Somber Today, When I

 

I try not to write about business in this blog.  It’s nobody’s business.  I referred to some calls yesterday though, that were emotional, not because of the anything to do with the commercial aspects of the call.  Rather, three calls in a row all happened to be with people in Israel, and it brought my attention to that land.  Made me think of my first visit there from last year.  Made me want to write everyone I knew and wish them peace and safety, even though it was a fleeting gesture. 

 

This morning I have standing call that happens at my 3:00AM.  I don’t mind the call that that time, which involves people in Seoul, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Sidney, Perth, and Belfast.  I’m the one that moved, not so long ago.  I’ll take the short end of the stick.  It has become the call that properly anoints the weekend.  My transitionary sip, of lemonade that removes any of the early morning bitterness Once it’s over, at 4:00AM, the work week in Asia is essentially done. 

But not quite.  As long as I’m up, I often squeeze in another call or two and have now come to having a weekly check in, thirty minutes after that call, with a client in Bangalore.  We haven’t spoken in three weeks.  During the last few calls, we have discussed the Covid situation in India, of course.  He mentioned last time that things were not good in Gujarat, and Mumbai.  But where he was in Bangalore, they were largely OK.  And so, it was a somber today, when I asked about how things were and he breathed deeply and suggested that they were not good.  Not good at all.  Colleagues had been hospitalized.  Bangalore was now in the eye of the storm.  And with that, all the other things we were to have discussed, became distractions. 

 

Wretched virus, hopping from human to human among our crowded swarm of humanity across the globe.  All that indomitable energy of Bangalore, shocked, shaken into trepidation.  What a terrible shame, as it had been here, as it had been in England as it had been in Wuhan.  And I find myself pausing on ‘business’ and rather than catching up on all the many emails that demand attention, that I’d rather write to the people I work with in Bangalore or in Tel Aviv and try to touch them somehow, even though such emails are, as I know, small comfort. 

 

My father will come by not long after 8:00AM.  We’ll go for a hike as we generally do Friday mornings.  I refuse to take meetings during this time.  I just block it out on all the many calendars I’m supposed to manage.  And there isn’t much demand for the time, really, for as I’ve mentioned the world which I concern myself with, has largely begun to rest of the weekend.  And I’m startled to hear one of my daughter’s walking down the stairs, and into the kitchen.  What are they doing up so early? My younger daughter is at my door.  Oh, right, of course, you need me to drive you to school.  Even though that has been the case these past few weeks, after physical classes resumed, it’s taken me some time to readjust.  She gets tunes, as always till just before the bridge.  And I ask her to put on “All Around the World” and “News of the World” and then “When You’re Young” all early Jam singles and tell her a funny story of listening to them at the same school she’s heading to with my friend whom she knows:  He was angry because he had painstakingly secured all these singles as imports at Bleeker Bobs and other stores and I went down one weekend and got them all in one shot, as they’d now been reissued domestically.  On the way home after dropping her off, the Vassar radio station had Amy Goodman on with some articulate guests discussing the situation in Gaza and I thought it better to listen to this, than to rock out with the Pidge on WFMU.

Friday, 05/14/21