All posts filed under: Family

Picnic Sandwiches

Published by Swati Singh

One day a white Ford Econoline van appeared, so old that its paint was matted, its enamel sheared away by time and smogwinds. The sound was unnerving when I scratched my stubby nails on its side to examine it, but I accepted it. It had a defunct refrigeration unit the size of a case of small water bottles on top and a huge sticker decal on one side that read “Picnic Sandwiches” in a chubby typewriter font. Deli, Catering, Delivery. (626) something something something – something something something something. I have no idea where my father procured this adorable hunk of junk, but I loved it. It was fantastically unreliable, breaking down with such tenacity that the guy at Lynn’s Auto Body had a dedicated space cleared for it. My dad had that crooked mechanic’s number on speed dial. I wonder now who he called first from the blue call boxes that dotted the sidelines of all of the highways where Picnic Sandwiches decided to stop to have lunch and a long nap – my …

Journey to Atlantis

Published by Swati Singh

I remember what I wore on the day I moved into my freshman year dorm because it was more than the shirt on my back. It was hot that day in San Diego. October can be like that in Southern California. Sure the season turns, but it’s a trepidatious three point turn that lurches in and out of Summer like a beat up Toyota minivan. There were no elevators in Atlantis, the residence hall that I was assigned to. They were all named after historic fleets, mine a shuttle, but funny – I didn’t feel like I was taking off. My room was on the top floor up five stairwells with sharp turns and dividing walls that made it impossible to see my new neighbors even when they weren’t new anymore, a change for a girl from a town where every one knew everyone else. During the tour I had learned that these buildings were constructed around the time George Winne Jr., set himself on fire in Revelle Plaza in 1970 in protest to the …

My Madame Bovary Story

Published by Swati Singh

Emma Bovary, the ill-fated protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s eponymous novel, struggled to live within the confines of provincial life. She grew up on a convent and thought marriage would be her entry into an existence more nuanced than the farm life she knew. Her husband was a respectable doctor and loved her, but she found him boring and filled her idle time reading romance novels that gave her the scintillating, sensual escape she was looking for. Marriage didn’t extinguish Emma’s taste for extravagance. Before long, she sought the kind of thrill she found in the erotic pages she burned through. She took two lovers, Léon and Rodolphe, both of whom ultimately rejected her. She racked up a bill during her exploits and became destitute, eventually committing suicide lest her private affairs be exposed, and her young daughter and husband humiliated. It’s a foreboding tale my traditionalist anti-novella father would have loved for my sister and I to read so he could wave his finger in our faces and say, “See! Look what happens!” But that …

The Backyard at Longview

Published by Swati Singh

In my silent picture memories out back in the old house at Longview, a few places stand out. The window above the sink overlooking the backyard where I would see my mother watching us play. I imagine myself there now for I look like her and there is nothing to look onto, but the sun setting on a life we once knew when we were all together indefinitely. Outside, there was a hearth somebody had built out of stone and cement where my dad cooked spiced and succulent meat and fish, sometimes bread. He would let me poke open the aluminum foil to see if steam was piping, the matte smoke from his cigarette swirling and blending into the cool twilight air like a ghost hiding and hanging high. As I venture farther these characters and their habits recede into time and it is just me in timeless spaces that know me like ancestral land. I imagine thinking of these places when I am dying. I return to them now because they are where my …

The Garden, Dad, and I

Published by Swati Singh

I spent much of my time growing up, especially my adolescent years, with my father in our backyard garden. We had this lust to grow things together. I would be home from school waiting for him and the second he got home, we’d be out there with our seeds. Our garden wasn’t neat and symmetrical like the ones I’d see in my mother’s magazines. This was my dad’s messy space where he could smoke his Winstons and be a philosopher. I loved my father so much, I wanted to be him – cool and aloof, unattached, yet deeply tethered to the poetry of being. He was my first great love. Dad was a busy man in those days and, like a writer trying to force out words, he stretched daylight to do what he loved most – farm. We share the “early to bed, early to rise” gene, so I fell into his routines with ease. It wasn’t difficult for me to choose hanging out with my old man over playing with the boys down …