Our Ritual. A Meta Theme.

Late drive in.  Newly fallen snow.  I don’t care if it's late or early.  I’ve been away for ten days and I, not the bus driver will drive this lady across the bridge and over to school.  My wife suggested this disrupts the rhythm of things, but I have tried to assert that this is our ritual, a meta theme that rides above day to day niceties.  Fortunately, my daughter is all over it as it means she gets to sleep later.  "Yeah.  We do this."

I need to continue on a call, but I can’t get it to connect.  I say “can you guys” hear me a few times.  And then I give up.  Suga, the shorter of the two main BTS rappers has a new song out with Halsey.  She sings a verse or two and then he rhymes in Korean for the rest of the song.  What is he saying?  I couldn’t tell you and neither could she.  But it’s offered up in a warm, sort of sexy, sort of pubescent droll that I cannot comprehend.  I will have to negotiate when it is I get to play music as we started late and our geographic trigger points are now all skewed. 

Not long after the toll, its my turn and I ask her to find Minor Threat.  I want to play her the same songs I played to myself as I as departing the Beijing Capital Airport Tuesday.  I listened and enjoyed and imagined I would do precisely what I am, in fact, doing now.  These would be great songs to play for my little one.  This, as they were exactly what I was listening to when I was her age, attending the same school.  And no one at the school enjoyed them in the least.

They are loud and fast.  And she’s good about it.  Normally we kill a few minutes together once we arrive but today, she has to leave immediately, and I head out just me and Ian MacKaye.  I call my mom.  Perhaps I’ll swing by on my way home.  But she and my stepdad are down in Danbury shopping at Trader Joe's.  Perhaps my dad will be around.  But he’s out on a walk somewhere and having toggled marvelously between my parents, locally, in a way that would have been impossible for the last fifteen years, I resign myself to just head home.

Wednesday 12/11/19