Show and Tell: The Sock-Puppet

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I will never forget the anguish I put my mother through as a child. So many dreams. Dreams that are memories now and also pain mixed up with love and a desire to let them be known.

I remember the sock-puppet for show and tell. It was a cloudy afternoon when the dim orange lighting of the kitchen washed over the peeling walls as I begged and pleaded with mom to help me with my show and tell project.

I needed something to show. Mom worked in needles. She worked in sowing, in making something out of nothing but a string of yarn. She agreed to help me then, making my anguish into her anguish as the hours seemed to trap both of us in their midst. It was still early in the afternoon when I sidetracked her with my last minute request, and we could take the whole evening if need be, but the next day still loomed like the clouds through the windowpanes, into our souls and slowly more coldly.

As night encroached I didn’t know if we would make it. All I could feel was my heart pouncing as time managed to swerve right above our every angle and motion.

Mom kept her personal sowing machine in the kitchen, and it didn’t dawn on me that she did so because that’s where she could get more work done for her shift at the garment warehouse the next morning. It didn’t occur to me that she had already had an eight hour work-day by the time I made my request to her, and that she had already picked us up from school, and that she had even managed to prepare dinner for us to curl into the evening with our bellies full.

All that dawned on me was my show and tell. The sock puppet needed to be real, and to come alive like the ones on Mr. Rogers’s. I needed to be able to hold my puppet, and to tell its story like an expert.

So I went back and forth between the kitchen and the living room checking on mom and her hands at work, keeping an eye on her angles as she shaped the dimensions of the puppet underneath the magic needle. She gave life to my dream on that day, which was also my pain, in one of the earliest instances of a lifetime of last minute races against time and everything that seemed possible that I’d embark on with her. We would share anguish over each other and one another’s fates through the course of many years in this manner. Years which would also seem to dash just above our heads as we scrambled to meet them with our best minds.

Before late into the night, mom stretched the hands and legs of the tiny sock-puppet before my eyes. I remember looking at it in that moment, as if to look into the depths of imagination itself, and feeling at once that it wasn’t like what I expected.

Made purely of black yarn, it didn’t look like the sock-puppets from Mr. Rogers’s. And it barely fit through my hands. I also couldn’t move the legs if my fingers were placed through the puppets’ hands, and likewise couldn’t move its hands if my fingers were placed through its legs. At least, not in the seamless way that appeared to be most right.

What’s more, our sock-puppet had no face. It was just the figure of a body, but it had no personality.

I barely mustered a thank you to mom before taking it from her hands then, as I figured that I could maybe still make it work, if only I gave it some eyes and some lips and a nose. I then retreated into the living room with the soft garment in my hands, placed the puppet’s body down on the plastic table where my brother and I did our homework, took some scratch paper out of my backpack, and set out to give the tiny figure its rightful personality.

I won’t ever forget the face I would forge on the sheet then, because it was the most natural face that came to mind in that moment; the only one in the entire galaxy that I could draw with some ease. After cutting out the circle of paper that we’d glue onto the figure’s circular-shaped head, I gave the sock-puppet curious wide eyes, brimming bright eyelashes, a roundish nose with just a small lumping tip at the end, and a set of large, wise lips. It was the face of my mom.

Even if the figure wasn’t quite what I expected then, I would still have something to show for show and tell. And my mom’s face before my anxieties–just as her hands motioning through the darkness of the night to still save the day–would remain with my memory through a lifetime; every dream come true for me now is only an extension of everything possible through the tiny sock-puppet with her eyes.

J.T.

Los Angeles, so you know

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It is quite possible, maybe even nearly guaranteed, that I will not be there on your final day. That is, in the final moment that defines that day. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but if I did it would just be untrue.

I also wish it didn’t have to be so simple. I wish I didn’t have to be so wrapped up in myself just like everyone else, and that I could summon the super-powers I always dreamt of one day having, so that I could be in two places at once after all; so that I could be as much the magic to you, as you’ve been to me over the course of so many days.

I am only human, however. A being bound by two hands and two feet, with just one heart and mind connecting each of these extensions of the body. Even if in my own mind I can fly, the rest of the time I’m pulled to the earth by gravity like every other one of the planet’s organisms.

What’s more, even if I could actually fly through time and space, the truth is that I would still have to leave one part of myself to get to you on the other side. This I could not do.

Last night, at the peak of dawn there was a tremor through the earth. I could not fly and get away. Nor could you. Instead we both had no choice but to bear the weight and worry of the tumble that marked the earth’s transformation, a transformation all but guaranteed to continue indefinitely, or at least, long past either one of us.

We had to be somewhat brave, Los Angeles. For a moment each of us faced the specter of being taken from one another and the impending doom thereof. Yet there we were. We made it through the strenuous trek. Now, we continue with our own transformation through the times. We are living, breathing organisms too, after all, each of us with whole worlds to fill out regardless of a tremor or two.

