They Were a Bad Lot

Drowsy at 8:00AM.  That’s about right . I’ve a Starbucks chicken roll down in the gut.  It was misty when I left home this morning.  There’s a difference (he thought hopefully) between a morning with pollution and one that is simply misty.  Sailing past someone village's grave mounds at three-hundred kilometers-per-hour  I suspect they were moved to make way for this rail road line.  It’s autumn but people must be growing things in one last effort before the winter comes.  There are cultivated shoots no more than two-feet high stretching out in rows beside this high-speed rail line. 

I looked at the map.  We’d just exited the provincial boundaries of Tianjin and entered Hebei Province.  Not a place known for multiple growing seasons.  They must know what they’re doing here.  The city up ahead is Caozhou.  I remember a Shandong relative suggesting that they were a bad lot, these people of Caozhou, which seemed ridiculous as they were only fifty miles west of where he lived, but just far enough over the border to be not-from-Shandong. 

A smile’s a good thing.  The young lady just passed me by and I glanced, not at her but at her cart full of fruit.  Perhaps it was clear from my glance that I was evaluating fruit.  I looked up at her young face.  Did I need any fruit she asked, above the Gene Ammons version of the eternally sad “Angel Eyes”, playing in my ears.  I smiled back and I told her that I didn’t need any fruit.  She smiles some more and I held my smile as she walked on, feeling both warm and stupid the way one does when one catches oneself smiling for a while after it is necessary.  

The misty morning still hasn’t burned off yet.  I suppose we’ll be all the way down in Jiangsu before it does.  I’m eating yogurt now in the hope that it will stimulate digestion and cause me to sleep.  I’m going to pick up my book:  “The Sword of Honor” and try to make some definitive progress in it.  I’ve been reading two books at once and though I enjoy this novel and have gotten far enough along in it, the Somerset Maugham has had pride of place in the bathroom and I’ve wound up reading more of Alex and his pre-Great War adventures in Paris than Guy in his mid-World War II adventures in Greece.

Saturday 10/21/17