My Year Abroad: A Novel

Val encounters life and persons as they come to her, this total acceptance of the fact that you’re here, that you belong to the space you’re taking up, that it’s all and only yours. A rare thing, IMHO. If you think about it, most persons, including many of those who say they love you, can’t help but question your particular coordinates in whatever

“You have a business,” Pong said to me quite seriously. “You just don’t know what it is yet.”

opium bed

the main thing you learn about yourself and everyone else toiling away is how much of your mental activity and chatter is about dreaming of doing something else, whether noble or debauched or downright silly.

He tailored these pitches for sure but what I admired was that they weren’t in the least fake or overflogged. Pong offered them the angles they needed and wanted to make a free and confident decision that you could see became ultimately theirs and theirs alone. Pong, I realized, made himself their partner, not the other way around.

Pong was generous because he had a bottomless wonder for our multitudinous human family, this perpetual appreciation of how people are. And maybe: can and will be.

haole

expurgated

I understood at last that it was a con I needed. Now and from the beginning. For maybe your favorite teacher or coach or best friend conned you, too, into believing in a version of yourself you hadn’t yet imagined, a person many factors more capable, a person who might not have otherwise bloomed.