But Charmed As Well

I was reminded that it was Father’s Day towards the end of my Father’s Day.  I’d been down in Shanghai teaching, for the last for weeks straight.  I’d come home on the weekends and head back down Sunday night.  But this weekend I plowed through a three-day course and so my time away was further extended.  Somewhere on my ride out to the airport I got the first and then the second wechat message, wishing me a happy Father’s Day. 

Living in Asia, this gives you plenty of time to prepare and be early for the call back home to my own father.  And then over to my step father as well.  Indeed I was early enough to be able to pivot and annoy my sister, suggesting that it was “already” 9:00AM and that she might perhaps have forgotten to call our dad, on the Hallmark Day of Obligation.

I didn’t reach home till 2:00AM.  In a routine that seems to happen whenever I reach the airport, I text my wife when I land.  Let’s say that’s 1:00AM.   And, as I’ve complained about numerous times, the folks at Air China never park their planes, at least from Shanghai, in the domestic gates.  They park them in the international section or somewhere on the tarmac and then bus all the passengers into the domestic baggage claim area.  I wait for luggage, get luggage, call a DiDi, wait for a DiDi and only then speed off home.  And it’s usually around this time, my wife calls and says, “how could it be that you’re not home yet?”

When I got home my wife was still awake, but the girls were asleep.  And on my desk was an invitation to play a game:  follow these clues to find the next one.  I was pretty tired but charmed as well and intrigued about finding the first clue.  “Go look at the Lonely Planets” There are literally forty on the shelf.  But there inside one of the ones on the top was the next clue.  I made it through a few until I was stumped with one that told me to find one associated with “dogs”, that I had read to her.  It was only this morning that she was able to explain to me that I should have considered Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles.”   How lucky I felt there, alone, tired, searching my book shelves at the end of Father’s Day.

Monday, 6/17/19