled in when my Father told us he would be leaving my mother and I alone there for six weeks while he "went to the Mountain." The Mountain was a location we weren't permitted to know anything more about, except that it was on a mountaintop of Taiwan, an island which, aside from the relatively flat area of Taipei, is itself mountain upon mountain, from north to south.

Now, I was trying to patch things up with my Father at this time. I thought the change of place might provide an opportunity. I saw him doing a cryptogram puzzle from a puzzle book and asked him how he did them. He told me how he looked at patterns and the frequency of letters. When he finished he complained that he'd done them all.

So I volunteered to make up new codes for him to crack. I scrambled the alphabet and wrote out a sentence with the new values.

When he would get the answers too fast I had a flash of insight. I could make a completely different kind of code. I invented a code that was essentially a vector code. After the beginning, the substitutions depended on the letters previously encountered in the message.

My Father was stumped, of course. It wasn't fair. A code that diabolical is too hard to decipher from such a small sample. But he was able to get it anyway, by guessing,.

Silly me, the only sentence I ever encoded was, "My Father is going to the Mountain next month."

Taipei

Taipei, Taiwan, was immediately red to me. That was the sense I had of it. Red, red, red, with smatterings of yellow, and only wisps of blue and green, except for the trees.

I loved Taipei from the first. The pier we docked at was a working pier next to warehouses full of cargo waiting to ship out or be trucked off. It was crowded with workers. There was no effort to put on a pretty face for new arrivals.

My Father met us at the gangplank. We had to wait for Koko and his crate to be lowered to the dock. There was some passport checking at a booth out in front of the warehouse. Then we were chauffeured off by Army staff car to our new home.

We passed through downtown Taipei along the way, and, as I said, that was red. Almost every store was decked out in Chinese red, with red banners, and red or yellow awnings, covered with large chinese writing.

Remember, this was the Fifties. Back in the US, beige was the king of colors. Mute was master. People who wore bright colors were shunned and ostracized, if not committed. People who painted their houses in bright colors were sued or evicted by their neighborhood associations. So the contrast to home was enormous. But there was also the fact that red was especially meaningful to me. It was the color of the i'iwi and the sacred color that gave rise to all colors. I felt like I was at the beginning of the rainbow.

The house we arrived at was in a middle class neighborhood at the outskirts of the city. One of the main highways out of the city passed a block away, leading to a hillside cemetery a mile or two beyond. You left the highway onto a side road that was paved for only fifty yards and then swung left parallel to the highway as a dirt road with walled middle-class chinese-style houses on either side for several blocks. After the road turned, our house was the first you encountered on the right side. The house directly across the street from us was, it turned out, the home of a Republic of China (ROC) general.

[Above: I've repeatedly tried and failed to find our house on satellite images. So here it is from memory. The houses were more rectangular than depicted. The stream was probably wider. The railroad is totally out of scale. Our house, in reality, was maybe 25 feet in front by 35 or 40 feet. The dirt road was narrower than shown. I was just trying to show where left and right was.]

If you went the other direction, swerving right when the road swerved left, you had to get out and walk. Rather than roads there were walkways through a warren of shops and shanties. We lived across the street from a poor people's bamboo village.

If you didn't swerve right or left but continued straight past the side of our house you crossed a stream, about 8 yards wide, which fed the main river that emptied into the sea and was also our sewer, and the place that our poorer neighbor-women did their laundry. There was then a little bridge you could drive over the stream. A few yards further and you were crossing a railroad track.

So much in one place! Life, death, commerce and cemeteries, poverty and wealth, dirt roads, steam engines, concrete walled homes alongside bamboo shacks. How can you not love a place that has all that?

A Cacophonous Nudge

I just found out that April is National Military Child Month. It has been so since 2005. That means they started it about 43 years too late for me to enjoy it as an actual military child, but I'll take what I can get. Thank you, Congress. Thank you, American Armed Forces. I can't tell you two how much you mean to me.

I have a ton of memories to share about having been a military child for twelve years, but right now I'd like to share the one that always comes to the front of my mind in Aprils.

In April 1958 I was 8 and 3/4ths, going on 9. I was living in Taipei, Taiwan. My Father was working there and at a mountain-top base he ran far to the south. He was in Army intelligence. The base he ran sent unarmed electronics-laden planes over Red China to spy on them. His people also spied on the Republic of China, on Taiwan. The ROC Army spied back on him. I had learned all this in December when my Father's own ROC Liaison Officer told me. That was after I had been driven up to the mountain base with my Mother, in an Army staff car. We had been blindfolded most of the way so that, if kidnapped, the kidnappers couldn't obtain the exact location of the base from torturing us. That sucked.

All that was behind me in April. All I knew then was that the other kids were saying that the island was being shelled, along the Western coast. Or maybe not the island itself, but some outlying islands. The Red Chinese were getting ready to invade. Before they do, they'll probably shell Taipei. We had a bomb shelter in the back of the house. It was a hole in concrete. I thought I'd be safer standing in the middle of the street with my arms stretched out and my mouth open, waiting for a shell to fall on my tongue, as I would be in that hole to have the surrounding concrete pulverized and bury me.

I also knew that a partial eclipse of the sun was going to happen on Saturday, April 19, 1958. My parents told me it was going to be a great show, because the natives were going to try to drive away the dragon that was coming to devour the sun, ha, ha. Silly ignorant natives.

Someone, I don't remember who, but it might have been one of the American neighbor kids next door, said that there was a good chance the Red Chinese would invade the day of the eclipse. He said that it would be a good time, because everyone would be distracted by the dragon. I tried to ignore that idea.

The day of the eclipse came. I remember it was due to happen early in the afternoon. At the time I knew to the minute when the maximum eclipse would occur. My father gave me a piece of exposed film to use as a filter so I could watch the progress of the eclipse. I was determined to ignore anything else that went on. I wasn't into sociology. I was a scientist.

At first as the moon's disk crept in front of the sun, it was just my parents and I in the middle of the road waiting for darkness to fall. Then as the sky began darkening, strings of firecrackers were draped over every wall in sight, and hundreds of Chinese ran out of the nearby houses. All of them were beating spoons on pots and pans. There was such a huge racket, I couldn't help but take my eyes off the eclipse and look at the people making the noise. When I did I made eye contact with one Chinese man about my Father's age. He grinned widely and winked at me.

I looked back at the sky, and I saw what he saw. I counted down to the second of maximum totality. Birds preparing to roost for the night raised their voices. Skyrockets screamed and arced at the horizon. With a thousand confused birds, hundreds of Chinese beating pans, and the remainder of the firecrackers, the din was awesome. I could have imagined an invasion. Instead I saw the most beautiful dragon, just doing what comes natural to a dragon, and only needing to be gently nudged away, the way you nudge dragons.