Silicon Valley Before Zuckerberg

Kenneth Tanemura

I’ve never seen my father cry. Now, at 80, in the realtor’s office

that will relinquish his home of 46 years—water in his eyes,

while California his home state since 1935

has seen too little of it—rain, falling.

“We have a lotta good memories,” he says of the space

the realtor calls its original form, hardwood fading,

busted oven that baked so many turkeys, steaks on Labor Day,

mom’s salmon, grandma’s apple pies before she passed.

Remember great grandma dined with us Thanksgiving 1975

while uncles played mahjongg, sang karaoke.

Working-class cul-de-sac till Facebook Headquarters

sprouted Frank Gehry designs 3 miles down the road.

The buyer, a Facebook lawyer will install a kitchen

out of Home & Garden TV—marble counter tops,

wine chillers, kitchen island.

In the house where dad and I saw “The Catch,” Montana

to Clark, NFC Championship Game winter of 1982,

impossible game winner embalmed in 49ers history.

Magic & Bird, Jordan & Kobe, Navratilova & McEnroe

flashed across the screen to the right of the fireplace.

These are the things I want escrow to erase:  teenage me

telling my sister I wanted to kill her, not thinking of the word

until my immigrant mother still learning the language

said think of what you’re saying.

Remember how Joey & I fenced with shovels like hillbilly kids.

“Fucking Jap,” he said. Dad stood in the driveway:

“Don’t let him call you that.” Joey’s blonde barefooted mother

scowled from across the street. One block over

where I waited for the bus in front of a home

for the intellectually disabled, schoolboys mocked, “retard, retard,”

birds migrating the wrong direction.

“Deadwood City,” they called our town until Steve Jobs,

one town over, returned to Apple, held the iPhone up.

Before Zuckerberg was born, rednecks

in the corner house had picnics on sidewalks,

buckets of KFC red and white on the curb.

Before they were pushed out by rising property values,

steered by semiconductors, beaten by software, the assault

encrypted, coded beyond their high school educations.

After the ink dries, dad says, “We made out like bandits,”

as if he didn’t deserve the price his house fetched.

The real bandits are buying up the block, tearing down walls

with sledgehammers. Then selling for over a million.

The real bandits are finishing their degrees at Stanford,

will turn the neighborhood into a country club.

Nouveau riche with golf clubs, Coach bags,

all accouterment & no soul.  A new brand of reckless

emptiness to replace the old. Still, in this kitchen,

mom filleted fresh caught salmon & tuna

from the bay fisherman friends gave us.

Even after the ink dries, dad oils the hedge trimmer

rusted in the shed, clips the overhanging branches,

twigs, for the new owner who’ll turn the yard

into a Japanese motif: azalea & fern.