What is a decade
A Honda Odyssey is just a minivan.
Rock Dust Light Star is a song by Jamiroquai.
A decade is ten years.
The year is 2011. The date feels like a distant memory because it is. It was ten years ago, and you wonder what ten years from now will be like, and if it too, will one day feel like a distant memory.
It is the latest in a long line of frequent moves: Seattle, from Hong Kong, from Chicago before that, and from even more before then.
It is arguably my most important move. It is the first time I truly feel like I am an adult, like I am on my own, like I have made it. It is the implicit mission of every youth to discover the path for their life and I have finally found mine.
I landed a job in Seattle, which is to be an intermediary, a stepping stone back to home, back to family.
Sometimes you spend more time with intermediaries than you do destinations.
The month is April. Spring has arrived. The weather has warmed.
I am packing my mom’s Honda Odyssey to the brim. It is already full of memories of her driving driver’s-license-less children around, driving car-less adults around, delivering Chinese-language newspapers to Chinese restaurants. It is already beginning to show its signs of wear and tear—the dings in the doors, the fender that doesn’t quite align, neither of which will get in the way of this momentous move.
The sun is blaring down on my exposed arm as I drive up ‘The 5,’ the highway that connects Washington state to Oregon to California and we are in Oregon when I listen to the live version of a song called Rock Dust Light Star by a band that I love and the song isn’t actually that good but it doesn’t really matter. My arm is hot from the sun. My body is jittery from the combined emotion of nervousness and excitement from the move. My focus is on the road.
I am finally moved into the small studio apartment that will be my home for I think a year or two, but the future will decide that it will be at least four. I send my parents off to return to their home without me, a home that I wonder if will always be there but the future has decided that in a couple years it will not.
I read the news that Osama bin Laden has been killed.
Because it is 2011. Which is ten years after 2001.
A Honda Odyssey is my mom’s minivan.
Rock Dust Light Star is the anthem of my move.
And a decade is still ten years.
The year is 2021. The date feels like a distant memory because it is. It was ten years ago, and you wonder what ten years from now will be like, and if it too, will one day feel like a distant memory.
It is the latest in a long line of frequent moves: my own place, from living in my parents’ house, from Seattle before that, and from Hong Kong and even more before then.
It is also a move from being tethered to another person to being single, from being a child with a mother to one without, from being a child with a father to a child who counts the days until his father no longer remembers him.
It is still arguably my most important move. It is the first time I truly feel like I am again an adult, like I am on my own, like I have found my way again. It is the implicit mission of every adult to discover the path for their life and I have finally found mine.
I am still in my hometown, which I moved back to from Seattle, but my hometown—without my parents, without my naivete, without my childhood—my hometown no longer feels like home. It feels like an intermediary, a stepping stone towards my own life, towards whatever is next.
Sometimes you spend more time with intermediaries than you do destinations.
The month is April. Spring has arrived. The weather is hot.
I am thinking about whittling down my life’s possessions so that I can pack them into a Honda CR-V, which was the replacement of the legendary Honda Odyssey, which is now gone and the CR-V is now mine because I pried it from my parents’ shouldn’t-be-driving fingers.
I stand under the blaring sun atop a towering hill near where my parents used to live, where I used to take care of them, seeing how vast and full of possibilities the world truly is, imagining how perhaps I will return to the literal and figurative road, a future where I will travel to learn and meet people and give to them and them to me and perhaps one day I will wrote a book about it all. I imagine that future and a song creeps into my brain and whispers that it’s okay to be excited for the future again, that being excited for the future doesn’t mean you don’t love your past any less.
I am finally loosening my grip on my identity as a caregiver, an identity I thought would last for three months but the future decided it would be years instead and that it would become something I clutched so fiercely because that was how I figuratively held on to any semblance of meaning in the storm that was dementia. And it would also be the future that decided to forcibly teach me to pry my fingers away, one by one by one by one by one. And it did teach me by force, because I believed that if I let go of the pain, what do I have left of my fading memory?
I read the news that California has plans to officially end restrictions due to the covid-19 pandemic.
Because it is 2021. Which is ten years after 2011.
A Honda Odyssey, and now a Honda CR-V, are the symbols of my mom and everything she taught me about selflessness and generosity and the power of using what you have to make someone else’s day just a little bit better.
The live version of Rock Dust Light Star is still not a good song but it is the anthem that will always take me back to the sun on my arm, being on ‘The 5,’ my body feeling the jitters that is the combined emotion of nervousness and excitement, and excitement for the future is a feeling I could use right now.
And a decade is still ten years.
Or is it?
The year is 2001. Or 1991. Or one day it will be 2031.
What even is a decade? What is ten years? It sounds like so much, an unimaginably long amount of time that might as well be forever when it’s 2011 and you’ve only lived one or two of them but by 2021 it no longer feels as long because once you’ve experienced three or four of these things called decades they all seem so much shorter by comparison.
I often wish I could go back to those earlier decades, back to when time felt long, back to when time was measured in years.
I never used to count time in decades. How could I? I had barely lived more than two but now it’s been more than three and I now know how this thing called life works. In 2011 a few people didn’t make it, but in 2021 many more have not. That includes my mom. That includes my dad’s brain. That includes many others.
How many more decades will I even get? How many moves will any of us get?
Life is often so defined by where you geographically stand, and I always knew that in life you can only move geographically so many times.
I now know, that life is also defined by other people, and you can only move figuratively towards and from people so many times as well.
I also now know, that life itself is defined by how much of your life you’ve already lived.
Because ten years is all it takes, to transform a Honda Odyssey from just a minivan, Rock Dust Light Star from just a bad song, from ten years of eternity to ten years in the blink of an eye.
The year is 2031. The date feels like a distant memory because it is. It was ten years ago, and you wonder what ten years from now will be like, and if it too, will one day feel like a distant memory.
It is the latest in a long line of frequent moves. Literally, to one place from another. Geographically, from one building to another. Personally, from the ones we love to the ones we have yet to love.
Temporally, from one definition of time to the next.
But a Honda Odyssey will always remind me of my mom.
Rock Dust Light Star will always make me excited for the future.
And a decade, will still be ten years, which is enough time to transform anything—hope, pain, grief, and even time itself.