Sport Dirty Snow

Upbeat cabby. The temperature must be hovering around thirty-one and half degrees.  Wet snow is falling.  But it isn’t collecting on the soggy ground.  Some of the car tops still have a bit of snow up top, and sidewalks sport dirty snow on the side.  Brown, city snow, puddles around clogged drains and Beijing looks good, because it isn’t dusty and it won’t be for a while. 

I’m passing a new complex on my right.  When did that go up?  I’ve never seen these towers before.  Surely they must have been built.  I ride this road every week.   More new buildings a few blocks later.  A guard in a guard’s blue trench coat is there pacing idly outside the empty vestibule. What on earth is that?  Who built it and for what purpose?  It will be old so quickly. 

Heading south and Shanghai should be warmer.  Savannah Georgia must be warmer than Baltimore.  At least my hotel will have heat.  Much of Shanghai, still haven’t had their flips switched yet.  Saturday morning travel.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Now I wish I was still at home, with cuddling and pyjamas and getting someone more cereal.

Poplar trees with their puff spores ruin the spring in Beijing.  But they keep up the green till the bitter end in the fall.  Willows and gingkos and just about everything else beside the pine trees have begun to shut down their leaf-sustenance programs.  Two inches of wet snow is tough to ignore.  But the poplar leaves haven’t turned.  I’m drafting on their optimism, their denial. 

My cabby already has his next ride set up.  I wonder if these guys are more utilized and make better money these days, as a result of apps like Kuaidi.  I have no idea and will unlikely learn much soon.  I’m much less inclined to kick up a conversation in a cab these days.  I have my routine.  I type.  I talk on the phone.  They have their hands free applications. 

The final coffee before the flight now.  No aisle seats and no windows.  One can only hope they are smaller than me.   Sitting at Costa Coffee listening to this remarkable Joe Gordon album, basically the only major release of his I can find, called “Lookin’ Good.” It’s absolutely lovely.  There is a young girl, she must be four, with pigtails in front of me.  She is dancing some routine she must have learned at school.  My girls learned similar routines.  But she is moving in perfect time to the rhythm section in my ears.  How different it will be to consider the life cycle once again, one day, as a grandparent.  So much accretion to love through, then, now.