This is a day. Huge puffy white clouds floating overhead, a
strong breeze whipping around the leaves.
I feel like I’m on the set of “Oklahoma.” Everything feels irresistibly fresh, as I
head on into the city on a Saturday. Fall can be wonderful in Beijing
Earlier in the day I took a bike ride over to my kids school
with my younger one. She had wanted me
to visit the school book fair. This was
too good to pass up: a chance to tick
the reading box and the exercise box in one jaunt, with my daughter. Biking over we rode into a strong wind and
almost stopped us.
The selection of books at the fair was OK. Apparently it had been on for a few days
now. I’m not sure that the prices were
any great remedy, but that’s all right.
We don’t have much of a selection for English language books here in
town. I saw two novels by Lao She
translated in English that I’d never heard of before. There was some Gabriel Garcia Marquez and
Isabel Allende that I thought about getting for my older one. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” seemed about
the rights size for her and I scooped it up. The younger one eventually landed
on a copy of Mary Poppins, which she’d seen the musical and the movie of,
before. I also nabbed a collection of
American short stories, edited by John Updike.
It seems like the perfect addition to the downstairs bathroom.
Riding home we kept to the right. I rode out nearly in the middle of the right
hand lane, to give my daughter room on the shoulder. I kept warning her about people opening
doors. “Be careful. Assume that one could fly open any
minute.” And this time the wind was
literally at-our-backs. It pushed us
faster and made it easy to coast. Just
the right wind to lift an umbrella up into and fly off.
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