More Primal Concerns

It’s cold.  We’ve finally been hit with the winter weather I remember Beijing for.   It is minus thirteen degrees Celsius.  Even after all these years I still have only the vaguest idea what that really means.  If I look on line I find that this is eight degrees Fahrenheit.  That’s cold.  But not as cold as some crazy ski days, or snow shovelling days or walking home from school days that I remember from the old days, in the old country. 

And so, the car barely starts in the morning.  It takes twice as long for the heat to have impact.  We dash any distance outside from car door to front door, from car door to school door.  The plight of the guards in our compound pricks new wells of sympathy as we drive by.  Not only must they be board out of their mind.  Now they are surely freezing.  I met the volleyball coach at my little one’s volleyball tournament today.  He’d biked over from a place I knew, that isn’t far away.  On a fall day it would be a leisurely ride.  He looked like he deeply regretted having chosen to peddle it. 

Mercifully, I suppose, the sky is bright blue.  If it was arctic cold and polluted this might be devastating.  As it is, the mood is bright, but practical.  Layer up and keep it quick out there.  It’s supposed to hold this way for the next week at least.

I’m mid way through Jared Diamond’s latest work, “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies.”  I should have checked the book title last night.  I was trying to explain the book to my wife and used the word “primitive” societies, a pejorative, which she didn’t recognize.  I talked around the word, trying to explain it.  The only other word I could locate as I scurried about was the far worse pejorative:  “savage.” 

I’d greatly enjoyed “Guns Germs and Steel” when I’d read it some twenty years ago.  This latest effort seems both closer to his core work as an anthropologist and perhaps a bit more plodding and sparse with its explanatory insights.  Still, it is thought provoking and good to spend time with the !Kung (what explains the exclamation mark out front?) the Dani and the Piraha rather than the latest mud slinging between Trump and Cruz.

Somewhat rudely perhaps, I broke it out whenever my daughter’s squad wasn’t playing during the tournament.  Volleyball’s captivating when my kid is playing, but otherwise I remained engaged only enough to be sure the foul balls don’t strike my head.  Mr. Diamond was aboard a canoe that had sunk off an island in Papua New Guinea and he was drifting out to sea, hanging to the side of the capsized hull.   He was worrying about his passport and worrying about his money and then overwhelmed by more primal concerns about his well-being.  The whistle blew.  My daughter took the field again.  Reluctantly I placed the book mark inside and reengaged with the final match.            

They won.