Back home after the
brisk walk from the gym. Funkadelic’s 1978
“One Nation Under a Groove” was welcome fuel in the tank mid-exertion. “Feet don’t fail me now” all too apt, trudging
to nowhere on the stair master. Now
that I’m there with the weather, instead of running outside, I do sit-ups on
the incline with the weight behind my head.
It’s much harder than on the flat floor at home. Two weeks ago I couldn’t do more than a few
with the weight but now I can do two sets.
Good to know the body can still reclaim ground, approaching the final
5/9th’s or so of all this.
I walk home along a path that abuts an artificial
creek. I was marveling at how long they
left it this year, before commencing with the obligatory draining. In the past I seem to recall they let all the
water out earlier in the year. Otherwise,
the artificial base would crack and who knows what other damage would result. Finally, now by November 19th,
they have done the needful. It was cold
this morning but still the biting, bitter Beijing cold has yet to land. It’s coming, gathering strength out in the
Mongolian steppe somewhere. And then it
will stay for at least three months or so.
But at least we’ll get a psychological lift after the darkest day of winter
has passed. That, however, is thirty-three
days off, which suggests we are now staring down the sixty-six darkest days of
the year, when 一日三秋[1]
And it's a choice to be here in a part of the world; the
world with winters. You can live in
Singapore, perspire every day and never have winters. You can live in Hong Kong and have faint suggestions
of winter when the temperature drops to fifty degrees Fahrenheit for a day or
two and people pull out their fancy winter parkas for just such an occasion. You can live in Shanghai where it snows once
or twice a year and where it was so warm the post-liberation government felt it
wasn’t obliged to provide heat. Or you
can get up here to the north and have a tough, proper winter. In ‘7DS’ I talk about wanting my kids to have
a winter. To understand what seasons
were. Not just a ski vacation somewhere,
but living through each successive seasonal change over and over.
Growing up in New York this is what felt normal. Some holidays are inherited from traditions
that grew out of a seasonal Europe like Christmas and Easter. Other national dates like Thanksgiving or the
Fourth of July first become defined and popularized in the seasonal U.S.
East. Halloween has to happen when
things start getting colder and the Thanksgiving story doesn’t make sense if it’s
tropical outside.
Winter, the thoroughgoing change of landscape and behavior, is
extraordinary when it first comes. The
first snow, the smell of fireplaces and the warmth of coming inside, the luck
of a snow-day announced on the morning radio.
And I think we can all agree that winter sucks mightily by February and
you’re absolutely done with the damn season by March. But then, you my friend have undeniably earned
your spring. There is that surreal week
in April where everything suddenly blooms.
It only means something if you’ve just lived through the barren
prequel. When I lived in Hong Kong or
San Francisco, something was always blooming; things were always green, which
is nice, in theory. But if you’re used
to the cycle, the unerring perky emoticon, is deeply unnerving. And oddly, I worried that my children
wouldn’t know what a spring, for example, really meant.
And, here we are at 39.9139° N., longitude, where seasons
most assuredly occur. And if the fall is the best season in Beijing, this one
coming up is the fierce bit to brace oneself for. These three months annually try men’s
souls. You have conference calls with
people in Perth or Santa Barbara and their out biking and surfing, completely
oblivious to fact that it is thirty-three days from the shortest day of the
year. And I say unto thee, tropical
transplants: seasons, the fundamental
metaphor of change, will remain a mystery for ye progeny. Will they lack a certain toughness, and
drive? Or just be happier and healthier?
Now I notice that our friends in Japan are trying to
introduce a mag-lev train into the North East corridor in the U.S., that would
run about 360 miles per hour and take you from New York to D.C. in under and
hour. Bring it! Japan wants to reclaim the mantle of
exporting blisteringly modern technology and is even willing to pay for a fair
piece of the effort to get it started.
How fat and happy the United States is to be on the receiving end of
such an offer? People compete to give
us things, because it will look good elsewhere if we’re seen to use them. There’s a seasonal offer for you. Grab that one while you can. We’re unlikely
to remain so attractive.
Abe, at least in the press accounts I read, continues to
grasp at reclaiming the Nipon-mojo. Go
Abe. We need a Japan that is confident,
stepping out over the brine, once again.
Japan has certainly been through a rather long winter period. What will the region do then with two giants
both in springtime bloom?
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