Thinking Spot by Sarah Chin

(Alternatively, We Are Rats In A Celestial Garden)

My father’s father died a few days after I was born.

I never met my grandfather, obviously, but I did get to know him. A version of him, the kind that

exists in grainy sepia photographs. I know that he had five children, and my dad was his favorite. I know that he was born on the East coast and graduated from Harvard. I know that he was an unlucky recipient of our family’s unusually strong balding gene and that he lived in a house with a loquat tree and a red fence. I know the taste of those loquats freshly picked from the tree, their ripe flesh gentle, tangy-sweet like honey and just as sticky.

I know that my grandfather is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery, that his tombstone proudly displays his name, Henry S. Chin, in Mandarin and English in fading gold, and that my sister used to say it looked like dark chocolate when freshly cleaned. I know that my dad never referred to it as Grandpa Henry’s grave, or burial site, or tomb; he called it “The Thinking Spot.” I know that my family would make an obligatory stop to visit him every time we were in the area. It was an ordeal, to my childhood self, something I didn’t understand and didn’t make an effort to. But every time, our family’s old blue Prius found itself ambling up the drive to the top. The cemetery was beautiful, in a way: all sprawling green lawns and polished metal, graves and bundled flowers marking the sides of the road like pairs of particularly grim parentheses. While my parents mopped the tombstone and neatly laid out fresh roses, my sisters and I would comb the grounds in search of something beautiful to leave on our grandfather’s grave. More often than not, that meant dandelions. The little yellow kind, existing abundantly in lazy diffusion. We would race each other, compete

to see who could gather the biggest handful, then arrange them on or around the tombstone in sophisticated mosaics, like smiley faces.

We didn’t know that they were weeds, at the time. That these little golden dewdrops, who seemed to serendipitously spring to life under our feet, were generally unwanted by society. Looking back on it, this designation seems unfair. Who decided that some flowers get to be the eternal symbols of love and beauty, while dandelions are decreed illegitimate, relegated to being the weird uncle of the flower world, cast out and plucked by the stem? Sure, dandelions get kind of weird and hairy at the end of their lives, and they explode when you blow on them, but don’t we all? Isn’t that just the human experience?

After the tombstone was sufficiently cleaned and decorated, my father would sit us all down to say a few words to Grandpa Henry. He would talk about how our lives had changed since the last visit and how my sisters and I had grown from the children he knew.

It’s been a while since my last visit, but if I were to return, I would tell him about how I spent two

weeks last summer in Providence, Rhode Island, the city of his birth and childhood. Providence: a city that’s lovely in every way except for the fact that, for a period of time in late July and early August, in other words, the exact time frame of my stay, God’s sweaty palm descends from the heavens to smother all of New England in stifling humidity. Those two weeks were somewhat of a blur of art, lectures, frizzy hair, and questionable dining hall food, but the most vividly life-changing moment occurred for me on a seemingly ordinary Saturday, when a group of my friends decided to spend the afternoon exploring downtown Providence. The two girls were in my class at Brown and I had known both for a little over a week at that point - one was a filmmaker and writer from the Bay Area, who shopped almost exclusively at Reformation and exuded an aura of carefree bohemian boldness, the other was a silver-haired painter and the first girl I ever had feelings for.

I remember clearly the three of us in the setting Rhode Island sun, making our way down to the

Providence River when Olivia was struck by the brilliant idea that we take off our shoes. Having spent a week at this point unsupervised on a college campus, hanging out with nonconformist lesbians and crossing streets whenever I felt like it, I had few qualms with the suggestion, so we did. In doing so, I realized two things: first, rocks are sharp and pointy, and I now understand why people wear shoes. Second, Providence’s cobblestone roads had struck me as quaint and homelike while the city and I were still making each other’s acquaintance, but it took feeling them - sun-warmed, rough, uneven, and undeniably solid - under my bare feet to feel like I could justifiably call the city my own. We carried on this way, enjoying our new pedal freedom until by a stroke of luck we happened upon a small alleyway-like street that branched off of the main road. Beyond that, an ajar gate, a brick path, and a plaque that read Shakespeare’s Head Garden. We entered, naturally. The garden was serene and still, almost as if we had entered a place in which time was frozen. In lazy rows, patches of white roses and purple geraniums spilled over the pathway like they couldn’t be bothered to hold their heads up. For minutes or hours or even lifetimes, we revelled in the garden’s quiet, ethereal loveliness and whatever divine circumstances had led us to it. Our reverie ended abruptly, however, with the discovery of a dead rat.

While I can say confidently that my first and only thought, at this point in time, was “Ew, a rat!”, in reminiscence, this series of events seems to present the most glaring example of a metaphor that I have ever experienced in reality. Not in a contrived, John Green “It’s a metaphor, Hazel Grace” kind of way; finding a dead rat in a hidden garden amidst the busy city that birthed and raised my grandfather, whose death has had a profound effect on my life since almost the literal moment of my birth is practically the narrative equivalent of big, bold, red letters that read “THIS IS A SIGN.”

But of what? What was the Universe attempting to make me realize (Or, more accurately, what was I trying to force myself to realize by attributing random happenings in my life to being the work of the Universe)? Unsurprisingly, an existential crisis ensued.

I asked myself: Death and life exist as a cycle, I know, but who knows the exact nature of this relationship? Is it symbiosis, an eternal mutual exchange? A chemical reaction forever in search of equilibrium? Who chooses which deaths are significant enough to warrant monthly visits and dandelion wreaths, while others are nothing more than a passing thought or fuel for an English paper? Who draws the line between existence and memory, and when do we become the infinite versions of ourselves who exist in the minds of the people we know? Whose job is it to wrangle the nebulous, subjective idea of beauty into boxes that we can label and shelve in some galactic warehouse? Who judged dandelions to be weeds and

roses to be the physical manifestation of the idea of love?

The answer, as I have determined, is us. We do. Anyone can. We’ve all seen the Matrix. This world we live in might exist inside our heads while our bodies are trapped in embryonic alien goo. I’m not going to pretend to know all the secrets of the Universe, but I think I know about as much as anyone does. If we exist, let’s do it on our own terms.

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Sarah is a rising senior at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, CA. She writes regularly for the school newspaper and her iPhone Notes app. Her work has been recognized by the Archer School for Girls Lit& Conference and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She draws to understand the world around her, and she writes to understand herself.

Instagram: metalstrawgrl / bysarahmari

Sarah Chin