Last night, my husband and I rewatched an old movie called Once Upon a Time in America. I woke up early in the morning and its music kept echoing in my head. When the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival back then, it drew a 15-minute long applause from the audience. However, the American filmmakers thought it was too slow and cut it down to nearly an hour in length. Leone is the director I admire most, and his work has become even more precious with the passage of time. No one today has the luxury of expressing such a haunting nightmare, fantasy, memory and longing that spans half a century. I've seen countless films, but never have I been so unprepared for such stunning images that I can't move: a storeroom full of flour sacks, a lazy tune drifting from a jukebox, a young girl dancing apparitionally, a beam of sunlight coming through a skylight and flour dancing in the air ...... This is where it all The beginning, yet it is already an elegy. Time slows down, like flowing gold, and then freezes for eternity. Perhaps this play is the archetype of memory, which evokes infinite nostalgia and nostalgia in me.
These days, time loses its unit, not what time or minute, but where the sun shines. Golden time shines through the windows, turning into one square after another, walking slowly on the walls, on the floor, on the furniture, until it turns white and then disappears.
I don't bother to think about what day of the week it is, it's all the same anyway. The only days are the days when the groceries are delivered, and the days when they are not; the days when there is sunshine, and the days when there is no sunshine.
These days are cloudy and time becomes a monotony of two blocks - day and night. It occurred to me that it was Sunday and the idea of celebrating was on my mind, and why not? We decided to go to a long-overdue Taiwanese bakery.
Before we left the house, I went to the mirror to brush my hair and noticed that a small tuft of white hair had grown above my forehead overnight, similar to a parrot. The years always seem to come and go like this, sometimes it forgets you and you forget about it, even to the point of forgetting about it. Then one day it seems to suddenly remember that it has not visited this person for a long time. You will be surprised that day to find that it has arrived without you knowing, and you were too careless to forget to duck out of the way.
I pressed a hat onto my head and put on a mask and sunglasses and was on my way, a pretty frugal outfit during the epidemic. Walking into the fragrant shop, I took a deep breath through my mask. If happiness has a smell, then the bakery should come pretty close. Everything here made me salivate and after a battle of the minds, I finally picked out the pineapple and taro bread, Portuguese egg tart, pineapple pastry and date rolls. The owner of this shop is a patient of my husband's, who sometimes brings freshly baked pineapple buns to his hospital appointments.
Husband has been a doctor in this modest city for over thirty years and has patients everywhere he goes. Sometimes we would go to a restaurant and only realise when we settled the bill that it had already been paid for. At the end of the day, he would often bring home little gifts from his patients as a token of their appreciation, sometimes a box of homemade biscuits, sometimes a bottle of wine, sometimes a few oranges growing on his own tree or a wild duck he had hunted. Before Christmas, his office would be filled with colourful cards, boxes of sweets and Christmas flowers. These gifts were always accompanied by cards written all over the place. I was always particularly proud of him when I read those words of gratitude for the many lives he had saved.
In fact, he and I met through one of his patients, who was on duty one Friday night 29 years ago, when a patient with a severe myocardial infarction was brought into the emergency room. The patient survived after the husband tried to resuscitate him all night. This patient in turn happened to be the boss of a good friend of mine. He came back to the office and talked endlessly about how good that doctor was, raving about it. My friend called me and said, "The boss's doctor is very handsome, you should meet him. I asked, "Have you met him? She said, "Oh, not yet. I asked again, "Have you seen his picture? She said, "Neither have I. I couldn't help but scold her, "Then how do you know he's handsome? She said, "When the boss woke up, he thought there was an angel with a halo standing in front of him. Her words made me laugh out loud. I hung up the phone and asked myself, "How can people know what they want? We only live once, there is neither a previous life to make comparisons nor a next life to make perfect, everything is a walk in the park. I didn't know what I wanted, I just felt some kind of mysterious call to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco to meet this strange man and immediately travel in my mind to where we would be together decades later. My husband once joked to someone that I was the thickest gift he had ever received.
When we got home from the bakery, we made tea, put the TV on mute and occasionally watched and had a chat. There was no place we had to go, no thing we had to do. It was an incredibly dark time, and we were the lucky individuals in it. Before the epidemic, my husband rarely had such leisure time; he worked 12 hours a day and even his speech became faster and faster. I was reminded of a book I read many years ago by Milan Kundera called Slow, about the disappearance of the sensual world in this incredible speed of today. Life has lost so much waiting and everything has become instant. In fact, it is only waiting that prolongs the good things, and longing is sometimes more intoxicating than satisfaction.
The television news said that in the United States, over twenty million people had lost their jobs and over thirty thousand had lost their lives in those four weeks. I moved my eyes out the window as the sky began to turn blue and the sun emerged. I thought, how do you balance happiness with disaster? A few grains of wheat on one side and endless misery on the other. And yet, they are balanced, just as the universe is balanced. Those few grains of wheat contain every sunrise, every sunset, every beauty that nourishes you, every longing that deserves you. Yet, today you are on one side of the scale, tomorrow you may be on the other side of it, without much reason. We only have to cherish. Decades later, at the end of my life, perhaps my thoughts will creep back to last night's basement, where he and I snuggled up in front of the screen and saw once again what seemed like a dream and a memory: a storeroom full of flour sacks, a lazy tune floating out of the jukebox, a young girl dancing ghostly, a beam of sunlight shining through the skylight, flour dancing in the air too... ...