I’m Up Now

It ain’t really winter yet.  It’s only the third day of November.  But it’s cold.  We’re in a new place and it is already clear as crystal that this place is going to be freezing this winter.  Chinese expat architecture from the 1990s, may as well be a drafty Victorian back home.  The heat’s up full blast.  The space heater is on near the bed.  Everyone is snuggling against everyone else.   Sweaters and sweat pants lie at-the-ready by the bedside.   You think twice before leaving the bed to go to the bathroom.

And with the winter comes the annual psychological challenge of getting up before the sun.   In the summer, the sun arrives around five.  But these days its already six thirty before the light appears over the trees outside my bedroom window.   If you head to bed early, you awaken in the dark.  Toss once, roll twice, begin to fret about all the things one might fret about.  I reach for my phone in the dark, knocking over a book.  It isn’t there.  Nor is it in my pant’s pocket.  I’m up now. 

Meditation on the cold floor downstairs.  I consider putting my back pillow, under my ass.  Yes.   That’s better.  Think of the monks in the Ganden Monestary.  This isn’t cold.  Toughen up.  A mouse runs across the long flat ceiling above me.  Presumably he and his family are cold as well.  Presumably this guy’s up early as well.  Fretting no doubt.  He has some pressing matters to fret about.  He doesn’t walk quietly enough. 

My younger daughter’s up early as well.  “Come on in.  You want to join me?”  “Sure.” Soon we have snuggle meditation, moving further yet again, from anything rough, transcendent and Tibetan.  The rodent family is wisely respecting our deliberate silence.  “How much longer?”  “Four minutes.”  OK then.  Lights on.  Music on. Time for calisthenics.  Reluctant, certainly, but we are warming up now, with every jumping-jack.

Dinner Was Plausible

Up early, and I’m not the only one.  Sleep hit forcefully last evening.  I tried to cut through work after dinner.  Familiar voices calling out from email correspondence.  “Do you want to do that call now?”  No.  I realize its 9:00AM for you, there in New York.  I typed a line and awoke with my thumb on the space bar, the paragraph disrupted. 

It was, after all only a two-meeting day.   Neither of the locations were especially far from home.  Both were close to each other.  There was a lunch, but it was spicy and I didn’t eat much.  There was no beer.  I was home not long after five.  The drive back was to have been a time for reflection; sitting in the back of a cab, knocking off the day’s journal.  Instead, I had a call from a colleague.  The schedule with the visiting executive need to be changed, for the fifth time.  “Let me give you one or two more updates.”  Somehow this took thirty-five minutes. 

I came home to find a dinner preparation, abandoned mid-chop.  There was a bowl of sliced tomatoes.  A smaller bowl of leek rings.  A fatty piece of pork lay, face down, on a plate, by the sink.  Valiantly I tried to overcome my annoyance.  I don’t mind making dinner.  But I don’t enjoy finishing someone else’s dinner plan.  In the sink lay a colander half filled with bean sprouts. 

What to do with all this?  The Mrs. had done as much as she could before she had to run off to something.  I’d need to finish this project.  I considered the meat.  There is a certainly a Chinese word to describe this cut of pork.  In English I’d call it a rectangle of fat, with meat streaks.  This must be what they use to make things like “hong shao rou” which was always said to be the Chairman’s fave.  It’s not the first time I’ve had to take on a cut of pork like this.   I suppose we have to fry it.

Dinner was plausible.  I found a zucchini and some tofu that helped to round out the porcine blobs.  Tomatoes and parsley with the bean sprouts retained a bit of crispness.  We all laughed about what an odd cut of meat that pork had been.   Work then.  And plenty of it.  But my body insisted otherwise.  The work became painful to consider.  “I’m just going to take a catnap.”  Everyone, including myself, knew better.   And everyone else soon made her way up to bed, as well.

He Doesn't Care About Us

Heading out to the airport to pick up the wife.  She’s back from a trip overseas.  A bright Sunday afternoon.  The cold is beginning to affect the light so that things look metallic.  Every day, the sun’s making its way down earlier. 

I had just finished teaching an early education English class.  Only one student showed and we dove into Aesop’s Fables.  ‘The Mouse and the Lion”  “The Vain Jackdaw.”  This young girl recognized a number of the tales.  She confirmed that she’d read them in Chinese.  Certainly there is no shortage of Aesop translations.  But could it be that the stories are older and more elemental than any modern translation?  Which was the first culture to tell the Mouse and the Lion fable?  Did it start west and make its way east or was it the other way around?

I got the text message that my wife had landed.  I know that precise moment in the journey.  They’ll be an hour’s worth of queuing and schlepping before she emerges.  I grab the girls and we head over in the car. We’re most of the way there when we get an updated text:  “I’m on the train to the luggage area.”  We’re going to be early.  Fortunately, perhaps, there is a ton of traffic at the ramp up to the Terminal Three arrival maw. 

