Harvard square once

We were lost in Harvard Square once. Me, my parents, in a Subaru packed high with my things. Seemed a lot at the time: books, clothes, some sentimental scraps here and there, there were shelves (to stay organized!), sheets (had to be “extra long”), a picture frame, my favorite pillow, a plastic water heater, an old poster or two to look at. It wasn’t that much. Not compared to what I have now, and quite suddenly. But it did feel pretty monumental at the time.

Anyways we were lost. And it was a happy occasion, so my parents, not naturally apt to socialize with strangers, stopped to ask for directions. We were in Harvard Square, and we’ve passed this intersection 3 times now, my dad explained out the driver’s side window to someone I couldn’t immediately see. We can’t take Massachusetts Avenue, he said, it’s going the wrong way, we need to go that way on it, we’re trying to go to MIT.

Stranger looked in the car. It was an older man, if I remember correctly. Looked to the back with all the stuff and smiled. “Go to school there?” he asked. Of me, apparently.

Um. Yeah. Orientation. I said. (I think. It made me nervous back then to talk to just about anybody.)

“Great. That’s great, ” He had the biggest smile on his face.

“I’m really proud of you,” the old man said, inexplicably. “You want to go this way and take Mt. Auburn, it joins up with Mass Ave in a few blocks.”

Thank you, thank you, my dad said. He waved as he pulled away from the curb; he beamed the whole rest of the way.

A few months later, we discovered the Cambridge St. exit off 90 over to Memorial Drive and we never went through Harvard Square again.

Now they are exhausted by my moving. Now I am exhausted by it too.

But back then, I was in one place, they were in many. My dad moved to Dartmouth in New Hampshire for work. My mom left New Haven for Maryland. Then my dad moved into a place back on Prospect St. He worries that my mom is home alone. All the driving. All the driving. When I started applying to graduate school, this winter, six years later, he joked that he was also applying. For work, at NIH or maybe another lab in the DC area. “We’ll see who gets the good news first,” he laughed.

Then he sold the house. Then I won.

A tree falls

Today at lunchtime, a tree fell over in the Qualcomm parking lot. John was walking by it. He said it was a redwood tree. I was stopped in the bus stop with my lights blinking. My arm felt hot from the sun. He said he heard a noise and saw it fall. It fell over onto a row of cars. Someone else saw it fall too but he was the first, he said. Then we drove to get Bento.

View

Summer before college we
looked for outcroppings
of rhyolite;
a rock
glass-like, that
has been known to
come alive
by earth’s heat and
walk slowly
across the land.

We picked
at the valley floor
with sticks
parted tall grass
while the cool slopes
on either side grew
like trees overhead.

Floods raze the land,
you said, waving
a bent stick at a stream
that was
not quite a river,
only a tame curve visible.
And I thought
such a biblical way of
starting over;
of course
there’s nothing to find here.

Then where?

We knew
what we would see.
Record of a
red hot earth
before the path and
chattering trees,
and the wailing births
of the geologists who
predicted a war
preceding any
in our human history.

Even before the visiting
glaciers that
aligned these mountains,
and the grass that spouted upward
in thin, green shoots
and finally covered the valley floor
like a bandage.

And long
before the two of us–
arms swinging
with each higher step,
stinking
from August sweat
and clumsy
with the weight of our bodies
–cast our two
impressive grey shadows
briefly
against a bulging sky.

“It’s starting to rain.”

Ahead,
someone’s abandoned walking stick
had flowered
and grown leaves.
I took a drink as
we climbed
ever higher.
Over our shoulders
slowly evolving,
an always more perfect view.

-Lulu Liu

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Years ago, I took a trip to Yellowstone with a group of people just like me. It was the first time in my life I’d met anybody like me.
Anyways, I felt like posting some poems.

New York Times picked it up

Hadn’t heard of the New Scientist, Sacramento Bee? Well, how about the New York Times?

Could have been yours.