Chapters,
not transcripts.

The radiator started knocking around six. I learned to tell time by it that first winter. Paul would already be at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread out, a coffee cup steaming, and I'd come in from the bedroom with Jenny on my hip, not yet a year old, still warm from sleep. The apartment was small enough that you could cross the whole of it in a breath — bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to the little sitting room that held our one nice chair and the record player. I loved it, that compression. I loved how you always knew where everyone was.

The kitchen had green linoleum that the previous tenants had torn at the edges, and a window that faced the back stairs. You could see a sliver of Brookline Avenue through it if you stood at the sink and leaned. I would stand there on Sundays with the kettle on, looking out, and think about nothing. That sounds like a small thing now, but I had come from a house where thinking about nothing was not permitted — my mother would find you in a room alone and ask, very gently, if everything was all right. So the permission to stand at a window with a kettle was — it was what I had wanted, maybe my whole life, and hadn't known how to want.

But I wanted it to last. That's the truth of it. I wanted the drawer and the ledger and the linoleum and the knocking radiator to outlast me. I think that's what young people don't understand about small rooms. You can be very happy in a small room. You can be happy in a way that doesn't photograph well, that nobody can put in a magazine or a movie, because it isn't made of events. It's made of the exact angle the sun hit the kettle at eight-thirty on a Sunday in March.

I didn't know, then, that it was the best time of my life. You don't, when you're in it. That's maybe the only thing I'd go back and tell myself, if I could. Pay closer attention. It's already happening.

I met Richard at a church social in 1968. He was the only man in the room who asked me what I was reading, not what I was cooking. I knew right then. Not that I would marry him, but that I wanted to keep talking to him. Forty-seven years later, I still do. Some mornings I catch him looking at me like he is trying to memorize my face, and I pretend not to notice. But I am doing the same thing.

When we left Saigon in 1975, I carried one suitcase and a photograph of my mother standing in front of our house on Truong Minh Giang Street. Richard carried our youngest, who was only six weeks old. We did not speak on the plane. There was nothing to say that the silence did not already hold. I pressed my forehead to the window and watched the country I was born in become smaller and smaller until it was just a green line, and then nothing.

I was twenty-three the October I quit my father's company. I remember the date because it was the same week Neil Armstrong's mother died — I heard it on the radio driving out to the site, and for some reason that detail has stayed with me more clearly than most things from my own life.

The morning I quit, I drove up to Mount Hood alone. It was a Tuesday. There's nothing especially important about a Tuesday. I want you to understand that. No big moment, no speech I'd rehearsed. I pulled over at the unfinished edge of the highway, right where the gravel met the old road, and I got out of the truck and I stood there for a while. A hawk was working the updraft above the ridge. I watched it. And I thought — I can remember this thought exactly — I thought: If I stay, I will be a competent man. If I leave, I will be a man.