Running Chlorophyll, Alight

Back down on Xindong Lu.  My daughter and I were here a lot two years back.  Purposefully, the memory is lodged with Dostoyevsky, as we considered Raskolnikov's desperation, in cabs on Xindong Lu.  Presently, we’re on the more glittering side of the same imperial city, with the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys.  Tolstoy is so effortlessly inviting.  Of course I’m invited to a Russian Ball in 1809.  Why shouldn’t I be?  I am intimate within the bone marrow of Natasha and Prince Andrey and indeed, they’ve invited me. 

It borders on inappropriate to be so convincingly woven into the consciousness of this strange sixteen-year-old girl from another century.  Not because we have learned anything salacious, but rather because we now care about her soul, in a way that should properly take years to matter.  One imagines every author who followed wanting to be able to write with such immediacy.

Waiting now.  On the couch.  In the waiting room.  Postcards are off to my right on someone else’s wall.  Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago.  Up top there is one for South Carolina.  I consider all these places, as the cards intended.

This morning I went to have brunch with old friends at The Orchard on Shunbai Road not far from where I live. I parked the car and was struck, immediately by all the fall colors.  Aching yellow leaves were scattered across the parking lot and the trees that must have been green only last week were now a conflagration, of running chlorophyll, alight, and then brown and then dust.

I had the cod.  I’m not sure why.  Sometimes that word looks better than it tastes. My old friends and I talked and talked.  They were moving back to Beijing from New York, just as we were thinking of the journey in the opposite direction.  Off in the main lobby there was a wedding celebration.  I considered my own wedding, which also took place in a restaurant.  The autumn leaves continue to scream at me from outside, the bridesmaids cut through the yard, walking along the piles of yellow leaves and I feel anxious for a moment that I hadn’t had my wedding here. 

Saturday, 10/28/17