Off Assignment
To Old Johnny
Letter to a Stranger
Lavinia Spalding
Your shop was smaller than our kitchen but better stocked, the shelves on both sides of its entrance packed to the ceiling with shrimp chips and kimchi, dried cuttlefish, ramen noodles, and vacuum-sealed chicken drumsticks.
It had no name, the shop—it was just that faded orange awning in front—so we called it “Orange Awning,” until one day when we’d run out of maekju or soju or oo-yu, or butter or cigarettes or change for the bus, and someone in our apartment suggested to someone else that they run across the alley to Orange Awning.
“Who’s Old Johnny?” a friend asked, misunderstanding.
So that became your name. You: the ancient man, stony and bony, who squatted day and night on a flimsy plastic orange stool inches from the cement, paying us no special attention when we charged through the door five, six times a week, our heads bobbing in greeting, all smiles and a sing-song anyonghashimnika.
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Carried Away
OZZY IS GIVING ME ATTITUDE—bumping against my pack, nosing ahead, blowing his semisweet-fermented breath in my face. I nudge him on the chest to keep him behind me as I inch down the steep sandstone, but he clearly has personal-space issues. I chose Ozzy . . .
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BWTW 11 Intro
On the first day of 2017, I sat in a room I love—a small, bright space with green wicker furniture, three neglected but determined ferns, and five slim hardbacks in an old wooden crate. My toddler was napping, my husband was working in another room, and the . . .
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To the one who was supposed to get away
What I remember, 15 years on, is not your face or hair or hands, nor the beach or full moon above us that night. I remember the safety cone. It was bright orange, brand new, and perfectly incongruous, so we stared at it for seven hours. My friend swung by . . .
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Coming Full Circle
We’d been in the air about five minutes when our pilot, Cameron, pointed out the rainbow. It could be viewed, he said, from the right side of the helicopter — my side. I turned my head, knowing just what to expect. Since arriving on Maui a week before . . .
