Widely Seen as Joyous

Got a ride down to Newark.  It’s a massive upgrade.  It just is.  My plane was at noon.  If I were to reliably resort to mass transit I’d have had to leave at 6:00AM.  As it is we can leave by eight or even eight-thirty and get down there with time.  The bus from this town takes only ninety minutes but it goes into Manhattan.  From Port Authority you need to grab the bus service they provide, which shunts you back under the Hudson, back up the elongated curve of traffic that affords the remarkable view of Manhattan from the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel.  It’s great to see once in a day.  But twice in the same hour is painful. 

It hasn’t snowed this year yet.  The news says tomorrow will be a blizzard.  Glad I’m leaving today.  My wife and I debrief Thanksgiving.  Everyone sent us messages suggesting they’d had a great time.  Much more importantly, and practically certainly, we each managed to navigate the holiday circuit without stepping on each other’s toes.  We each had areas of responsibility we stuck to and despite various predictions to the contrary, it was widely seen as joyous. 

The new parental reality.  I’m getting used to the notion of getting on my older daughter’s calendar in order to have time to speak.  She arrived Thursday, and I needed to leave today, Saturday.  I asked her ahead of time to save a slot for me.  She had her boyfriend and other chum along for the visit.  Her sister absolutely wanted to enjoy her fleeting time home, as well.  I was up at four and she hadn’t gone to bed yet.  Improbably we had a time alone and enjoyed a fabulous chat about what it was like to acclimate to the United States and confront things that were never relevant in the bubble world of her old international school in Beijing. 

It’s the borderland then.  On the one hand she is a kid still, who is only trying on adulthood for size, snuggled in blankets back at home.  A young lady, certainly too, filling out a newly independent frame the way I did, with all those remarkable undergraduate friends, whom I can only remember as other adults.  Driving down to Newark I recall bits of the conversation with my wife, undeniably proud, unmistakably aglow having savored something rare. 

Saturday, 11/30/19