September, 1968

 My mother and her friend, a nice Southern girl who my mom met dealing cards in Tahoe, drank a bottle of cheap blush and then convinced my grandmother, the one who scrubbed the tub after every bath, to lay on the diningroom floor so my mother could pierce her ears.

"I was so drunk I forgot to numb the second lobe!" my mother giggles 35 years after she forgot the ice, 20 after she 'got sober', 5 after she disappeared for a week.

I look carefully now at my grandmother's 90 year old lobes. They are soft and stretched and when I ask her how long she's had the holes she tells me, "Oh, I had it done just last week. That oriental girl at the salon you know." I look into her milky eyes and wish I could shrink into one of those big opal studs and go back in time. Watch from her lobe at all that has passed. Smell my grandpa's cologne when they embrace, whisper in her ear to punish my mother, make her sit in a corner. Tell her to write a second letter to that dark-skinned boy in Vietnam.

That same month my grandmother felt the dull needle casually pierce, my father realized he was afraid. After an overnight flight, a stop in Japan, he and hundreds of other boys deplaned to the mindnumbing heat that would cradle him for 11 months.

"When we got off the plane, the guys who were leaving were waiting to board," he tells me now from his little home hidden in the mountains, deep in the forests of Northern California. I nod, a coward behind the camera. "They watched us from behind the fence and all I remember is one guy looking straight at me as I came down the stairs, and I heard him say, 'You guys are fucked'".