Spoke with my best friend this morning. We hadn’t spoken in nearly four months. He’d asked me to be patient, as he finished off his thesis and managed his professional responsibilities. Reasonable. I suggested that if that were the case no need for quick pings. Do let me know when you're ready to talk. Properly. And I know him better than anyone save my family and I felt there was more to it than just time to work. And I waited. I tried not to be resentful. And I also didn’t want to flinch either. If you ask for patience, I’m too proud to ask first if perhaps, now, you might be free. He pinged me out of nowhere last week and suggested he’d like to catch up and this morning, my precious Friday morning 6:00AM, when China has cut off work for the day, and all is restful and we talked for an hour or so.
When you’re far away from China, it can be difficult to remember what normalcy was like. The news is horrible. The relationship between here and there is at a new thirty-year nadir. More monitoring, more observation, more patriotism, this is what we read. And it speaks to one aspect of existence. But it doesn’t reflect what life is necessarily like, at all. Chatting with my friend who is there in a hutong in Dongcheng, it was like a balm to hear of his American flaneur perambulations around the Drum Tower, ignited, as one ought always to be there, welcome, as one always somehow is in that unique, gristly old Beijing fashion.
He needed to run. He and his fiancée were off to dinner. Dinner! To walk out into a hutong in Beijing this evening and have some dinner. There isn’t a soul in this house that wouldn’t sigh at the thought. It’s all still there, as it’s always been. Just rather difficult to get there and back these days. So, I won’t have a chance to see his Beijing, any time soon. Nor he my New York. But it was wonderful to go through the ritual of explaining each other’s world’s, as we’d normally do ever few weeks, in a manner that spanned many, many odd, and reflective months.
Tonight, we were invited to a dinner in Poughkeepsie. My mother and stepfather wanted us all to dine with them at Savona's there, across the Vassar campus on College Avenue. This would be our second attempt to dine out since the Covid scourge descended. The first effort, when we casually ducked into an atmospheric roadside place with an Italian name in Princeton, New Jersey, was awful. This evening was quite good, biased certainly as this was the first meal in four days. So, how to? You can’t have a mask on when you put food in your mouth. You can when you go to the bathroom. You ought to have it on when your server comes, but you can take it off to chat with the people you live with. I kept thinking off all those incriminating photos from the heartland where people are dining mask-less and the rest of us snicker.
Walking back to the car on the other side of College Ave, I notice a maple tree that I didn’t recognize, be-speckled with thousands of crimson two-winged seeds not yet ready to spin to earth. I looked and AI-god inside the Seek app suggested this was a new species for me, an Amur Maple. And now my mind was back to the six-thousand mile Trans-Siberian rail ride and all the many trees standing there as we sped by. I've seen the Amur go by.
Friday, 02/08/20
No comments:
Post a Comment