In my dream, I was at the Maine Lobster Festival with a whole bunch of people.
They were eating fresh boiled giant red lobsters. The lobsters were not cooked well, so some of them were still moving on the table, stretching their legs, sprawling and rattling.
And everyone was naked. Their loose skins were hanging from their decayed bodies, and they used their bare hands trying to grab the half-alive lobsters and open the shells and eat the half-cooked-half-alive meats. And red-yellow colored blood was dripping from the mouths and hands of people. Their hands were long and bent and moving clumsily, like lobster legs.
I could not tell the difference between lobster-eating human beings and half-dead-half-alive lobsters.
They were all immersed together into a group of mad wild animals.
I read from Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project that bluebirds are a symbol of happiness.
I bought a watercolor painting of a bluebird from Boulder Arts Festival during my sabbatical and it has been hanging on my bedroom wall for more than a decade. In my kitchen, I have another oil painting of a little bluebird. Every morning I drink coffee with my favorite bluebird mug, eat my toast on a bluebird plate. So I had a wonderful relationship with bluebirds, until this spring.
I saw a baby bluebird on the front porch when I took my dog, Aspen, out for a walk. Maybe a half-size of a robin. Crawling slowly. Aspen immediately attacked it. I quickly pulled Aspen hard, and gently released the little bird.
Then, suddenly two large bluebirds, perhaps daddy and mommy birds, were flying straight at me and attacking my head. I had to instantly pull my fleece jacket over my ears. Good thing that I had a baseball cap and sunglasses on. The birds were striking my head over and over. I was screaming but the birds did not reduce the speed and they would swing in the air and struck at Aspen’s little head.
After we finally went to the street and walked for about 20 minutes and then returned to our front yard, the two bluebirds were still waiting on our porch and started to attack us again.
Now we made enemies with bluebirds.
Bluebirds seem to not know that I do not eat animals, especially I do not eat birds.
How can I make bluebirds forgive me? I want to have a good relationship with bluebirds because I still believe that bluebirds are a symbol of happiness, even though I am scared of them every time I see them, even when I drive.
When I came to a small college town in Ohio for a job interview at a state university, Nick came to the airport to pick me up.
We introduced ourselves and shook our hands. He had an enormously wide shoulder, attached to bulky and short arms like swollen balloons. He stood upright before my nose, his green eyes were staring at me like burning torches. I could hear his heavy breaths from his nose and mouth. Then suddenly he grabbed one of my hands and said, “Girl, I will take care of you.”
Nick told people in the university that he was a big shot in the biotechnology field. I was also in the same field, but I had not heard of his name before the interview.
Shortly after I was hired as the first and only female faculty member in the 38 years of the department history, one day, Nick appeared in my office. He sat down across the desk without saying a word, staring at me, the two torches burning again like wildfires.
I waited a minute for him to speak, but he was silent, only staring at me. I started talking slowly, then faster and faster. I started to sweat. I took my sweater off over my head. Beneath the sweater, I had a long-sleeve green shirt on. He was still staring at me, in the same manner of someone looking at Michelangelo at Uffizi. After about a half-hour, speaking alone, I finally gave up and turned to my computer as a polite signal that I needed to go back to my work. Mike slowly stood up, with his thick arms still crossed, and left my office, without a word.
When I looked down, the second and third buttons of my shirt from the top were unclosed and my red bra was visible from the wide-open spade-shaped slit.
I have had this beautiful pearl necklace for more than 30 years. When I was a graduate student in Japan, someone presented this to me. Someone badly wanted to go out with me.
Japanese people dress like they just jumped out from the Vogue magazine. Every woman wears expensive designer clothes and several pieces of beautiful jewelry and carries the same Channel handbag. It was 1990. I just came from China. Back then, China was still very poor and I had only ugly cheap clothes. Then someone presented me with this pearl necklace out of nowhere on Christmas.
It came with a gorgeous gift box which had a lovely silver ribbon. It was wrapped in hundreds of layers of soft peach-colored papers and placed inside an outlandishly large shopping bag. The ivory-colored pearls were breathtakingly beautiful. They looked noble, very special. It was such an extraordinary piece of jewelry that I had never tried to wear it. Even when I went to friends’ weddings, I didn’t dare to wear the necklace. I was afraid I would lose it when I was drunk or dancing and I would not notice it.
When I moved from apartment to apartment, from country to country, from continent to continent, and even when traveling for conferences, I always carried the necklace in my purse. It was a nervous-breaking task to keep this valuable piece of jewelry with me wherever I was traveling.
Last year, during the Pandemic lockdown, I became very sentimental and started to look at my precious necklace and wondered what I would do with it if I caught COVID or I would die suddenly. I started to wear the pearl necklace in my house, with my pajama on, indulged myself in the reflection of the dazzling pearls in the mirror. I regretted having not worn it at all these years.
It occurred to me I would like to know how much it would be worth. I brought it to a jewelry store to ask about its market price. The guy, who was in his 60s, with a huge belly and big chest, studied the pearls with a microscopic magnifying glass and looked at me. Then he said, “They are not pearls. They are glasses.”
I was shocked, I felt I almost fainted out.
He asked me aloud, “Do you want to know why I say they are faked?” He placed the pearls in a glass of soap water, and quickly I saw some thin plastic foils peering out from each peal and floating in the water.
I came back home, and put the entire necklace into the soap water inside a large soup bowl, and waited until every pearl lost its plastic foils. I took the necklace out and gently rubbed it in a bath towel. Now each glass-pearl became completely nude and looked even brighter than before without plastic wrapping.
So all these years, I kept this faked glass-pearl necklace as the most valuable thing I owned in my life and did not wear even a single time.
The next day, I dressed up in crispy white shirts and a black skirt with black tights and went to another bigger jewelry store. I had my faked pearl necklace on me, I also had diamond earrings and a blue sapphire ring. A good-looking woman in the store instantly noticed me when I entered the store and smiled warmly towards me. I pulled out my necklace and handed it to her, “Could you tell me if they are real pearls or not?”
This blond middle-aged woman had many diamond rings on her fingers. She looked at my pearl necklace carefully and told me cheerfully: “Yes, they are real. They are gorgeous. They are really beautiful.”
I smiled back to her, “I had this for 30 years and this is the first time I am wearing it outside of my home.” As I walked out of the store, I still felt her brown eyes following my back.
Since then I have started to wear this precious faked pearl necklace. I always see someone admiring my necklace as if I was wearing some expensive real South Sea pearls.
shanhu lee 