Turn Around and Go Back

It’s six-o-five on a Wednesday morning and I’m biking over to the kids’ school to visit the gym.  I like this much more than driving the car over and spending the time on the stair master.  This way, I get there and all I do is weights and come home.  Each morning I step out the door and feel the warmth surround me as I leave my air-conditioned home.  I’m glad for the warmth.  I wouldn’t want it unfiltered, a few hours from now, when it gets hotter and hotter.

A present, I’m in shorts and a tee shirt and that’s just fine.  One morning, probably one morning next month, in September there will be a morning that is abruptly chilly.  Fall comes earlier, I believe, in Beijing, then it used to in New York.   Something blowing in off the Gobi Desert maybe, from up in Siberia spinning now, southward, pushing out the settled, summer air.  And when that morning comes I’ll turn around and go back in and throw a light jacket on and it won’t much matter.

Some other morning, perhaps in October, certainly by November it will uncomfortably cold and it will bite at my fingers.  I don’t mind having a coat on but I suspect I’ll need to go out and find some gloves somewhere.  Some morning, perhaps with or without gloves, I’ll throw in the towel and turn back in and get the car keys.  And that’s how it will be for the rest of the winter.

Today though, is just fine.  And the Harlem River Drive song “Idle Hands” comes on as I ride along beneath the thin willow branches that canopy the side of the road.  Listening to the logic of the song, how the Garden of Eden was a place of “freedom” and how others rose up with schemes to disguise injustice as “progress” I’m unwittingly reminded of Yuval Harari’s thesis in “Sapiens” that while the Agricultural Revolution may have advanced the species it was a step backward in life quality for individuals. 

A willow branch is up ahead.  I don’t dodge it and I let it brush my face.

Wednesday, 8/29/18