That said, there will also be a time when one of us cannot make it. On that day, even with all the bravery in the universe coursing through our veins, we will still be broken through. A day when the sky will be blotted out by an endless sense of abandon. A day when we’ll be left to course through the dark of the night as new, less certain structures. Broken structures.

That brokenness is also likely to extend through the course of more than just one night. It may even take a lifetime to adapt to a world without one another, but we will once again transform through this. It is our destiny to expand into the universe through each of the events that happen to us, and through those we happen to. If it were not for the same reason, I could not write this note to you today, nor any of the notes we’ve shared. And even if the notes one day vanish, I’ve got a feeling they could only disappear to take time and space in another form, too.

Naturally, there will only be one Los Angeles over the course of time and space, just as there will be only one JIMBO TIMES to express so uncompromisingly such a fervent dedication to Los Angeles.

But before it’s all a memory, with what time and space is still left, I want to express my gratitude for everything we’ve been able to form together.

You have made me, Los Angeles, and I can only hope in some way I’ve made you too.

As such, when the time comes to remake ourselves, even beyond one another, no matter if I can’t be there to say goodbye, I trust each of us will still remake ourselves well.

Indeed, the pueblos depend on it.

J.T.

Finding My Way Back Without the Lights

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Since as long as I can remember I was driven by a tremendous love for the world, which was also a great hurting for the world, in that it hurt to love something so much.

‘Being driven’ implies some form of control over this love, though, except that I wasn’t always in control. In fact, it might be that I was in control of the world around me less than half the time. During the other half, it felt like I was only reacting to an unexpected wind, as if one day the world suddenly opened its arms to me and I had to react. I had to express myself. I had to write.

Except that even if I wrote, it still didn’t mean I knew how to appreciate everything I loved about the world all at once, or even just at the “right time.” I mustered what I could with the scraps of time I was given, dropping the world again and again on its head, making mistakes, and moving on. Now, with more distance between myself and all I’ve loved over the years, even if I wanted to claim to have no regrets, that would preclude that I know the whole of myself; the fact of the matter is that I’m actually still getting to know the different moments which add up to myself. As for what the final version of myself regrets, I’m still finding out.

How does a person imagine their whole life to make up their mind about how they feel about it, anyway? As in, where do they find the time for such a thing? In any case, I realize that this time around in reflecting on things, I can see I’m now somewhere along a middle space.

I can also see that I’m supposed to cross this passage onto the next span of my travail through the Cosmos, but that instead of lights guiding my path, it’s actually a rather dark terminal I’m standing in.

A part of me wanted to come back from all of my travels this year stronger, but another part of me was highly aware of how I could actually only come back from them in a more vulnerable state than before, estranged from my surroundings as I tried to make sense of just what mattered the most in both the places I left and the ones I returned to.

I’m now rummaging through that vulnerable state, because everything to be found in it is a collector’s item. And I’ve come to believe that I’m supposed to get to know my vulnerabilities better in order to prize my strengths better too.

Maybe that’s why I’ve decided to step away from so much of the driving force as of late; while the last time I checked I wanted to immerse myself full throttle with the world to uncover its farthest dimensions, it’s now the polar opposite; I am like the night, swollen into a dark and spacious state, unloving and even cold. It creates a balance in me somehow.

I know this when I open my eyes through the darkness to find the other part of myself; rather than being afraid of its difference, I am immovably at peace with it, accepting it for as long as it needs to be with me.

I don’t always need light to observe my existence; even through darkness, I can sort through its contents to still find enough of what I need from myself; I understand that just as I thrive with light, I’m meant to thrive without it as well. The result is something I’m rather happy to lay bare.

With more soon,

J.T.

L.A. Remembers this Pueblo

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How could I ever forget, the magnificent breeze brought by the wind when roaring heat passes, or the way my whole body galvanizes at the start of another golden morning.

Even if I’m just like a bird passing through a chasm of time and space amid dry earth, I treasure the opening for another flight through. I love its span of daydreams and jamming; together we’re reflections of each other, bound for glowing warm hues, each filled with a light of our own to make even more colors as one.

And how could I ever forget, a place where I can lose myself only to recover more of myself later. Each part I leave at every intersection is not just the same when I recover it, it’s more; it’s born again, wrapped up in the old days as much as it’s open towards new days. I can be a million bodies in this way, like any one of the strangers who color the crosswalks.

I am the helicopter pilot churning through the sky, searching frantically to ground myself. And I am the motorcyclist, racing out of wrecked road to make my own way.

I am the writer who is celebrating at the sight of another vision brought to life on the screen. And I am the student, whose backpack is a time capsule destined to save the world, or at least to give it more time.

I am the ice cream man, playing my song to the avenues no matter how heavy their silence weighs on me. And I am the store owner along the boulevard, opening my doors for yet another miracle to waltz in.

All of it is only the traffic of myself, soaring or slugging forward to finish what’s started. It is the pueblo of the people of Los Angeles, from every part and parcel of the world. We dream and daydream and live in these dreams, together.

J.T.