We sat in nervous silence as we drove, the kind of nervous silence that overcomes you when you realise the trip you'd planned just might not happen. "Let's keep driving," Greg offered. I nodded assent.

We were on our way to Haystack Mountain for a half-day hike when the rains began to fall, first a gentle sprinkle at which Greg and I laughed, and then the sudden and harder rains of a quickening storm that threatened our plans. In the background, the strains of Outkast grew softer as the pitter-patter of watery drops on the windshield grew more intense, Andre 3000 inviting us to shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture. I nudged the volume up a bit and we continued driving, staring straight ahead as though nothing had happened. If we pretended hard enough, perhaps the rains would go away.

It's been a while since Greg and I had had some time to ourselves, what with our conflicting schedules and various obligations, and we were looking forward to a quiet weekend alone, just the two of us. We'd driven to Vermont Friday night, and had woken up lazy late Saturday morning, exhausted from the trappings of Corporate America and needing some time in the outdoors to recharge. New England would be perfect. But now the skies had opened up and it looked like we would have to turn back. Instead we persisted. "Yes," we agreed, "we'll just keep going a bit."

Our perseverance paid off and the rains soon stopped, as abruptly as they had started and long before we reached our destination: the trailhead to what the guidebook promised "a simple jaunt to a modest summit." We took the trail at a decent pace, neither of us daring to admit to the other just how much our bodies complained, following the blue diamonds that marked our way to the little rock outcrop and promised four-state views at the top. On our way up we met a busy woodpecker, a few day hikers like ourselves, and a friendly dog who offered to lick my face as I stooped to examine the velvety soft petals of a wild red trillium. I let him; it was the least I could do to reward his enthusiasm.

We were lucky on our little hike: it didn't rain a single drop, and the trail was dry enough to make it comfortably to the top and back. As we got back to the car, however, the splish-splash drops of an impending shower began to hit the windshield again, and we breathed a sigh of relief as we started the engine. We had gotten back just in time.

We slept well last night.

It rained all day today in southern Vermont, and it rained all last night, the hypnotic drone on the roof lulling us into a soporific trance. It's what we've been needing for a while now: a quiet weekend, a little fresh air, and a little alone time with no one around but each other. A little time to talk about dreams and goals, to put things in perspective, to play catch up with each other's lives, to talk of futures ahead. A lovely time to help us appreciate just what we have. And a lovely time we had, indeed.

Life sometimes, you know, seems a-okay.

Photos of our hike here.

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In the summer of 1990, I was tending to customers in my father's grocery when someone suddenly ran in and began yelling. "They've taken over," she screamed. "The Muslimeen have taken over. Quick, turn on the radio." That was how we learned that the government had been overthrown in a violent coup by a band of religious zealots. The siege lasted barely six days, but it was enough to cripple the island's postal service for the rest of the summer, something I didn't realise would happen as I watched the Muslimeen leader read his demands over the island's television. It was the summer I was leaving for college and I had no patience for this.

I had known before my senior year was over that I had been accepted into an American college, somewhere in a place called Philadelphia, a place I knew nothing about except that there was a college there waiting for me. I was thrilled less about continuing my education than I was about leaving the island, ready to begin my own history as an adult of sorts, and I was filled with the restless energy of an eighteen year old ready to see the world. Yes, I had decided, this Philadelphia would be my new home.

I left home a month later, my life's meager possessions filling barely half the suitcase that was a going-away gift, nothing more than an acceptance letter and a visa stamp in my passport to prove that I was going somewhere I was supposed to be. Postal service hadn't yet been fully restored, and I was clueless as to when or where to show up. The island was still healing. My flight took me to Providence, Rhode Island, where my brother had just finished his second year at Brown, and a few days later I found myself alone on a southbound Amtrak, heading towards Philly, suitcase in tow and fascinated by the northbound trains that whooshed by in the opposite direction and so close to each other that the carriages shook. The conductor woke me up as the train pulled into 30th Street Station.

It was a hot, dusty day when I arrived at the Office for International Programs on Walnut Street, not unlike one of the many humid Philadelphia days to which I would grow accustomed over the next few years. The dorms weren't yet open and the program director had somehow coaxed them to let me in a few days early. "Poor, bewildered kid," he must have said. "Someone please let him in; he's harmless." I slept alone in the empty dorm building for the next few days, pillowless and with a flimsy jacket as a blanket, a lightweight spring jacket that I had been given before leaving home and which I used as my winter coat for my first Philadelphia winter. I rationed the little cash I had on hand to buy food, stingy with my allowance and horrified every time I converted secretly the prices back to the currency I knew. I wasn't accustomed to spending American money. It was a week or so later after I'd woken up to parents and freshmen streaming into the dorms that I finally bought myself some cheap sheets, a pillow, and a blue pillowcase with a picture of a cow jumping over the moon. It wouldn't do to let the Americans know how modest my pedigree. It wouldn't do to let my pride be hurt. No, not on the first day. There would be enough time for that later on.

