TheBanyanTree: Respite

[Margaret R. Kramer]

The clouds parted.  The sun appeared.  The winds died down.  And the earth
warmed up.  After days and days of rain and clouds and dreariness, we
finally had a summer-like day.  It was beautiful.

Our dogs started barking around 5:30 am.  I thought deer were wandering
around in our yard, but it was our Hmong neighbors up early to prepare for a
family gathering.  Their functions start early and usually end by late
morning, but this one turned out to be different.

As we ate breakfast, more and more Hmongs were pulling up in their SUVs,
minivans, and small cars.  Before long, there wasn’t anywhere to park on our
street.  People were gathering in our neighbors’ yard, talking and laughing.
The noise level on this quiet summer morning was getting louder by the
second.

Ray cut the grass.  I worked a bit in the house.  When I was weeding the
yard, my neighbor, Ying, came out and apologized for the large gathering.
She gave us some egg rolls and asked us to come over.  She explained that in
her culture when a couple has been married for a certain length of time, the
husband changes his name.  That’s what the gathering was about.  It was a
religious ceremony and a celebration.

I couldn’t help but wonder if they were going to have this many people, why
didn’t they have their event in a park?  But some of the Hmongs still do
animal sacrifices, so I suppose they really couldn’t kill a live pig in a
park.  Park regulations wouldn’t allow it.  Plus, they begin their functions
extraordinarily early in the morning.  At 8:30 am our street was packed with
cars.

Ray thought it was good that the Hmong continue to do rituals from their
culture.  I agree, because as much as a lot of Americans complain about
immigrants not learning the language and culture of the United States, they
don’t realize how fast the “old country” slips away.

My great-great grandparents came from Denmark, Norway, Germany, and England
in the middle 1800s.  Not one of us speaks any of the languages other than
English (of course!).  I learned German in school.  We don’t eat lutefisk.
We don’t like sauerkraut.  We’ve intermarried with other Europeans.  No one
is “pure” anything now; we’re all a bunch of mutts.

This will happen to the Hmong, too.  Each generation will have less ties to
the “old country.”  Already the some of younger Hmong don’t think the animal
sacrifice rituals have any meaning.  As the younger Hmong depend more on
English and less on Hmong, the use of Hmong will fade away.  They’ll begin
to intermarry with whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other Asians.  Certain
things from the culture will be kept and most of it will be forgotten.

We left the noise of the Hmong party and drove out to the cemetery to put
flowers on my parents’, grandmother’s, and uncle’s graves.  It was quiet
there.  In fact, I surprised not to see anyone there but us.  But I suppose
it was such a beautiful day, the living wanted to spend time with the
living.

We got sandwiches and then went to the park to eat them.  The park was full
of people.  Hmongs and  blacks were using the pavilion, and I saw a couple
of Somali girls on the playground with their heads covered with scarves.
The water park was open and we watched small children clad in bathing suits
run back and forth on the sidewalks.

Ray and I took a walk around the outer edges of the park.  Some Hmong boys
were looking in the overflowing water for tadpoles.  We told them we had
just thrown a cup away in the trash, so one of the boys went to retrieve it
so they could bring their tadpoles home.

Another group of Hmong boys were fishing.  One of them caught a small
bullhead and Ray helped him get it off the hook so he wouldn’t get stung.

We saw several geese out walking with their babies.  Well, the babies are
getting pretty big now, they’re almost the size of adult geese, but they
still have their baby feathers.  The adult geese hissed at us as we walked
by and we left their babies alone.

The party was at a fever pitch when we got back.  In fact, some Hmongs were
parked in our driveway, so I had to honk them out of there.  Our black cat,
normally so adventurous, stayed in the house all day.  All those people next
door really freaked him out.

The laughter and the talking started to die out around 5 pm.  By 6 pm, when
I looked outside, the street was clear, and the only noise I could hear was
our neighbors and their overnight guests putting chairs away, picking up the
yard, and doing other clean up stuff.

It takes a while for it to get dark in the summer.  In the winter it seems
like night crashes down, but summer evenings are gentler, like the daylight
doesn’t want to give way.  As 10 pm approached, I went out on our upper deck
and surveyed our yard.  I could make out the colors of our flowers.  I could
hear the leaves rustling.  The Hmongs next door were quiet.

And we made it through an entire day without a drop of rain.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at earthlink.net

http://www.polarispublications.com
Be a star!

http://www.bpwmn.org
Business and Professional Women of Minnesota

A bird does not sing because it has an answer.  It sings because it has a
song.
~Chinese Proverb