I Wonder If It Will Still Be There

Home again.  Waking up on a Saturday morning in my own house.  I’ve one call at eight.  It leads to another call at immediately thereafter.  By the time it’s done, it’s starting to feel like any other day of the week.  But my little one is sitting out in what we call the Queen of Sheba chair, as it sits below the Claude Lorrain painting, which depicts her majesty’s embarkation.  And I know she’s been there a while fiddling with her computer, growing hungry.

I propose we head over to the gym on our bikes.  Do you want to go to the gym first and then go get breakfast or the other way around?  Dumb question.  Breakfast it is then.  It really is a lovely day out, sunny, not too hot, not too cold.  Mrs. Shanen’s, there behind the makeover billboards on Tianbei Road, is our destination.  Every time I go I confess I wonder if it will still be there.  Everything around it has been destroyed.

Mrs. Shanen’s has a good western breakfast that you pencil into the menus they provide.  I don’t believe the smiling bespectacled proprietress who is always there serving things up is necessarily Mrs. Shanen herself, as the owner apparently hails from Brooklyn and this lady has explained that no, she not from Taiwan, as I suspected, but rather from Ningbo.

Bagels are the specialty, but I try to avoid a big starch-fest and stick to fruit and yoghurt.  The espresso is good.  My little one and I try to reckon with what the enormous painting to our side is all about.  A giant green comet appears to be snaking through space, bleeding out of a dozen forked puncture holes.  As we settle-up, I mention how glad I am to see that she’s still there.  She mentions that they have a long lease and so they’ll be staying, even though the entire village surrounding them has been flattened.  Another villa compound, she mentions, as if we need another such thing.  She’s right.  The ones that are here are not full and they are not well maintained.  Before we leave I head to the back bathroom and consider the devastation and see what I can capture of it with my iPhone.

Saturday, 06/03/17