To an Impassioned, Undergraduate

We’ve got guests from Beijing coming up today.  Friends of my wife’s.  Friends of my daughter's.  Uncharacteristically, my wife asked me if I’d make food for everyone.  “Make your lasagna.”  Happy to.  But is anything open on New Year’s Day?  The super-sized supermarket Tops is closed.  Good.  Rest well, Tops’ check out team.  Shop Right though is open for business.  A name I’ve known as long as I can remember, along with the corny can-can jingle and this will be my first visit to the local Shop Right.  

There is no front door at Shop Right.  Workers are standing around waiting, it appears to start using a blowtorch on the back of their truck.  The glass is removed and there are cloth drops of insulation to keep the heat inside.  I grab a cart and head around the opposite entrance.  I don’t know my way around, so I find myself considering just about every aisle.  On the airwaves is mild mix of seventies classics that was just as likely on when I visited Shop Right in the seventies.  Paul Simon’s “Love Me Like a Rock” is something I haven’t heard in quite a while.  And I muse about the phrase “Rock of Ages.”  Is that a biblical reference that I’m not familiar with?  (Reverend Augustus Toplady, took refuge under Burrington Combe and apparently penned a hymn with that name in 1763.  Rymnin’ Simon know that?)

Back at home the lasagna’s a hit.  Their walk on the trail was well-reviewed.  And its’ good to sit around by the fire and sip some wine and speak in Mandarin.  I shouldn’t but I involuntarily consider that we are not being bugged when I begin to dance around sensitive topics.  One of the guests, a lady my age whom I hadn’t met before metamorphosizes remarkably before my eyes from a reserved, middle aged lady to an impassioned undergraduate who, when the topic turns to Hong Kong protestors and comparisons are made to May Fourth and June Fourth, confirms that she had been in Tiananmen Square that fateful evening in 1989.  

They have brought us a gift which immediately, captures my attention.  Not something I would have ever bought myself, “1000 Books to Read Before You Die” is, I suppose, the fifty-two-year-old's version of “Rolling Stone Magazines 100 Greatest Albums of All Time.”  This book quickly has me hooked, as I feel like a proud little simpleton every time, I land on one that I’ve read and pondering more deeply than I otherwise would, all the selection’s I’ve never heard of.   

Wednesday, 01/01/20