Ask A Grizzled Guard

Google maps says so!  I’ve got a meeting near the U.S. embassy.  I still haven’t figured out the smart way around this issue.  The Beigao highway entrance has been closed for months and the alternative entrance, further upstream is a nightmare.  I’m rolling up 20 minutes late.  But I notice something on my map that suggests there is a Manchurian dumpling house right next door.  This places itself inside my mind. 

I mention it to my colleague as we’re descending the elevator on our way out of the meeting.  It has now entered his mind as well.  We head to the building and ask a grizzled guard who was characteristically suspicious at first and then became loquacious.  “It used to be right there.  Right there."  We look up and take in a dilapidated building.  “And it’s gone then, is it?”  This has me rather upset as I've imagined it for hours and indeed sold someone else on the alluring and apparently dated point of note, on the map.  Off across the parking is a large, bland tower.  “They have roast duck.”

Neither of us are in the mood for the Beijing duck ritual. “Ahh, there’s this Korean place too, right here.  Right here. “  Neither of us want bimbimbop either.  “Hey thank you.”  Most people are suddenly out of their offices and filing into the lunchtime scramble.  My friend insists that anything will do but I know we’re going to pass on most places along the strip we are walking.  I look in on an empty booth by a window and notice the word 'Belagio.'  I do not think of Las Vegas, but rather of Taiwanese cuisine.  I double check when I head in and it's that Belagio and this will do just fine. 

Later we’ve ubered it out to Shangdi.  I’m in the front and after making a polite effort I quickly head off to nod, springing straight up periodically when a flash of the conversation or a question cuts into my dreamscape.  I was up rather early and all the blood is down there digesting the Taiwanese delicacies.  I consider it an investment on a longer evening ahead and greedily return to whatever it was I'd been imagining. 

Slowly, Proudly

We got birds.  Birds I haven’t heard from all winter are calling outside.  We got bees.  There are flowers in bloom on a wispy cherry tree and the pink petals are swarmed with bees.  Riding home from the gym this morning on my bike I stopped once or twice to consider the activity and snap some pictures out in front of a random neighbor’s home.  Spring’s here.

It’s good to have a bike again and not be looking through a dusty windowsill on some ride around, waiting for the automobile heater to kick in.  Over at the clubhouse they have a little faux farmyard with a family of bunny rabbits inside.  I’m sure these are a hit with all the little kids who pass through.  I didn’t bother to ask what happens to them after the resurrection celebration next Sunday. 

                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Our old place did such a good job on horticulture.  There were plumb blossoms that would bloom early and then a myriad of cherry trees would blossom next.  Bees would swarm the walkway.  The man made stream would be refilled and start to trickle and gurgle.  This place we’re in now somehow missed the memo on horticulture.  We have a predictable cast of cedars and pines that help in the winter.  But there ain’t much else.  Our house has a magnolia out front.  It’s pleasant.  The house down the road has a cherry tree.  But most of the landscape is dusty, monotonous, unimaginative.  I’m holding out hope that the tree in the back yard is a jacaranda, as that would yield some glorious purple flowers. 

Late at night, on line and Youtube has wound itself into a series of live Miles Davis recordings.  Stockholm 1960, with Coltrane wound its way to Paris in 1967 with Wayne Shorter and then on to the remarkable period of 1971 with Gary Bartz on sax, Keith Jarrett in rather amusing ecstasy on the keys, and Miles playing through a wah wah pedal.  Then I got it into my head that I wanted to hear Miles speak.  But there were no interviews I could find on film that went back before the 1980s.  The interviews after that were pretty rough, with his pavement voice, bulging eyes and loose-the-thread style of narration making you wonder what he was like, once upon a time. 

Could it be that there are no clips, no recordings interviewing him from before the 80s?  This seemed crazy.  There had to be something from when he was at the apex of popular culture.  There are a few links that are all inert to what was supposedly a 1952 interview. They all claimed that this was recorded before his voice became gravely.  How could he have gone for so long without any recorded reckoning of his thoughts?  One can only imagine that it was simply his decision to avoid such engagements that he defended vigorously.

I wasn’t looking (only listening) when the 1967 session was drawing down.  I returned the clip to a moment before the finale.  Miles blows his last note and just walks off.  No: “Thank you.” No: “You’ve been a wonderful audience.”  Definitely no “See you next year.”  Nothing.  He slowly, proudly, just holds his horn and walks off.  The rest of the band then follow.  A man of so few words, that for decades, nothing seems to have been captured. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

He Is Probably Accustomed

My bike had a flat in the fall.  Maybe it was already winter.  There must have been a puncture on the inner tube as it was stone-flat.  And with that my cold early winter rides for five minutes over to the gym and the grocery store came to an end. I’d avoided the mile walk over and insisted on having a car to get myself over whenever I needed to.

Today was an undeniably rising spring day.  The magnolia tree out front was emerging with eighty-nine different flower buds blooming.  I had to drop my older one off at an appointment and it occurred to me to get the inner tube fixed on the quick dash back.  A bike shop would be a hassle, but who needs one when there’s a traditional Chinese cure.

