I brought along a writing notebook and early on a Saturday went to the park. Walking, I stopped downtown to buy a cup of coffee, which I carried to my favorite spot behind home plate in the empty stands of our baseball stadium. Our park has swings and slides and monkey bars and sand and also a small electric train that toddlers can ride. It has picnic tables and trees and places to buy sno-cones and ice cream and hot dogs. Middle of its large circular lawn white daisies surround a tall flagpole. It is very much like the city parks all about this country.

Our town was having its annual arts and crafts fair that weekend, an event called Victorian Days in the Park. Since it was early the booths were still being set up, the barbecues of the vendors selling hamburgers and hot dogs and chicken and sausages were just being lit, and, far out in the outfield of the baseball stadium, under redwood trees along the homerun fence, men dressed in Civil War uniforms sat on the still dew-covered grass between white tents in which they had slept the night before, drinking coffee from large tin cups and polishing their rifles. Their wives and girlfriends busied themselves setting up demonstrations - here a sutler's, there a blacksmith's, and beyond a photographer's: the booths of the various tradesmen found about a Civil War camp. The men in their authentic uniforms and cleaning their very real guns later that day re-enacted a battle that could be heard two miles away.

Bustling about the park were many women dressed in hooped skirts and flowery bonnets of the style worn in the latter decades of last century. As I sat alone in the baseball stadium, itself empty except for the Civil War actors faraway in the outfield, I heard the deep, air-cracking whop-whop-whop of a military helicopter. As I looked about - it felt as if it were right on top of me - over the trees suddenly came a phalanx of cannons and rocket barrels and missile tubes all aimed at my nose: an attack helicopter was descending fast, low, and coming right at me. I thought I had peed my pants until I remembered that peeing in your pants actually feels pretty good, and so I knew immediately that the excruciatingly hot sensation was either spilled coffee or a laser from the wicked machine burning off my dick.

The aircraft - a USMC Super Cobra - turned, and then as it was landing where the grass starts behind second base, the stadium became a maelstrom of dirt and twigs and grass and redwood tree needles. Finally settled and its turbines shut down, I peeled my hands from my eyes and face, from my hair pulled needles blown from the trees over three hundred feet away, and watched among the flattened tents gray and blue and mustard-colored soldiers looking for their scattered hats as their faceless partners peeled hoops and hems out of their twisted bonnets, the rotor wash having nearly denuded a dozen women as it flattened the encampments and spirits of both Union and Confederate armies. I imagined just one of the damn things, its pilots snapping bubble gum, dipping low here and there into The Wilderness or mowing down Gettysburg's hallowed field and concluded regardless of cause that such a machine could never offer proud heritage.

Next to me, her appearance as sudden and mysterious as the aircraft's, stood a woman about thirty. She had shoulder length black hair, streaked at the side with a dull auburn color. She wore sandals, jeans, and a white shirt.

"Are you going to be first to sign up for a ride?" I said. She laughed and very soon was seated and holding my writing notebook and pen and showing me how her name is written in Chinese. Gingya was her name back home, "but here in America people call me Julia," she said. She was thirty-four and until just months before had lived in Beijing. Her mother was a school teacher; her father an officer in the Communist Party. She had a degree in English from a Chinese University. She worked for the phone company. Julia continued to demonstrate how different words and phrases look in Chinese.

We talked for an hour, during which time the infield became a museum of modern materiel: at first base was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle; at second a jeep bristling with weapons; at third a monstrous battle tank; and, at the base of the pitcher's mound, toward home plate, like a low slung and tubed pitching machine on its tripod, rested a grenade launcher over which knelt a Marine hardly nineteen showing a boy hardly seven how to set and release the firing mechanism.

"There are things I don't understand about your country," said Julia.

"Same here," I said.

"Tell me," she said. "Why do you call it Victorian Days?"

"I don't know," I said.

Just as I cannot understand the characters she left in my notebook I still cannot answer her question and I was born here.

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