my brother and i were pretty awful kids. I picked on him a bit, as the oldest. But mostly we were a team when it came to babysitters, grandparents, and superiors in general.

We could answer the phone in the same voice, pre-puberty, and in fact looked pretty similar too. When we were in a car, there was a game where whenever the car stopped (for a traffic light, stop sign, dog in the road, etc), we'd unbuckle, and with difficulty, move as quickly as possible to the other's side of the backseat. Also, in stores, we'd like to hide from whoever'd brought us, inside the round clothes racks especially.

My grandmother used to have 'kiddie leashes' she'd bought, so we couldn't keep running away. I have this small scene I remember of using my whole weight to drag away from the captured arm, tugging against the leash, while walking along this sidewalk on a bridge with my grandmother. I understood that I shouldn't, but didn't know why. The essential difference between discipline and punishment, or I didn't care. But there was a little yellow flower in the cracks in the pavement just a little too far from the path my grandma had chosen, and I was resentful and longed to stretch a little farther to see it; it was very important.

In my two previous posts I describe pranks we'd participate in related to memory-keeping because keeping diaries and this blog makes me want to write about the idea of remembering more.

seasons as children / honey bunny

When we were little, my brother, sister and i used to spend a lot of time in the backyard of our house in Framingham MA. It must have been around 4th grade.. I had one very good friend named Lauren Graurer-Gray and we would bike to the library together. She insisted we walk around her prickly crab-grassy backyard with no shoes on, which my mom said later could give someone lyme disease.

In our Chen backyard, there were three gardens. My brother had a vegetable and fruit patch; I was envious most of the strawberries. I had a neighboring plot of 'springtime' little flowers that were mostly pastel and blue hued blooms. My little sister had the 'summer' flowers, big and bold and colorful, sunflowers and tulips.
A note: these 'seasons' are mostly what they looked like visually as a kid, not actual blooming time of year.
It was behind this house that we also had a shed where I wanted to house a family horse, and there was an opening to an aquaduct that our family would walk along behind the houses in our neighborhood and stroll together. Usually my brother had a big stick he would wave around.
One of our neighbors upon moving away gave our family our first real pet (besides when we were babies and had two dogs, good stories for another time.); Honey Bunny. She, like the house, couldn't be taken with us when we moved and lives among the memories we had there. One afternoon my brother and I were standing in the front yard with Honey Bunny. We had a little harness for her, almost like a ferret leash, though she was a fat Rex rabbit. Suddenly, and I ragged on my brother for a while because of this, she bolted, and the leash tugged so fast we saw her bolt off into a neighboring yard which we were pretty sure had large dogs. It was a strange coincidence that soon after, we had to move. Right before we left, my brother and I stood again in that yard and did a strange thing. I dont remember who's idea it was, but we started making a little dirt pile there where we'd lost Honey Bunny. I've always had sweaty hands, and I tried to mix as much sweat as possible into the handfuls of dirt, and we spit a little I think. That way Honey Bunny would know we'd remembered her, if she ever came back. It was very important, as we drove away, that the dirt pile was still there.
Later as a family we'd have at one time, four parakeets. and another bunny. But she was the first.

oh ps. happy thanksgiving
(i think what i mean is. in other words. time is sensory rather than linear. and your first loss doesn't get replaced, even if its just a mound of crap that remains.)

childhood in autumn

One of the differences between my brother and I, while both creators at heart and introverted in different ways, is best illustrated with a scene from our childhood during autumn when we lived in a community of townhouses called I think Harris Pond? in New Hampshire I think. It was while living there that we learned how to bike and had a babysitter named Brittany. I developed a healthy fear of swimming and my brother and I once climbed a mountain that was really a hill near our house.
Anyway so it was Fall and we were interacting with nature in different ways. I have a really visceral memory of my brother trying to collect all the leaves into a huge pile in the backyard field and asked me to help which I halfheartedly started to assist with but lost interest. My mom had said the only real snakes in the Northeast were an especially dangerous and sneaky type who would hide in foliage.
So instead I had been noticing the sap running along cracks in the trunks of trees in our front yard and careful to not get my fingers sticky, gathered the sap onto an acorn, bits of bark, and some pine leaves and things to make baby-Moses-in-a-basket figurine which I left on our front steps for someone discerning to notice later. We both had erected little monuments of value to both of us individually, and were always to be in this way similar but different. Instead of trying to make the biggest leaf pile and possibly encounter a snake I wanted to make something weird out of sap.

When we moved to another house I remember we left little messages surreptitiously for the new tenant, welcoming them and saying different stupid things. In our home in Southborough MA where Oliver had been born we were always trying to explore the 'swamp' in the woods behind the house, and upon finding some firewood, and having had to leave our pet bunny behind in our old house ( who we'd left a dirt mound in our front yard in memory of the night before leaving) we started working continuously on a log/ mud combination hut type habitat for the future bunnies we'd have again one day, behind the shed attached to the house. When it was too cold we'd hose hot water on the mud so we could keep playing.
As the oldest I'm afraid I instigated many of these sort-of-in-hindsight-strange occupations, but many of our inclinations natural as children symbolize more how our minds work rather than the subjects thought about themselves.
We were strange, smart children without too much conflict in our lives, were only bullied marginally once or twice and the offenders were always justly punished. A black boy in my 4th grade class called me 'chink' because someone said I could draw better, and my parents protested and transferred me to a different school. My brother was picked on by a guyfriend, so he gave him a black eye somehow with a tennis racket and we had to transfer private schools. To this day I'm very interested in race issues especially among children, and my brother gradually left sports. What else.. and we also role played being sort of the Pevensie children in Narnia, with my little sister Emily, but we called the place Nomania and our bikes were our horses. Another story.

head down typing all day every day
-a zen meister

I'm so annoyed and have all this bad energy just sitting here right now. I know I should do something get it out, shower, maybe. uuugh but there's a certain pleasure out of knowing one can be almost blindingly frustrated with everything for no reason.

i'd like to redeem myself.

(Clip from Pandoras Box)

Last night was the screening of "A Good Friday" a short film I starred in, that showed at Tribeca Cinemas, as part of Big Apple Film Festival... At the risk of not being humble for a second- I was so honored to meet Loui and he and the whole team were great, loved how it came out... we started off the series, followed by a short with John Heard, the next had Sean Astin and some other names... it was so cool to see them in things I might not have seen otherwise.

I had an idea earlier in the evening.. I'm an older rich guy on the subway, who sees a homeless guy asking for change. When he leaves, he turns to the guy and we're alone and I give him $100 and say something profound like the man who gives Jean Valjean the candlesticks to turn his life around in Les Miserables... The homeless guy thinks of all the good things he could do with the money, but in the end does something self destructive and dies.

love this. esp the ending. whatever it is that's been so far away... to finally just have to jump in and get swept away..