The Wily Filipino

Mobile Homes.

I'm writing this in a hotel room while Izzy sleeps. It is one of many hotels over the last year in which we have made our temporary home for a few nights, all uniform in their anonymity and proximity to freeway offramps. But we make the room our own nonetheless, our domestic rituals almost unchanging as we open the door, turn on the lights, and step with half-dread and anticipation into our new home. She gets to pick which bed she wants to sleep in, but this does not matter because come dawn she joins me under my blanket.

Our toiletries are perched, on opposite sides, around the small sink; her asthma medicine in a big Ziploc bag on the nightstand next to the clock radio. Two toothbrushes and two tubes of toothpaste stuffed in a plastic cup; her night light, the same one we've used for three years now, poised by the lone wall socket. We never bother to unpack; the bags are always open, sitting on the floor by our Chuck Taylors. Mine are brown. Hers are pink.

We are used to this now, Izzy and I: a late-afternoon pickup at her school on Friday, then an early dinner at Kerbey Lane Cafe. Where's your car, Izzy asks on the way to the lot, and I pause for a moment to figure out which economy rental car it is this time. Then the sheer joy of the all-Izzy weekend: maybe the zoo, maybe peeking into the shops on South Congress, maybe the children's museum, maybe a ride on the little steam train in the park, migas for brunch and lunchtime quesadillas and a steak dinner somewhere in there, for it's Texas after all.

I'm told Austin is a great city, and it is; it's probably as close as Texas will get to San Francisco, though all I really know of it is through Izzy, and that is fine with me. I drop everything when I come here; no laptop or textbook weighs me down these three or four days. Then a lingering goodbye, which sometimes results in tears, in the gym before the singing of the national anthem on Monday morning. Then the long, lonely flight back, though I am already happily awaiting the next month so we can be father and daughter all over again.

Despite our daily phone calls, and despite these brief weekends, it is difficult. I never saw myself being a father like this -- certainly not like this. She agrees, though her assent is mostly unsaid, but sometimes blurted out, unexpectedly, in her six-year old fashion, when she asks certain questions. I know how I'm supposed to react -- the books and experts all tell me how -- but my heart breaks nonetheless when I answer, almost always in the negative. But her resilience, constantly surprising me in its depth, is such that I can learn from it too, and I have.

Car headlights sweep in an arc across the nondescript hotel curtains. This time, we are on the first floor facing the parking lot, and for this reason the curtains are completely drawn closed to give us a little privacy. We don't get to see the orange Texas sun shade slowly into black while I read her chapter books to her and sing her to sleep. Everything is illuminated by lamplight. It reminds me of my apartment.

Next week I am moving out of the fog and high rent of San Francisco, its urban romance finally receding with just the briefest stabs of regret. But no matter: I am saying farewell to the spiders and bugs and dust mites and occasional mice with whom I shared the in-law basement apartment, moving out of my windowless, mildewed, damp batcave to a second-floor, two-bedroom place in a four-unit building in Piedmont. Actually, I'm on the Oakland side of the street, but the Post Office prefers to recognize it as Piedmont. The rent is a little above my price range than I could previously comfortably allow, but it's a lot bigger, and the need for escape is too strong. It's an awfully nice neighborhood. There are windows that look out onto the quiet street. There is sunlight; I can see trees.

Soon my old apartment will no longer remember I was there: the DVDs I piled up high on a ledge have been packed into boxes; the sleigh bed -- practically the only piece of furniture I got after the divorce -- will be disassembled and rebuilt into a new room; the smells of the curries and stews I attempted in my slow cooker have already vanished into the ether long ago. For someone nicknamed Sunny, this apartment was a cruel joke. One window faces two walls, with only a sliver of sky to be seen if one bent one's neck; the other is underneath a deck, conveniently positioned to catch the few minutes of sunshine in the early morning when the sun was angled just right, if the fog of the Outer Sunset allowed.

I realize I never once bothered to put anything up on the walls in all my three years here, because it was never really home. The apartment would magically transform into one only on the nights when Izzy would stay over and sleep on the inflatable bed on the floor next to mine, the suffocating drabness returning once more in the morning after I took her back to school. Except for the occasional visitor, even my friends were hardly welcome, mostly out of embarrassment on my part. There wouldn't have been any place to sit anyway. It's just as well that houses have no memories, for I associate nothing but a vague, dusty misery here.

Izzy's leg jerks out of the blanket sometimes while she's sleeping. I do not think this is out of an anxious restlessness. I think she is excited because it's her big birthday bash tomorrow, complete with ballet teacher and princess pinata. She will be handing out princess wands and hats and blowing out six candles on a Charlotte's Web cake. Eight girls -- no boys invited! -- all in pink tutus and giggles, will be arriving the next day, ballet slippers in hand. I like to think she is practicing her pas de chats in her sleep.

It will be almost a year since my baby moved 1700 miles away. But now I'm throwing out old things, selling books to make more room. I'm allowing myself to think about buying furniture again. I will know now when the sun rises and sets. When I pick her up in late December and bring her back to the East Bay for a quick Christmas visit she'll be moving into a home. I think I'm getting a tree this year. We can't wait.

Posted by the wily filipino at August 7, 2007 11:35 PM