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| 2008/10/12 00:04:27瀏覽899｜回應1｜推薦14 | |
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德州大哥要搬到南加州了。臨行前夕，他獨步客廳逡巡徘徊，月光映過成堆的紙箱，在地上灑下明暗的幾何光影。他想起 Isak Dinesen 的《遠離非洲 Out of Africa》，以及梅麗史翠普演的同名電影；想起他也打包了生命中的一個珍貴片段，即將遠離德州。想起達拉斯的一切 - 消磨過無數週六午後的舊書局，每隔兩週就報到一次的上品牛肉店。電影開場時梅麗史翠普的旁白在他腦中縈繞：「我在非洲有個農場，它在關山腳下 ...」一個古老的，疲憊的，空洞的回聲。於是他提起兩根手指，緩緩地敲下他的心曲：「我在達拉斯有棟房子，它在兩條溪水交會之處」。 德州大哥搬家給我帶來很大的困擾。首先，我十一月要到達拉斯開會，本指望到他家喝紅酒吃上等牛排，全落空了。再者，他在我這沒什麼名氣的部落格已經小有名氣；他搬到加州逍遙去了不打緊，是不是還叫做德州大哥呢？我絕不會改稱他為加州大哥的，怕他的粉絲流失  ，而且誰會把加州大哥當一回事？（你知道他的小名是 BB - Big Brother 是也；到了加州，BB 成了 Bikini Brother. 想見他必然心癢難熬。可是，難道以後要改登他的比基尼相片？Oh, the unspeakable horror!）讀了這封信之後，我的問題解決了。一個人一生只能有一個永久地址，所以德州大哥還是德州大哥。 ---------------------------------------------------- Out of Dallas, Texas “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of Ngong Hills…” I kept hearing that in my head while mechanically transferring my books from the bookshelves to the boxes. I had, within the last 12 years, moved five times and I began to wonder whether my books would be better off had I made them stay in the boxes for good. It was also at this point in my life that I started to appreciate the book ‘Out of Africa’ (where the line comes from) more than its fair share – I bought it many years ago and thought the book itself, with all its colonial nostalgias, just tolerable if you think about what a lousy movie they had made out of it. I believe the particular line quoted above was narrated by Meryl Streep who has this amazingly talent in imitating any accent. But were Baroness Blixen - the original author - the one who is going to read that line to me, I would love to have her voice to be just like that: ancient, tired, surrendering and elegiac; a hollow echo from someone who stares at the horizon no more because she has nothing else to cling on to but watching the camp fire dying down. I had a house in Dallas, at the tip where two creeks join together. Now that all should be donated to local charities, have been; given to friends – given away; put into boxes - boxed; the completion of this entire sequence of actions started to make me feeling depressed, as if I was settling my affairs – in a sense, I was. I paced the soon-to-be-emptied living room back and forth, meandering my way around piles of boxes cast over by the geometrical patterns of lights and shadows created by the moon through the skylights. Was this how Horatio Nelson paced the deck of the H.M.S. Victory on the eve he set sail for Trafalgar? Did he know then that he might not be returning? Will I and do I? This is, after all, by no mean the first time I move away and unlikely my last one. But somehow it is different this time; I am much attached to Dallas - to the point that I was almost willing to stay put and to see whether I could weather the storm or not. But in the end, being who I am, my survival instinct took over. The next thing I knew, I loaded up the westward-bound wagon and now I am ready to whip the mules. I am going to leave old Texas now For they’ve got no use for the long horn cow… It feels as if it was eons ago when I first heard that song from the radio station ICRT (then the American Forces Radio in Taiwan). Little did I know then that one day I would have to say good bye to my old Texas. The road will take me through Amarillo where there is nothing to see, through the badlands of New Mexico where grasses never grow, through the Arizona desert where rain never touch down and reaching California where I will have to learn to call it my home. No one I know likes Dallas, at least not as much as I do. They all said people here were rugged; they always said we blended our words too much when we spoke; they joked about how we never learned how to drive in winter time – well, we didn’t, no reason to try figuring that out if it only snowed twice a year; they snubbed us down by telling us that we have no sense of being cultural– true if you believed, or made to believe that Austin, the capital of pretension, had it in the first place; they picked us for not having sceneries, rivers, mountains and whatever green or brown or whitish pile of s**t to go to – why would you need those when you could comfortably strip yourself naked in your privately fenced-in backyard and put two gargantuan T-bone steaks over your sizzling big-a*sed Texas size grill – didn’t that bring you close to Mother Nature as it did your ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago? Wouldn’t that alone be something primal enough to give you the same sense of pride of feeding your family over what you have just killed? A little corny it might be, but no more so than wearing your high-tech boots, bearing your multi-purpose survival gears and making sure that you have your GPS system track you when you ‘hike’ (Why call it ‘hike’? You are walking, no different from what I did in Galleria Mall once every week) your sorry a*ses from Adirondacks to Zulu Land. I am acting defensive because I really love this place. But why is that? Was it because this is the place where I raised my son from a boy to a man, watching him inherit the best (or the worst, depending on how much you appreciate my twisted personality) of me? Or was it the affordability of living in a million-dollar house at a fraction of the cost comparing to any other places? Was it the Half-Price Books and Magazines store where I spent countless Saturday afternoons strolling and browsing through? – every time I walked in there I could feel my heartbeats speeding up, as if I was in love for the first time again. Or was it the Belt-Line road where for every franchised restaurant in US, you could find a branch store there? Was it the gourmet meat shop where I ordered my 6-weeks-aged porterhouse steaks every other week, where the owner would insist on taking care of my orders in person? Was it the repeating patterns of Wal-Mart, Home-Depo, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Home-Depo, Walgreens…that some thought it boring to death but I found it extremely loving and caring, especially when the entire city was at the brim of running out super-glue due to a silly school project that made every parents frantically hording in every single one of the glue tubes they could put their hands on, and your knowing well that you could always find it in the next store, or the next following the previous next? The answer is none of the above but at the same times all of the above. My days of writing scientific papers to be published in Physical Reviews have long passed me so I no longer experience the urge to write rationally. I can like and dislike something at the same time; tell that to anyone and explain myself to none. I only see and talk to people I love and care; others, I watch and speak to them and that is all; these were what Dallas gave me. I felt alone all the time but never feeling lonely at any time. I have finally found my little universe that I can be peaceful, with the world, with myself. Will California do the same for me? Perhaps but I hope not. Were you me, you would have had your shares of filling out the ‘mailing’ and ‘permanent’ addresses into all those annoyingly tiny boxes from all sorts of hateful application forms – from cable to gas company , from post offices to physician’s front desk; you name it. But what the hell is this concept of a ‘permanent’ address? Don’t they know what word ‘permanent’ means in English language? And if they do, shouldn’t there be a law to forbid you from having more than one ‘permanent’ address in your life? If everybody, boys, girls, men, women, young, old, white, black, yellow, red, green, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, billionaires and beggars, pacifists and warlords, winners and losers, all you condemned souls wandering the surface of this tiny piece of rock revolving around a dimming light you call sun get one and only one shot at what you would like to be your ‘permanent’ address – between Heaven and Hell - where is it going to be? That is why I hope – I sincerely hope – that I will not fall in love with California. I have already decided where my permanent address is going to be and I have no desire to change it. “Will the eagles of Ngong Hills miss me?” Will all those gigantic Texas bugs miss me? |
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