Form Literal Floods

This driver hasn’t shaved in a few days.  Neither have I.  He’s been efficiently cutting up the side lane of Jing Mi Lu and we’re paused at the penultimate light, before the entrance to the highway.  He seems tired.  This job must be cement.  I’ve suggested a few directional matters.  He’s taken them all in silently.  Another cab just cut in front of us, with a move that would have elicited a Ginsburg howl back home.  This guy was nonplussed. The two-hundred and thirty-eighth dick move I’ve endured this afternoon. All in a day’s work.  

The other day I came up upon this exit in the opposite direction and the entrance I’m now approaching was completely backed up.  They’d closed the entrance on account of a dignitary’s visit.  Our sun goes down earlier now.  It pops back up later and later.  This will all get worse.  I must check as it is almost certainly quite close to daylight savings in the USA.  Then we’ll be back to calculating eleven hour (or is it thirteen?) hours of difference with our time out here.

My older one is reading “Like Water for Chocolate” at school.  My wife had read the book when we visited Mexico a few years back.  Years ago it seemed like everyone was reading Laura Esquivel’s novel.   But for some reason, I had never dug in.  My daughter’s teacher was kind enough to lend her a second copy so I could read it when she did and so I set aside some time this weekend to read it. 

It was pleasant to suddenly be in Mexico for a while where the revolutionaries are civil and the mothers are tough and the food preparation is meticulous, evocative, the love repressed and then destructive.  Happy as well to spend time in a novel of magic realism where tears form literal floods and flatulents can be fatal.  I was drawn to Tita, but like most readers I spent most of the twelve months explored wishing she’d tell Pedro to go get lost.  That they died making love in the end wasn’t terribly sad to me.  But that the decent, loyal doctor was thwarted and disposed of, after years of waiting, in favor of the opportunistic Pedro, this was melancholy and that this doctor’s name was “John” elevated things to proper tragedy.  

  

More than once though, I found myself wishing for the magic realism that had left me gobsmacked.  It’s been years since I’ve read Gabrielle Garcia Marquez or Isabelle Allende.  Rushdie’s "Midnight’s Children" had that quality, as did Mo Yan’s “Republic of Wine.”  Beijing traffic reports are ripe for magical disruption.