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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


05.22.03, thursday night

Biking, whee!, through Oakland�s Chinatown, I pass many men I could mistake for my father. Sometimes I look again and wonder, Dad? Isn�t he in San Diego? Does he have my new phone number? Did I remember to give it to him?

What is about these men that render them my father�s doppelgangers? What is it that makes me want to bump into them, gently, with the front wheel of my copper Schwinn, just to watch his phantom start, as startled as I already am by the nature of our encounter?

Maybe their smallness reminds me of him, a smallness that would be considered lithe if their bellies didn�t swell so gently underneath their meticulously pressed poly/cotton blend long-sleeved shirts from JC Penny.

Maybe it is the plastic flip-flops they wear, even with pressed slacks and their pressed shirts, falling so soft, you can�t hear their feet kiss the ground.

Maybe their hair coruscates, sunlit, exactly like my father�s salted modest afro, crinkly hard-to-tame hair that lies on the pate like a halo of dark fleecy light.

Yet perhaps they are most like my father in the brownness of their skin, a kind of brownness that shifts in memory, a brownness that changes with the light and the seasons, as hard beetlebrowed years season the skin to a melancholy that wavers between tawny to dried persimmon to night, when night is not overpoweringly black, but peach-swept, mute and suggestive of the tenderness of a father who sees his children typically when it is dark--earliest morning, right before he closes the door behind him, or late evening, just when daughter and son are hungry, tired and speechless, who won�t put words to the fleetingness of their youth, and the youth of their parents, until years and years later when they have finally found the words that fit just right.






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