A Good Fit

I like to bring together multiple sources, thoughts, and experiences for poems. A Good Fit came from three different places.

The first was an experience in my twenties when, between jobs, I interviewed for an emergency replacement teaching position. The interviewer dismissed me as unserious because I showed up in corduroys and a sports coat, instead of dress pants and a tie – it was a more formal time. He was correct that I didn’t really want the job.

Then, a few years later, I was visiting Hong Kong and my hosts insisted that I had to get a custom-made suit from their “favorite” tailor. This led to me being intimately poked, prodded, and measured by a coterie of very discreet tailors in the Yau Tsim Mong District of Kowloon. I felt entirely out of place, but the suit was a wonder of creation.

Lastly, decades later, during an intense heat spell in Los Angeles, I had started to hike the Rocky Peak trail in the early morning hours. One dawn, I found myself at the top of a wide sloping meadow, just as the sun hit the chaparral. The heat was intense, even that early, and as it evaporated the dew on the plants it created a cool updraft, filled with desert scents. I kept returning, trying to recreate the moment, but always failed…OK, I tried two more times; there is a limit to how often I’ll get on a trail before dawn.

But somehow, these three events jumbled in my mind. I imagined myself getting properly outfitted for a job interview I wasn’t sure I even wanted. I remembered being a young man, making the transition to adulthood, and feeling like I was faking it in formal clothes and proper jobs.

In the stage play, the director Sonny Lira made what I thought was an insane choice when he cast a young woman for the lead role in this poem. It turned out to be inspired. Jeanette Srinivasan knocked it out of the park, and the ensemble did an incredible job as the nattering tailors.