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In the late evenings after happy hour and some solids in my gut I would walk through downtown back to the house where I rented a room.
They were a very hard-working people and very family oriented, and the downtown – and the countryside too – got quiet quite early. The downtown was generally well-lighted, and everywhere, even in the unlighted alleys or empty lots or shady tree-lined streets, I was not afraid. I was young and in very good shape and large by local standards and filled with beer or rice wine or tequila. And, truth be told, a danger to myself, really, most of all. And that has always been the case.
At the boardinghouse the salon girls were closing up. They ran a salon on the ground floor – hair and nails and massages. It was Thao (who I have written of before) and Huong and Pei Ling and Mimi. They saw me and danced up and down clapping and gathered me up like Hank Aaron and took me in a cab to karaoke.
You think Shakespeare was difficult? You think trigonometry was difficult?
Here’s difficult: try singing karaoke, translating while you’re singing, from an atonal language to a tonal language, all while following the melody.
I chose Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” from 1972. I figured it was quite slow. Figured it was it was easy to translate. Hard, but not Joan-Baez-hard, to sing.
Queue up the song and on the big karaoke screen there’s horsies running across fields and lovers holding hands on the seashore and clouds against a blue sky, and here’s the salon girls just not breathing because they’re waiting so long, and finally the melody comes on. Lyrics in English on the screen, and I’m singing them in my Vietnamese translation. Vietnamese, like Chinese, is tonal: it has half a dozen accents, like high, low, high broken, guttural stop, rising, and level. If you don’t get your tones right, the syllables – the words – are meaningless. So how do you pull that off in the framework of melody and harmony?
I just went with it.
And it was like Nirvana’s MYV Unplugged.
I gave it some meaningful flourishes. And collapsed from emotion.
Oh, the girls ate that up. Something had gotten through.
More? Encore?
OK. So, we queued up Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.” And I sang it to Thao.
We could whisper to each other, briefly, and for me it’s a rare and fleeting thing to be so heard and understood.
Ten and fifteen years on and things are very different. Here in the crisp, humid spring it’s not like that anymore.
I try to whisper with the pups, but not much gets through, maybe just a feeling, really compounded or complex. Never a thought.
It’s easy to know when something is wrong with one of the pups. It manifests itself in an obvious way. Foxy vomited twice last night; she must’ve found something rotten in the woods. Or she comes up lame in one or the other hind leg from running flat-out all the time, and then she has to run on three legs for a week.
Three seasons a year Daphne is bothered by raspberry stalks that tangle in the feathered hair on her fanny.
Sometimes in the woods nowadays walking or snowshoeing I trip and fall to my knees. I’m getting older, or heavy, or slower to react, sometimes from bifocals that I have trouble using. I trip and fall down, and my damn pups run to me and start licking my face and glasses, and they are happy and curious and fun-loving, like it’s a game. Like I’m in a “let’s-play-agame” crouch. It’s not what I’m thinking… It’s not what I’m feeling.
The whispering gets confused at night if I’ve been drinking. The pups are under the bed, on their Orvis beds stuffed with straw, but they don’t sleep. They are awake and cautious, and if I move around the shack shakily or slow or stumblingly, they watch, and know that something is up, but they cannot understand.
It’s not easy to be a James whisperer.
They look at me like they are the ones who have done something wrong. It’s the absolute opposite of whispering. And it’s a place I’ve lived much of my life in.
I find it’s hard enough communicating with my own species.
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