That was nearly fifteen years ago when I arrived in this country, ready to take on the world and its contests with all my idealistic vim. I've grown some since then, some for the better, some perhaps for the worse, but I think often of my formative years in West Philadelphia, my old stomping grounds where I began my path toward adulthood and self-sufficiency. I went back to the old campus last weekend for a tenth year reunion. It seemed so different now, the city, the campus. Everything looked the same and yet disturbingly unfamiliar. Things looked smaller, things looked bigger, buildings had been built, buildings had been demolished, old faces were new. Yet the things I remembered all came back on Walnut Street as I walked up to my old dorm at the edge of Hill Field. First impressions are ingrained into your memory, so they say. First impressions like the first friends I made, and how I would feel when one of them would take his life years later. First impressions of crushes, girls I thought were cute, guys I thought were cute, first impressions like how instantly I fell in love with the old mouse my then-girlfriend and I rescued from her lab and who was supposed to live only a few more days but who lived for years and years after we brought him home. Mousey, we called him.

I walked about campus, remembering things that had escaped me since I left the city. I sat in the old classrooms, rooms where I failed so many exams only to ace so many more later on; I peered into laboratories where I once prided myself in my research and where I subsequently and unceremoniously abandoned my goals; I walked into the old libraries where I would fall asleep amid the stacks of ancient books, late at night after I had procrastinated once more on some paper due or some midterm looming. I walked to the old pond where one chilly evening many years ago, eyes red from crying, I had buried Mousey.

Maybe it was the old field, maybe it was the old buildings, maybe it was the host of red and blue banners and balloons and all things meant to bring nostalgia to the alumni, but I struggled to maintain composure so many times as I walked about, an odd friend or so in tow, reminiscing about the past and pretending to laugh it all off as the good old days. Good old days, indeed. The blue pillowcase from freshman year some fifteen years ago I see every once in a while, folded and faded in my things thrice retired, and I have to smile to myself sometimes when I reminisce about things like this. Ten year reunion. Wow, time sure flies. Good old days, indeed.

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Last week, for the first time in my life, I saw my mother dance.

It was at the wedding reception in Arizona, after the tables had been cleared and the music had been playing for some time, when Sinty twirled by and pulled her onto the dance floor. My mother protested vehemently. "No, no, no, I don't dance." But Sinty would hear none of it and she tugged at my mother's arm, insistent and wordless, her head bobbing to the music, up and down and up again. "I don't dance," my mother repeated, laughing, helpless.

And then suddenly there they were, two tiny and elderly women arm-in-arm, dancing at the very edge of the swirling crowd.

They were so tiny hardly anyone noticed them.

It's always funny seeing my mother in new situations like this. She turned seventy-three on Sunday, Mother's Day, old enough to be my grandmother, more than a generation, more than a language, more than a difference of culture between us. She surprises me sometimes, she does. She surprises me the way she travels the city subways and buses, unable to read the words and relying instead on her broken Caribbean-Chinese English, making do the best she can. And, like a homing pigeon, she always makes it back none the worse for wear. She's lived three different lives in three different geographies: one in Asia, one in the Caribbean, and one here, now, in America. She surprises me still with things I didn't know about her, like the time I went off to college and she made me a scarf. I learned then that she knitted. Like the time she told me about her love letters back and forth with my father, when they had been separated for many, many years and long before I was born. The way she's accepted my being gay. The way she's accepted Greg. She surprises me with her resilience.

Mothers are like that sometimes. They pull things out from previous lives, lives they had before you were born, lives they had before you came into the picture--and we forget that sometimes, that they were once untroubled and carefree. Mothers were young once upon a time.

I stood at the side of the table closest to the dance floor, watching Sinty and my mother move rhythmically to the music. Soon enough, Sinty sat down, exhausted as old women would be, but my mother kept going, first by herself and then hand in hand with her tiny great-grandson, marching back and forth and laughing along with the crowd. I stood there for a while, not believing what I was seeing, stunned at the sight and confused by the tears that surged but would never be allowed to run. I bit down hard on my lip and cheered her along.

I don't know if I'll ever see that sight again, my mother with such unbridled joy on her face, her arms up in the air and dancing to the music. Even if I do, I'll be certain to not be caught by surprise, knowing what I know now, having seen what I saw then. First times leave such an impression. First times are so precious. First times like the first time my mother made a funny face at me a few years ago, when she realised I was no longer a child. First times like the first time I ever saw my mother cry, when my father died. First times like this first time last week, when I stood spellbound, goosebumps riding up my arms and back and neck as I cheered on and on in the cool, dark blue Arizona evening, the evening I stood from the sidelines and watched my mother dance.

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