Haunted With Old Photos

Cab ride down from Wang Jing to the Hilton.  It’s cold out.  Couldn’t find a Di Di anywhere.  Instead ordered a fancy-schmancy Benz.  Lady played classical music.  I thought I was back on the rail-trail beside the Gunks.  When I was back in New Paltz it snowed in Beijing.  Just a dusting.  When I landed, a blizzard unloaded back home.  Wife driving my daughter to Liberty Airport in a blizzard.  School cancelled for the little one.  The yard looks indescribably beautiful, blanketed in twenty-inches of snow.

A meeting with a client’s partner.  Why do they always go to the same, bad Hunan restaurant?  My poor client-guest is at their disposal and they don’t really understand how middling this Chinese food is.  It’s not my place to say so.  But afterwards, I do anyway.

I offer to do a dinner.  But it doesn’t seem to be of interest.  I’m tired.  They are too.  They are still full, from lunch.  I am not.  I try to find an “Old Beijing” restaurant near their hotel.  In my memory, from ten years ago there was a great place, just around the corner.  I can remember going there and having madouf and little cumin battered pork balls.  I call the Hilton from the car.  What’s near your restaurant?  There’s a Quanjude duck chain across the street but nothing else besides western fast food within a few hundred yards.  I try to describe the place I have in mind but it doesn’t lead to anywhere.  I drop off my clients and tell the Di Di driver to take me on to Chaoyang Park's west gate.  

I’m back over and my old friend’s place then for a bottle of wine.  I have been in this apartment many times over the last fifteen years.  I was here just a few weeks back.   But he doesn’t really live here anymore, after his divorce.  And the place is haunted with old photos and travel mementos of theirs that I remember considering when I was younger. 

We have a fine talk that night.  We laugh and eat well and conclude with a shot of peaty whisky.   We haven’t covered much ground on the topic we’ll be meeting on tomorrow.  But it doesn’t matter at all. 

Monday, 12/02/19