Prompt: Go see a local author talk and write about it.

The Alameda Free Library, at the end of a spit of government buildings off the main drag of shops and restaurants in town, pretentiously emulated the classical era of Roman architecture the way most civic structures tend to do in the United States. With a concrete nod toward the two-thousand year old  styles of a long fallen mediteranean empire this pompous edifice seemed assured of it's own superiority as it presided over a small rectangular lawn and a handful of empty parking spots. All roads, it seemed to say, lead to the Alameda Free Library, but I'd gotten lost on the way over here and knew at least two that weren't hip to the plan. Near the door, I unwound my chain and noticed that the only other bike on the rack was stripped to the rivets. As I fiddled with the lock, I scanned the area for signs of anyone desperate enough to make off with my crappy gear, finding no suspects fitting that description. In fact, I didn't see anyone at all, which made me anxious. "If this," I thought to myself, "talk's been cancelled. I am totally, royally screwed."
Walking inside, however, I was relieved to find signs of life in the form of a librarian who pointed me to a cluster of chairs in the children's section where a couple of people were talking. I crossed the room and dumped my backpack near a seat in the last row within arm's reach of a plexiglass case enclosing a balsa-wood pipedream of the building in 2008 or whenever the funds became available to slingshot it into modernity. In front of me, a guy and his kid were talking to a woman in an irridescent green shirt and black pants. She had dark hair intermittently highlighted by silver hints of middle-age, a professional demeanor, and easy confidence. I assumed correctly that she was Pam Chun, the local author I'd come to see speak. It was exactly 19:00, but since there were only a handful of people in attendance, Pam was passing the time vainly attempting to coax dialog out of the self-concious nine-year old boy.
"You like science fiction?" she asked, both adults encouraging the petrified kid until the father was eventually forced to vantriloquize "yes".
"You know who writes really good science fiction is--" She named some authors I didn't know. "Or the [something] series. Have you read any of those?" Her glance darted to the father who shook his head.
"Aw, those are really good! I'll bet they have them here."
I was sure they did; they had a lot of books here. What they also had here in rampant abundance were brightly-colored posters and construction-paper artwork that nestled against the institutional earth-tones of the walls and the dust of general under-utilization in a reminder of mortality that had kept me out of libraries since I was old enough to get depressed. A thin, poorly concerted, yet nonetheless noble attempt to get today's attention-deficient youngsters fired up about the written language. Thinking of writing, I dug into my backpack and extracted my notebook and mechanical pencil, clicking the latter a couple times as I flipped to a blank page in a section of the book originally reserved for English, currently under annexation by Mandarin which had come to require more paper. I headed the page with the date and the subject and lit out in search of a drinking fountain.
When I returned, more people had shown up, the boy and his dad were gone, and I was the only one in the room with a Y chromosome and no memory of my fortieth birthday. I think, also, that many of the women present were Chun's fellow writers from the local area, making me an outsider on as many levels as I had fingers to count, but no matter; I was courteous and quiet and as interested as anyone else in what Pam had to say about her book-- which turned out to be a fair amount.
As it happens, Pam was born and raised on Oahu, HI, which sort of obligated her, I suppose, to pronouncing the island chain "huh-vah'ee" whenever it came up in conversation, no scant amount of times. She attended UC Berkeley, presumably sometime in the late seventies, and wrote her first book about her great grandfather, Lao Alurum, who transcended the stigma of Chinese emigrant to the pre-acquisition Hawaiian islands, becoming one of that kingdom's wealthiest and most influential citizens by the time of his death, assembling palacial digs, thriving business interests, and (I think she said) five or six wives. The book was called "Money Dragon", and her next novel, "When Strange Gods Call" was supposed to be a story that didn't quite make the cut. Her description of it, however, made it sounds more modern and fictional albeit no less interesting: an amalgamation of Cambodian art theft, the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s, traditional polynesian ghost stories, and a Romeo and Juliet-style story of love and bitter rivalry set on the tropical sands of her home state. I was actually hoping she'd read a little from the book, but apparently that wasn't part of the agenda.
Pam had a way of talking somehow redolent of community theater; not bombastic or overtly histrionic in any way, but deliberate, carefully worded, and well-rehearsed, like a den mother telling tales around a fire. I was personally impressed with how much she'd memorized. Operating with neither notes nor spontanaety, she walked casually to and fro as she lectured, gesturing with her hands, and casting her eyes from face to face. Notable was the fact, to me anyway, that she didn't glance in my direction until half an hour into the speech, but doing so eventually and finding nothing objectionable in my gaze (I'd gone to the trouble to shave and wear nice clothes as a show of respect), she shuffled me into rotation. When she eventually reached her conclusion, everyone was quiet, mezmorized by her patter and wanting more. Pam waited expectantly before raising her eyebrows by way of friendly prompt.
"Any questions?"
"Whoa," one lady said as the crowd stirred back to life, "Is that it?"
This put Pam off balance a little bit, but not enough to unseat her air of patient authority.
"Yeah, that's pretty much all I've got. Does anyone have any questions?"
The subject of ghost, or "chicken-skin" as she called them, stories came up and she entertained us all with some colorful anecdotes, tales full of menehunes, ancient burial grounds, and restless spirits. In it, she made referrence to a Chinese tradition called "chingming" (didn't catch the tones), a kind of east Asian "Day of the Dead" that I made a mental note to ask my Mandarin professor about. When that was over and a couple people in the audience had chimed in with their own brief contributions, various staff were indicated and applauded, courtesy refreshments were pointed out, and I made for my bike and the train.
As I punched over the railway tracks and the bridge on the way to the station, I wonderred what the weather was like in Oahu, and how I'd start in on this paper. I thought about chingming, when ghosts hung around on the beach in wait of mortal "replacements", and what type of governmental structure existed in Hawaii before the U.S. invaded at the turn of the century. I'd heard somewhere it was a matriarchy, actually, but I wasn't entirely sure that was true.