Park the car in the outer ring between number 10 and number 12.  The guy in the car ahead us is smoking by the curb.  I roll up behind him.  My daughters, the welcoming committee, have already fallen asleep.  I start to read the book I’ve brought, a brief history Nicaragua.  Eight pages later cars approach and take off, but no one is concerned that we’re just sitting here.  In a U.S. airport I’d have been told to ‘move-on’ by now.  But here the touch of airport traffic regulation is much more faint. Eventually someone would certainly have something to say.  There is a cop walking up and down.  But he doesn’t care about us. 

The latest text arrives:  “I’m through customs, where are you?” 

Sitting by the Door

Sitting by the door, waiting for the first trick or treater.  The jack o’ lantern is lit.  We decided upon an aggressively jerky maw for the 2015 pumpkin.  This, by not cutting out the other half of his mouth.  He’s out there now, as the sun falls, welcoming the compound’s daemons to come and tithe candy.  I have a bass amp plugged in by the door turned up full blast.  I cup the mic and laugh a low sinister laugh as my younger daughter hands out the candy.  “Were they surprised?”

She has, appropriately headed out for some of her own tithing.  I am listening to something appropriately off and disturbing for this High Holiday:  Faust.  This is from 1973, “Faust IV.”  It has an acidic, metallic sheen that glistens for Halloween.  I don’t know if I can do the surprise Halloween laugh quite the same way without my sidekick, but we’ll find some way to maintain the drama.

Sitting here by the door, reading a book I’d bought my wife years ago called: “100 Techniques that Changed Photography”, or some such thing.  Every time the door  rings, I try another amplified disruption.  Growling throat, high-pitched scream, disturbing scratching noises.  Sitting by the door, I tried one after the other annoyance and then jumped up to be civil.

A friend tried to call and discuss a business meeting for tomorrow.  I interrupted this Skype call seven times to doll out candy.  “Great costume!”  I valiantly tried to cop a plea.   “You do know what night it is?” Most of the world has no obligations this evening.  Some day my kids will be in college and me and the Mrs. will have an urban one-bedroom apartment somewhere and will comfortably ignore the evening, as most people do.  For now, it’s a function of life in an expat compound. 

Earlier this evening, I calculated how much candy I had and how many visitors might appear and figured more than once that I may well run out of candy.  I’d need discipline as I doled things out. .  I’ve restocked twice already.  As a veteran, I implicitly understand, if you just offer the bowl out they’ll reach out and grab as many Snickers as they can.  I rehearsed the line in my mind:  “I’ll do the dollin’ daemon” to say any wieners who figured they were in a position to school me on civility in looting.  

We put on a recording of someone reading "The Headless Horseman" and light the first fire of the season. 

Screw in the New Tank

I’ll get some meat to grill.  That’ll be the thing.  I’m stuck here in line at the ATM.  It’s in a butcher shop and I glance over and convince myself buying meat and fish is something that I should do, before leaving.  I get a few beef cutlets and a side of salmon.  My older one had been asking for salmon for some time. 

“Dad, I have plans for tonight.”  “I see.  Can I make it for you, for lunch?”  “I’m not really into fish for lunch.”  “Maybe when you come home late?”  I need to make dinner for the little one, but she and her friend want mac & cheese, which is easy enough to dispense with.  In the dark, with the mosquitos, and a light that isn’t working, I tried to screw in the new tank of gas in the grill.  It isn’t going in.  I try to screw the other direction.   Twisting, for naught.  Change direction. Brace the tank against my leg and try the other direction.  Again.  Spin it the other way, then.   The remains of the kids Mac & Cheese and zucchini and hot dogs was starting to look rather more appetizing than it did when I set out to do all this screwing.

My younger daughter and her friend are in the other room watching “Poltergeist.”   They are enraptured, terrified.  I was hoping it was the “original” which is about as ancient as “Psycho” was for my generation, I suppose.  No, this one just came out.  Of course.  Why else would you be aware of it?  My daughter’s friend pronounces it with a soft-‘g’, in a knowing way.  I say it with a hard-‘g’ and we discuss this.  It appears that they are marketing the soft-‘g’ version for the redux. 

Later, after they’ve been thoroughly frightened and are too scared to go any where in the house, we trade notes.  Girl sucked into a TV?  Check.  Boy counts the time between the lightening and the thunder till the tree reaches in and grabs him? – Check.  The housing complex is built on a graveyard?  “No.”  “Really?”  Hmm.  That is, alas, what is most oddly appropriate about the plot and our current villa complex.   Best not to think too much about what these places are built on top of.  Dead people are likely the least of our worries.