Down On to My Cheek

I’ve dozen new books.   Had them delivered to my friend in Oakland.  He was kind enough bring them over.  They’re all piled up on my night table.  It’s hard to know just what you’re going to get sometimes on Amazon.  One book that I thought would be a rich history is an amateurish photo remembrance.  Another art history book by the recently deceased Wen C., Fong of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is large and something I am suddenly proud to own. 

I read the introduction of one by William Giraldi.  The author discusses why he hates most writing.  I imagine him hating mine.  I consider another first chapter of something written just before France fell to the Nazis by Julian Gracq.  He moves along a mountainside in a train and I'm dazzled by each successive sentence.  I’m up and I can’t sleep.  But the reading isn’t yet making me tired, until I feel the book fall down onto my cheek once and then again.  I tell myself: "That must have been sleep."

I can relax.  My plane leaves at noon.  I’d been planning for 10:55AM.  How many books can my luggage take before they reject it.  Fifty-pounds.  Is this fifty pounds yet?  It’s heavy.  I try to charge up my devices and plan-out emails I need to write so I can access them easily on the plane.  The charging is going too slow.  Neither my lap top nor my phone is fully charged by the time I throw on my coat and unplug them both.   

Press send on a driver immediately after checking out at the front desk.  He’ll be arriving in one minute.  Glad now I didn’t order it up in the room.  The grey car with the telltale license plate pulls up immediately and offers to help me with my not quite fifty-pound bag.  He is not playing music which uncharacteristically pleasant for Ubers here in the homeland.  Then I hear his GPS speak to him in mandarin and realize he is Chinese. I hadn't really considered more than the back of his head before that.  Eventually I ask him where he’s from and he replies with a thick Cantonese accent that he is from Guangzhou.  He likes San Francisco.  He thinks if you work hard you get rewarded.  I am intrigued by his accent and Cantonese mannerisms  like rising to extend the "ah" sound out for a long, flat pull.  

Saturday, 11/03/18