my magic earrings

Many years ago, when my about to turn 33-year-old daughter was about five years old, I bought a pair of Swarovsky crystal earrings, a pair of clear, small 'teardrops'. The crystal has a coating that makes the glass shimmer, I think.  I paid $20 for them, around 1987.

I don't remember wearing them much until I moved to California in 2006. Then I got a couple strands of crystal glass bead necklaces, not Swarovsky, but shiny, bright and clear.

The earrings and necklace go with everything.

Back when I still lived in Mountain View, CA, like in 2007, I agreed to meet a real estate agent with my friend Kay, from Thailand. Kay is not her Thai name; she used Kay with Americans because, she insisted, her real name was too hard for us. Kay was househunting, with a one million dollar budget. Also, she started out adamant that she had to have a brand new, never-lived-in house.

There weren't many new houses in Silicon Valley, and very few in Mountain View.

Kay had worked through a couple real estate agents. The first agent told her the best place to buy was in Los Altos, to buy something and do a major rehab. Kay had a fear of buying a house where someone had died. After taking up many days of that first realtor's time, who had even helped her pre-qualify for a small mortgage so Kay's daughter, who would be the name on the title to the house, would have an income tax deduction. Kay and her ex own a string of lumberyards in Thailand and was rich. She could have paid cash. She wanted to give her daughter a house in USA and a mortgage for the tax benefit.

Kay had her first child, her daughter, in America in the late sixties. Kay said during the Vietname war, many in Thailand feared 'the communists' would take over Thailand. She said many of her friends came to America to have babies, so the baby was an American and then that child could eventually sponsor the whole family. Kay sent her kids to American boarding schools. Her daughter graduated from Brown. A son graduated from Stanford. And the other son was getting a PhD in Economics from the London School of economics when Kay asked me to go househunting with her.

She was surprised that I was eager to go with her.  I don't own a car. I still have seen relatively little of California. I enjoyed going and looking at houses in Palo Alto, which was where the few brand new houses usually were.