Simply: missing summer. Tickly-hairy peaches, avocados, letters waiting in the mailbox. Having a mailbox. The blitheness from not having to worry about employment or houselessness. Time, enough to write back, enough to call without feeling rushed or that it's "about business", enough to be patient with the act of writing or stories themselves. The company of friends. Rini's stories, even when heard for the umpteenth time. Dipti's expansive gestures, as if she would embrace the entire world if she could. Annie's disarming wit. Others and other details, too many to recall properly.

Sometimes, I miss my brother.

Childhood: the good times, the times my mother could be droll and so young and not so beaten down by hard labor and the times my father would laugh, his eyebrows arching michieviously like the actor Jack Nickolson's. When he laughed like that, I could imagine him young and daring, the young man he might have been before he married my mother, the young man I will never know except maybe in a Technicolor picture from the 1970s - a tawny man surrounded by other tawny-skinned men, all of them wearing sunglasses, or just him, pipe between lips, attired in a natty white sailor suit like Popeye except if Popeye was Cambodian and mostly ate stir-fried beef and vegetables over rice and not spinach which we had maybe once a year.

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