There was a time, when every corner in China has a little enterprising old man, sitting with a pump, and tools and a water vessel ready to help with bike repair. In Shanghai in 1993, everyone biked everywhere.  These entrepreneurial ge ti hu were ubiquitous and thank goodness too.  If you had forty minutes to go before you got home and the tire on your “Flying Pigeon” gave way, you’d be walking and swearing.

Our neighborhood has a bike repair gent.  He sits by the flower sales people, beside the bridge between two compounds.  I folded up the bike, threw it in the car and headed over, to the dusty turnabout where I knew he’d be.  The flower lady greeted me expectedly as I parked my car.   I gestured to the man with the cluttered old san lun che smoking on a cigar.  I considered his tools as he considered my tire.  His perch here is near the villas so he is probably accustomed to aiming high.  He said something in a thick regional dialect.  I suggested half of what he’s said, and he accepted, quickly.  I do recall when these services were only a few kuai at the most, but I’m so glad he’s here and that I knew he would be, that I didn’t mind paying what was no doubt considerably more than whatever his bottom line might have been. 

I put the bike in the garage, but haven’t used it yet. The day slipped by with everyone just working away on their computers till I needed to get the dinner started.  The year's first bike ride for tomorrow then. 

Quickly, If You Would

Woke up with no time for anything.  These days its rare to stay out till two in the morning.  The place I’d been chatting in had bar food, but I’d avoided it at the time and I was hungry when I left.  Piling out into the corner east Jianguomen and Da Wang West Road at 2:00AM there was fortunately plenty of street activity.  I called an Uber and agreed to meet the guy up by the corner.  In the time it took to order the cab I was in the middle of my next order with a jianbing guozi.  “Quickly, if you would ma’am.  My car is coming.”   This morning I was reminded of my midnight snack as seemingly all of my clothes were covered in sticky jianbing flakes.

I picked up my coat and tried halfheartedly to sweep some of the flakes off.  They weren’t impressed.  I noticed that last night’s shirt and the pants I’d laid beneath them were swarmed with flakes.  I flicked a few more times and noticed the flakes were all landing on the floor.  I lifted the shirt and it smelled like a cigar.  Had I really had a cigar last night?  I dropped the shirt, repulsed.  I gave up.  It all seemed like too big an undertaking at that time of the morning.  I went to get a grapefruit juice. 

Reconstructing the day now I remember taking the little one to a basketball tournament and finally reaching someone in the their U.S. night for a quick and productive call.  Soon I was helping my wife with a class she runs.   First espresso in hand, I was trying to explain resurrection and pagan antecedents and how it all related to eggs and chocolate and rabbits to a group of impassive seven year-olds.  We weren’t connecting.  I switched from English to Chinese and this helped.  Then, plucking from one of the vaguely Easter themed books we had there that I’d piled up to show them, I opened up “Horton Hatches the Egg.”

Thank goodness for Dr. Seus and his flamboyant illustrations and mnemonic patterns.  Soon every kid was repeating: “I meant what I said and I said what I meant.  An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.”  Later when kids began to paint the eggs we considered whether or not their might be elephant birds inside. There was only one young boy in the group.  He looked bored.  I told him to sneak out with me.  I introduced him to an old American tradition I’d just invented called throw the hard boiled egg against the wall.   This was the most fun either of us had had all day. 

Merely Obscured

My daughter was going to go on a field trip today.  She was terribly excited, as we had visited the place before on a family outing.  An hour or more’s drive north from Beijing is a series of Tang Dynasty caves that are hollowed out and abandoned but once housed a whole colony of refugees and exiles.  She was looking forward to being quite likely the only person who’d seen the place before.  Late March and the trees would just be blooming. 

This morning early she burst in my room and went straight to my computer.  What’s up honey?  Checking the AQI.  It’s early.  I’m not quite sure what she’s saying.  I look up and there’s a map of greater Beijing and with various numeric bubbles on my laptop and it all starts flooding back.  She had told me last evening when we did the emergency-run trip to the supermarket to get lunch material for the excursion that the trip would be canceled if the air quality index were too high. 

At first it appeared that the index was low and she’d be all right.  But as she fiddled about it became clear that the rating for much of the city were all quite high.  The trip would likely be canceled. 

I’m driving around the city now.  The pall of particulate dust stretches out across all of the sky.  The dust has a gravitational quality so that any straight gaze is slowly, imperceptibly pulled downward.  It is a particularly ironic haze today as it would otherwise be a lovely early spring day.  The sun isn’t hidden behind clouds.  It’s right there.  This should be a sunny day.  It’s merely obscured by dust.  There are a few cherry blossom trees in full bloom out and around.  There are magnolia trees blooming and buds of all different variety preparing to rise and unfold.  They are also obscured by dust.  Buildings, cars, roads, needless to say, are all blanketed in dust.   And the truly sad part as we learned this morning on the map, is that it extends out for hours in every direction.