Happiness

Some of my most distinct childhood memories are my family trips to Reno, Nevada. I don’t know why, but all throughout my life up until the third grade, we (my mom, dad, brother, and me) went a lot, and it’d just be totally random. Sometimes it was a holiday, sometimes it was during a school break, but most of the time, it was coming home from school on Friday to my mom telling me, “Get ready, we’re going to Reno. We’ll be back Sunday.” By 3 or 4, we’d be out of the house.

The four-hour ride seemed like the longest wait in the world to me at the time. My dad drove this beige BMW that he had before he and my mom got married in ’85, and it had the stiffest and most uncomfortable leather seats. I wished I could’ve slept throughout the entire ride but any time my dad tried to accelerate or drive past seventy miles per hour, the engine roared like a motherfuck. Looking back though, it was good that I didn’t get to sleep the whole time, because it was family time.

My dad drove, my brother got the passenger seat, and my mom and I sat in the back on the right and left, respectively. (To this day, the formation has never changed on our family outings to restaurants or our relatives’ places.) My mom talked the most, either offering the rest of us fruits or bottled water or yelling at my dad for driving too fast (75 MPH). The car smelled like citrus whenever my mom peeled oranges for us.

We all talked about school, and, I think I lied a lot. During one trip when I was a first grader, my mom recounted some story she heard in the news, and I told her—what a coincidence—that during recess, my friends found the same story in a newspaper on the blacktop and asked me to read it to them. (In reality, however, I wouldn’t learn how to read for another year, and second, I didn’t have any friends.)

After the first few trips, we knew to keep an eye out for certain landmarks that told us how much farther we had to go. Early on in the trip, I’d look up at the bright sunny sky and see balls of a bunch of different colors, suspended in the air by power lines that followed us through the mountains. In the middle of the trip, we’d drive next to mountainsides that were blanketed by nets, and I’d look up the mountainside toward the cloudy gray sky and unsuccessfully try to find the nets’ edges. I had no idea what they were for, so my dad told me that they kept the mountainsides from crumbling and causing landslides. Toward the end of the trip, with Reno only ten minutes away and the sun far away behind us, there were the billboards. (“I keep looking for a bunch of big signs with avertizements on them because that tells me that I’m close to Reno!”)

At this point, the highway was one long straight narrow road that seemed not to end at the horizon, but rather, as we continued to drive forward, it emanated from the horizon, as did an orange hue that seeped through the sky, the long wispy streaks of pink cotton candy clouds, the gray silhouettes of distant mountains, and the succession of billboards*. The billboards came one after another, and I never realized how big they were until we passed by each one. They projected vibrant four-star meals or luxurious suites suited only for giants, and—the more fascinating billboards—they branded bare human sensuality as dazzling entertainment, though to me the parade of billboards was a show itself.

If we somehow happened to be asleep, this was the part my dad would wake us up for, and we’d all cheer and applaud. With skyscraping hotels in sight, we knew we had made it and we were finally here, here at Reno at last.



For the entire week and a half since I had been back from NorCal, I didn’t call my parents. My mom tried calling me a few times, and then my dad tried. I always found myself in an inconvenient time or place to pick up, such as my apartment, where sometimes I would have just have enough reception so that I’d get an incoming call, but so little that the call would immediately drop if I picked up. I kept on telling myself to call them when there was time, but somehow, I would always forget and get distracted with some form of dancing or schoolwork or internet social networking.

I figured that they only wanted to remind me to deliver those fucking persimmons, so I did last Tuesday, hoping that my aunt would call them for me and appease their nerves. I still planned on calling them, but I was hoping that the delivery would buy me some more time in case other “obligations” got in the way. That plan kinda failed. I got this email from my mom the following day:

Hi Brian, I hope every thing is OK with you. I'm getting worried about you because you have not picked up your phone or returned our calls. Why? Did I do or say something to make you upset/mad? We need to talk. Please tell me if I have done something wrong? Is it because of the monies that I said in my previous email to you? I can't get a hold on you and I get so stressed out. I'm developping some kind of anxiety and I think my heart is beating too fast I think I will have a heart attack soon ...

I didn’t know how to feel. My mom’s been overdramatic in the past, so the heart attack bit didn’t make me too worried. There was no doubt though that I couldn’t put off calling her anymore, but I also had to get on campus and go meet up with Alfonso for dinner. So, I figured instead of listening to music while waiting for the bus, I could actually call my mom instead that day.

Once I was outside and sitting down at the bus stop, I dialed her number, and as the phone rang I ran through the things I’d say to her in my head. Hi mom. I’m fine. Sorry I haven’t been calling. I’ve been busy. I delivered the persimmons. I got pizza and one hundred dollars. I’ll cook cơm gà on Friday. K love you bye.

The ringing stopped, and shortly after, I heard a quiet, feeble, “Hello? Brian?”

I stuttered. “Uh, hello, hi?” Liked I was talking to some stranger. “Hey I can’t really hear you right now because I’m outside waiting for the bus and the traffic is really really loud so I’ll call you back in ten minutes is that ok? K love you bye.” I hung up quickly without letting my mom say another word.

I was lying, of course. It wasn’t the traffic that was loud; it was my mom who was too quiet. I had never heard her voice sound so soft and weak, almost crackly like an old, tired out lady. It caught me so off guard that I suddenly felt at a loss for words.

When I got onto campus, I had my phone in hand, ready to call her again, but I stalled. I walked across campus for about ten minutes playing with the phone in my hand. Sliding my phone open and closed, checking the time every thirty seconds, opening up the calendar to make sure that it was still Wednesday, double/triple/quadruple-checking my last text from Alfonso to make sure he said to eat at Mesa, not Pippin.

After highlighting my mom’s name in my phone book, exiting out, and then going back to it several times, I somehow, like quickly ripping off a band aid, hit the call button.



I sent my mom a link to a photobucket account where I uploaded last night the pictures of my cơm gà and salmon dinners and, tonight, pictures of me eating at a Korean barbeque place with my friends. I told her that she should share the pictures with my father and brother.

I feel like I had been gone too long. I feel like it’s because of me that we can’t really be a tight family anymore, but fuck, believe me when I say I’m trying to make shit better.

(*The picture at the beginning is in fact a picture of going down the highway 80 and getting close to Reno. You can see the pretty sky I described and a billboard on the side. I wish I had a better picture though, because I got this one after spending about thirty minutes on Googlemap’s street view trying to find the right shot.)