Saturn Is The Biggest Planet On Earth

“What do you need to sit fully into your seat?” the yoga teacher asks us in an earnest, probing voice. “To sit fully into your pose, into yourself, into your life?” she continues, as we sit on our mats and try to figure out what she’s talking about. Then she instructs us to bow and “dedicate the energy of your practice” to someone. I wonder: is dedicating my practice to someone the same thing as praying for them? I wiggle my butt on the little, round meditation pillow, trying to sit fully into it, and decide to dedicate my practice to my younger brother, who has just been “transitioned” out of his job.

Dedicate, transition: every little corner of our culture has its own dialect, its own way of using words. English is a hard enough language as it is, with so many exceptions to so many rules. It makes me want to apologize to the immigrants trying to learn it, and also to my brother’s daughters, ages four and six. Though born and raised in California like me, they still get tripped up by the odd conjugations and pronunciations of their native tongue: Why, for instance, we say we caught something instead of we catched it. And why we pronounce Ford one way and word another. “I’m sorry,” I want to say to my nieces, to the children I tutor in the San Francisco schools, to the Mexicans I meet in the dressing room at Mervyns, to all students of English, both native and foreign born. This language makes little sense. Even the sound of it is harsh, unlike Spanish, which jangles like oversized earrings.

“I got transitioned out of my job,” my brother tells me in a soft, sad voice. He’s speaking English, but I don’t understand what he means until he explains that “transitioned” is a fancy way of saying “fired.” His name, Isaac, means “he who laughs,” and he usually lives up to it. His is a sweet giggle that can be endearing coming from a big, sports-loving, meat-eating guy like him. He also cries more than any other man I have ever met. And that, too, in a man his size, is endearing, and also heartbreaking, especially since I’m his older sister and our “family of origin,” as the social workers call it, was poor and divorced, we children evicted too early from our one and only childhood. I want to give my brother a severance check and a gold watch — everything that his company, a local television station, did not give him. While I’m at it, I want to give him parents who attended his high-school football games, a car for his sixteenth birthday, and introductions to a couple of sports-media personalities who could, with a phone call, set him up with fifty thousand dollars a year and video equipment to produce his own local sports program.

My brother’s six-year-old daughter is named Mille — pronounced “Millie.” Her first-grade teacher has taught her about silent e’s, but her name, she and I realize one day while she’s practicing her reading at the kitchen table, has the opposite of a silent e. What would that be? A noisy e? A loud-and-proud e? Mille’s sister, two years younger and always wanting to keep up, tells me she can write her name as well. She just throws down those letters — and she’s got a lot of them in Tallulah — onto the paper. She doesn’t care what order they’re in: that’s her name. She is at the age when she does not understand the difference between fact and opinion, between knowing something to be true and wanting it to be so. Like certain politicians and talk-show hosts, she operates under a paradigm of conviction: if she feels strongly enough about something, it must be right.

“Saturn is the biggest planet on Earth,” she told me the other day, as if daring me to contradict her.

“I don’t know about that,” I said, taking her bait.

“Yes, it is,” she said, not a trace of doubt in her voice, as if she were saying, I like strawberry yogurt best.

I appreciate her boldness, and I respond with a giggle that sounds like her father’s, he who laughs. This kind of conviction can be endearing in a four-year-old, though not so endearing in a talk-show host, nor in the president of a country — people who hold the fate of so many lives in that slender gap between their confidence and their ignorance.

THE FIRST THING I need in order to sit fully into my seat is a better chair. Everything I own I’ve scrounged, so none of it necessarily fits the purpose to which I’ve put it. I grew up poor, and I still don’t know which verb tense — past or present — to use between the subject I and the adjective poor. No matter how much money I’m pulling in, it just doesn’t seem right to buy something brand-new and designed for only one function: like, say, a chair to use at a computer.

You don’t have to be poor to cultivate this habit of buying secondhand or doubling and tripling up on the uses of things; you could also be an environmentalist. But those of us who reduce, reuse, and recycle out of necessity can sometimes have trouble spending money on something costly that we really need, even if we could maybe afford it. We live in fear of becoming poor in the future, like we were in the past, and maybe even are in the present. But that doesn’t keep us from wanting: Wanting that office chair covered in breathable blue, red, or black nylon with the adjustable seat and padded back. Wanting this thing so badly because we believe that if we get it, it will help us achieve everything we’ve ever dreamed of doing or having or being.

Truth be told, though, what I really want is that cool Eames-style task chair with the ergonomic design that relieves neck, back, and shoulder pain; the one that comes in muted tones of burnt orange and pale puke green and has levers for shifting back and forth, up and down, and around and around. Then I’d be sitting pretty. Then I’d be sitting fully into my seat. Then I’d be wheeling around my desk, watching my fingers buzz along the keyboard; seeing the words and sentences blossom onto the electronic screen; letting the answering machine take my calls from nine to one every day, because those are my creative hours; and returning those calls only after I did my yoga and had my lunch of crab and avocados (if they were in season) and organic baby spinach dressed in a locally grown Meyer-lemon vinaigrette.

Not everyone who grows up poor is infected by such an audacious imagination. My older brother, for instance, succumbed to cynicism instead of escapism. But when I was a girl, I used to dream of a voice on a loudspeaker picking me out of the crowd on our busy Mission District street corner in San Francisco, and a helicopter sending down a rope ladder and then transporting me to a kind of Paris salon in the clouds, where I really belonged, where everything would finally be perfect. My life would be (conditional tense, describing the future of my past) my art: writing, filmmaking, whatever. My younger brother’s conditional life would be sports: first playing them, then reporting them on television, plus a little acting in movies and TV commercials on the side. It would be the O.J. Simpson trajectory. This was before O.J. became a joke about a glove and a white Bronco, back when he was a star athlete who came from an even worse neighborhood in San Francisco than we did.

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