The Cherubic Cumulous Positivity

A clear night and now the sun is coming over the hill which we live near the bottom of.  Uncharacteristically minor sounding solo above the cherubic, cumulous, positivity of the Congolese rhumba.  Some exceptional time changes, horn fills on this gorgeous song by Les Grands Maquisards “Nsonia de Diana.”  It was so arresting and obscure that I thought to add it to a Youtube playlist I have as a general repository.  I couldn’t find the edit function the way I formerly could.  I watched two or three how-to videos, read through unpleasant threads of complaint and . . . gave up.  I’ll do it later.  The sun’s coming up.

Some little bird is out there signing triplets.  peeya peeya peeya pi pi pi.   I tried to capture the sound with my handy, dandy bird call identifier app and it tells me I’m listening to a starling or perhaps a nuthatch.  In the time it’s taken to type that, he’s gone. 

A fresh pot of coffee from a cup with a stupid slogan on it.  This isn’t a cup anyone I know bought.  It’s a remnant I suspect from an earlier tenant.  A new bird’s on the scene.  She sputters off two upward calls and then a spray of eight staccato tweet-thrusts.  I’m gonna head out there and dump some seeds on the lawn.  As I often do, I imagine them looking down up on me incredulous: “Here he comes again.   I know.   He’s just throwing seed around.  He’s an idiot but he’s our idiot.  peeya peeya peeya pi pi pi."

My younger daughter’s vacation just got extended by a week.  The older one was told Spring Break would extend till mid-April.  And just like that, we’ll all be a foursome again for an extended period of time.  We will need to buy puzzles and monopoly sets and a deck of cards and more, I’m sure, as we ain’t going nowhere. Stranger perhaps than for many people watching this virus unfold as a bicultural U.S. – China family. As the terror over there was very personal and commanded all of our attention where it was perhaps only of peripheral interest to most Americans and we could watch as it flared and receded in one place and built with uncertainty here now as well.   The unknown, the unpredictable is America’s broth just now, where Chinese have been told all is now well under control.  The editorial in Today’s New York Times by Ian Johnson captures this sentiment nicely and stares coldly at America’s unwillingness to see learnings from how China handled matters.

Saturday, 03/14/20