Venue of Celestial Possibility

Back in the atrium of the Palace Hotel.  I walk down the side and try to ignore the same musician who was hear yesterday, playing an electric guitar all by himself in this high-Victorian temple.  I like electric guitar as much as any man but damn if it didn’t seem like someone had invited a guy playing for tips out on the corner into this hallowed space.  How lovely it might have been to hear a big band fill out this space.  Surely, the original architects would have howled in disapproval were they to have heard Billy Eckstine play here in the forties just as much as any solo guitarist.   

I walk in and up the side of the space to the left until I come up to a red roped off area.  Staring up and around at the ceiling, considering the pale, winter, afternoon light only just making it through the stained glass above, the patterns simple and somber,  I realized then why I was so taken with this venue of celestial possibility, as it suddenly feels like a cathedral.  I’m considering it now in this way.  And uncontrollably, my mind moves to the Victorian San Franciscans and imagine them with their brash new money moustaches and the truisms that guided their days in their golden outpost. 

Soon I was in the Uber going over to Oakland again.  It’s 5:00PM here in California and Beijing is waking up for its Saturday morning.  One person and then another reach out on Wechat.  Someone calls, and drops and I call him back and soon we are reviewing a week’s worth of information back and forth in Chinese on the phone.  I hadn’t looked closely when I got in the cab,  as he helped me with my luggage but when I’d finished my fifteen minute chat in Chinese he immediately laughed loudly and asked about my Beijing pronunciation of things.

This young man was from Nanjing, it turns out.  He’d been in San Francisco long enough to master “hey man, what’s-up?” English usage. I asked if he was intending to head back home to Jiangsu.  He wasn’t.  It was interesting to have spoken and then debriefed his impressions of the U.S. and he home the left behind, in his uber-driver-English, contextual slang.  Discussions in English about Chinese themes, then, certainly different.

Coming up to where my friend's home is located, I learned that my mother and step-father were staring down an evening without heat, back in the Hudson Valley.  I couldn’t reach them on either of her numbers.  My sister said she’s spoken with them that calmed me down.  It wasn’t snow, I was told, nor was it ice or rain but wind’s what did it to them there.  Trees blown out by their roots.  All sounds rather extreme.

Friday, 03/02/18