Blowing in the Background

I have to leave today.  Certainly, I don’t want to.  A folded pair of pants, two folded shirts are over on the stool, by the door.  It’s an eight-thirty flight, this evening so I won’t be late until I’m late.  Digging early Stanley Turrentine today.  Not quite sure how I got on to Stan the Man, but I think I heard him blowing in the back ground on the album of someone else I was listening to and took a look into all that he’d done.  My first love of his was his playing on Duke Pearson’s “The Right Touch” where his distinctive flutter flourish up the scale, couldn’t sound any better.m  These days, I’ve learned like the rest of the populace, how to check into Air China on line so I know I will have a window sear this evening. 

Landing in Fuzhou my first impression is to consider just how far I am from the hotel.  The fare DiDi spits back is so high I wonder if I’ve landed in the right city or if the hotel I’ve entered is in the wrong town.  Check the email receipt.  Consider the coastal location.  Consider the city and order myself this car into town  It’s wet outside and the weather is biting cold.  Not unlike the day I spent in Shanghai, the week before, the south wasn’t anywhere near as warm as I thought it might be.

I can’t see anything but shadows of buildings and bridges along this airport road into the city.  We go through a tunnel and the rain stops, the drizzle strikes the windshield again.  I ask my driver and no, they don’t speak MinBei Hua here.  Nor do they speak MinNan Hua, which I knew.  There is a third dialect:  MinDong Hua (and one can only imagine that somewhere out there there must be some people running around speaking MinXi Hua as well.)

The “Minjiang Westin Hotel does what it is supposed to do: I feel like I’ve reached some place I already know.  The ceilings are fifty feet high.  The painting up behind the pleasant, effeminate young man who checks me in is an areal view of the famed, local Tulous, or round houses, that are communal, circular constructions common in some villages near here.  And one thinks about Ike and Dicky in fifties during the Quemoy, Matsu Island crisis when America almost went to war with China over these two uninhabited islands not far from here.  Apparently U.S. satellites had a view down into the Tulou's and determined that they could only be missal silos.  Any excuse to find nails for our hammer.

Up in my room, I enter and walk fifteen feet in before the lights go out.  Carefully, I retrace my steps, muttering.  The card they have in the electric station is where it is supposed to be and I shove it in once and twice.  Returning I half expect the lights to go off once again.   I unpack my stuffed bag, lay out my things and find a hanger for my shirt,  I had bought two cans of beer.  One I drank on the plane.  I consider having the other one now, but it's late and I don’t really want it.  The room is essentially the same as any other Westin I’ve ever been in.  Outside, the twenty-second floor has a view down towards the river, though it is obscured by other tall buildings, some still being built.  And, as always, one marvels for a second at just how this and all the other fifty major cities across the country were built out this way, in the last few years.

Wednesday, 03/06/19