A Solid Red Bar

I should know better.  Monday morning traffic.  Into the city.  I called a cab at 6:50AM.  But it was already too late.  You wanna believe what you wanna believe and I had been considering that the ride would be an hour as it normally is.  Maybe I’d get lucky and arrive in fifty minutes.  Now, sitting here on the Jing Cheng road, after the toll booth we are confronted with a solid red bar on the driver’s GPS and mine, for the next few miles.  I had pushed a person to meet at 8:00AM, instead of 8:30AM.  Now I’ll be lucky to get there by 8:30AM.  Wretched traffic.  Just wretched.  What a dope. 

It isn’t exactly Singapore but the road-side flora along the Beijing, Chengde expressway has come a long way.  And on a day like this, just about every tree planted to bloom is now in- bloom.  The sky is clear there’s a cool breeze.  If you live in the northern hemisphere and you have proper seasonal weather, could there be anything better than April? 

Guy wanted to take a short cut.  It’s alright with me.  Now we’re heading west.  Stuck at another light.  I’m considering all these cars and wondering if people saw them from another time might they consider them to be sentient beings and not just vehicles that much smaller people inside were manning?  There are a bed of crocuses outside. They help.  Beijing tries.  I can remember seeing crocuses as a child in Harrison, New York, and being mystified when everything popped up out of the earth in the spring.  Something was happening.

His short cut seems to have paid off.  We made better time cutting across town than we ever would have if we stuck to the main road in and attempted this on the third ring road.  We’re turning left now, southward.  This will be the last.  It looks green on his GPS but this stretch may prove nettlesome.  I’m thinking of my father who said he stops reading these Dustybrine blogs whenever I begin to talk about traffic.  Which I can understand must invariably be boring.  Apologies tender reader.  

Monday 4/15/19