American Voice That Sounds

Spent the earliest hours of Sunday on the phone with the Far West.  My chum, who hails from Modesto, was on the train in Tokyo.  You can listen on the train in Tokyo but you can’t talk.  Walking along the canal at Naka Meguro though, we chat it up and get our business out of the way and talk about China and Japan, and family instead.  I mention my China reading and wonderfully he’s a former student of David Keightley, who’s comparisons of ancient China with ancient Greece had recently grabbed my attention.  Why was patricide central to Greek mythology as contrasted with filial China? A Berkeley grad, my friend knew Keightley the Berkeley prof.  He even remembered the Limerick he’d penned for him in a class assignment.  I was asking about Limerick assignments as Keightley had included student examples at the end of the volume which I’d just been reading. 

Next call was to Bali.  An old Beijing veteran has taken his family south and weathered the Covid storm in that Hindu sanctuary.  He hails from Boston.  He knows what it means to have earned a spring.  I speak to him in that language about what I’m seeing outside my window as the sun slowly rises behind me.  And I labor to grok the life he describes there on an island, where his kids are riding bikes through jungle paths and service labor is rather cheap, and the local language isn’t so hard to put together.  We’ve visited the neighboring island of Lombok and stared across at Bali, but I've never been.  We close out our call with obligatory post-Covid promises of travel. 

 

It’s Easter Sunday.  I’ve no eggs to hide. My sixteen-year-old won’t be expecting to hunt for any.  I’ve a friend who sends me a clip with a meditation on the Passion, which I don’t click on.  I don’t bother with the jokes about Christ that someone else just sent me either.  My mom will have us over to visit with my sister, my nephew, my stepdad, later in the day.  Stepping out of the shower, I find myself thinking twice, and putting on slacks and a turtleneck that suggest a whiff of Sunday finery.  My wife has on a hoodie and I automatically cast a skeptical gaze.  The lingering odor of my earliest Easters. 

BurgerFi in Poughkeepsie has, of course, absolutely nothing to do with Easter.  Rather it’s a surprise for my nephew, dreamt-up by my daughter.  I dial the joint up on the ride over the Mid-Hudson Bridge, (fear not, my wife was driving) and I speak with a woman who is very chatty, and who reads through her order-script in a folksy American voice, that sounds remote like an emerging-market call center.  I ask her to confirm that this location is the one right there, next to Vassar, and it becomes clear that she isn’t “there” physically.  “No matter, ma’am.  I’ve got it.  I know where I’m going.”  My wife immediately is suspicious.  Apparently, I've used a very ‘romantic’ voice, conversing with this woman. 

 

 

 

Sunday, 04/04/21