It Has Just Beeped

I keep imagining that I’ll go for a bike ride while it’s dark enough for me to want to use this bike light.  I bought it.  Put it on and can’t get it to operate.  Now I’m having trouble getting it off.  I know I’ll need it once Day Light Savings strikes.  But for this morning, the sun has already come up.  Even if I left right now, I wouldn’t really need it. 

I woke early to hear my wife trying to escort a mouse down into the basement.  She’d built up a pathway that was to lead the critter down stairs.  I couldn’t find my book though she’d used some of them to block off the pathway out of the kitchen.  Sitting here later I saw him go left, feint right and the drive straight under the chair I’m sitting in.  I’m in bare feet which somehow detracts from combat readiness.  I spun the chair around, but he was no where to be found.  Traps then.  Reluctantly, traps. 

My wife had participated in a cooking event yesterday.  I was up early and she was up late, as often happens for her and I.  She was feeling annoyed and philosophical.  The hostess of this event who was also of Asian persuasion had referred to as “exotic.”  What had that meant, she wondered.  And we mused about how otherness is such an absolute constant for someone like me in China.  There would never be an assimilation that superseded one’s visual representation as a foreigner, no matter how long you’d lived, how remarkable your language skills were, you are always other.  The U.S. holds the promise of assimilation for everyone, and I think the pressure therefore is quite different.  If you still are objectified as “exotic: it suggests that the dream of ever fitting in was perhaps a myth to begin with, while at the same time it grinds at one to somehow work-harder at what is supposed to be within reach. 

I’ve got a pot of coffee and it has just ‘beeped.’  I had been perfectly happy dripping water over grinds and deciding for myself when things were done.  It’s another blue-sky morning.  It has been a particularly nice autumn time here, though I’m dreading the winter. A friend has would up in Odessa and he is sending me pictures of borscht and dumplings that he must be ordering now for dinner.  I have never been.  I would love to go.  I suggested he read Isaac Babel.  Perhaps he will.  Coffee then.  It’s time.

Sunday, 10/13/19