To: the spiraling of my haircase.

They have a real, live organ in the Church here. The organ player gets paid for playing in the mass. Essentially, he gets paid for going to church. There is a single rasta drummer who sits beside him, the only thing to keep tempo for us, and prays with his hands clasped near his belly-button, diamond shaped, with aligned thumbs and index fingers. He reads the scriptures from his iphone and speaks and drums to himself before and after church.

After the organist near-destroyed my solo by taking it about ten octaves too high, I start on my way home after church, and a petite Haitian young woman stops and asks me about my hair regimen. She claims her English is not too good, so we end up having most of our conversation in French. I am amazed by how fluent I still am. I take her to a nearby pharmacy to show her the oils I use and we continue walking home together. Only to realize that she lives a single house away from me.

I spent a long time yesterday remembering Martinique and Axelle and her family. How they live on a mountain-side with the capital at their feet and a Jazzy-Zouk carrying the sea-breeze on a Friday evening. I remember the blue-framed window without burglar-proof, the shower with no curtain, the green-peas, the fish-pie, the bare-skin of the beach. The old slave barracks, rum-houses, montagne Pele and women in their yellow scarves. I miss the vibrancy of the place.

I've come across a document written by my great-grandfather in 1959, apparently he used to write a lot of correspondences both in English and Chinese. He spoke on being a businessman and the hardship of it, on the scattered seed from his loins and the generations growing from it, and their beginnings in South Trinidad. My focus for a years now has been to learn about his own father, Joseph (obviously not his original name) and what it was like to come to Trinidad in 1863. I would like to write on that at some point. I did a while ago, but I want to revisit the idea.

I fear for the generation of Trinidadian women who ten years from now will be at a loss for love and their spouses and fathers. Men are on a steep decline where I come from. That is not the type of sleep that they can wake dreams from. The real-type men are even more scarce. Rare specimen in a field of dirt.

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children, and your sons, and your sons.