All This Blue Food

Baskin and Robbins are here.  They need at least twenty-four hours to prepare an ice cream birthday cake.  My wife ordered it.  I’m not sure which flavor has all this blue food coloring within, or if this is what was used to write her name, but this cake melted iridescent.  We have a budding blue lake forming, after cutting pieces that seems to stain our lips and our clothes and the very tabletop. 

This color is appropriate to consider on my daughter’s birthday as she is very keen to die her hair blue.  My wife and I seem to have collectively given up on nay saying this idea with the assumption of her twelfth birthday.   I’d teased her and acted shocked and generally behaved in an obstructionist fashion the last six times or so it has come up.  What for?  I eventually reasoned with myself.

Certainly I was purposefully not cutting and then aggressively buzzing my hair around that time.  I’m certain I never died it though.  That always seemed a bit achingly vain rather than counter cultural to my self-image consultation logic.  She sent me a picture of a lady with a wing like streak of metallic blue in her otherwise black hair.  “I want that.  Is it OK?”  I pondered for a bit before answering the chat, and reminded myself that I wasn’t going to throw up a roadblock any more.  “Sure.  Go for it.”

She was determined to go today.  And at the same time she was intimidated by what she was about to do.  I resisted mightily the urge to say a mistake would be costly, requiring months to grow out.  And indeed, she convinced herself and headed off determined.  But she came home a few minutes later deflated because it was going to take two hours and she needed to be at dance class in ninety minutes time.  “Just visit them when you return home from dance.”   This is the latest.  I’ll know by dinner whether or not she got the blues. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Spinning With Wings

The caterpillar is gone.  I wasn’t the first to notice.  My wife pointed the fact out to me with a sigh this morning.  The caterpillar is no longer in the parsley.  Wow.  We’d had an absolutely beautiful green caterpillar about one inch in length.  I’d photographed him nibbling on parsley and moving from stem to stem.  We’d begun to refer to him as “ours” anticipating the chrysalis he would eventually build, right there on the parsley stem.

This starts a discussion:  what could have become of him?   My wife offered that the Ayi found him and did away with him with a shake into the garbage can.  Could that have happened?  I doubted it.  Perhaps.  We’ll have to ask her.  But what else then?  I had assumed that he or his nose at least were smart enough to realize that the parsley plant was a fine thing to denude.  Once you leave the parsley plant, there is only counter, fella.  There are unforgiving moving objects that can be raised and lowered with abandon.  You have, against all odds been made a pet, and not a pest: do not disturb things.  It only goes down hill from here.  Steeply.

Assuming the Ayi hypothesis is false, then it would appear that instincts and “animal sense’ and the cosmos all failed our little friend who decided to leave the safety of the still verdant, parsley plant to try his luck elsewhere.  Thinking like a caterpillar there are reasons, presumably not boredom, to make you want to leave one plant for the possibilities of the unknown.  First off, the plant you’re on may taste horrible.  That’s fair enough.  If every bite is disgusting, and life is simply eating, I get wanting to vacate.  Worse if parsley was some how toxic to iridescent green inchworms, than leaving would have been an absolute necessity.  But I doubt it.  He was eating away quite happily for at least two weeks.  I don’t believe that parsley was peyesin to him. 

Just now I suggested he was too simple to be bored.  His role was to fatten up and spin a cocoon, not ponder it all. But perhaps you ponder.  Certainly you calculate to go up ad down and find the next leaf and move on from the last turd.  So what I’m left with is: was it a binary decision, left, right, up, down, or was it in fact, a hedge?  The latter suggest more complicated thinking the prior suggests something a bit further beyond protozoan.  

We checked, hesitatingly, behind this book and that pan.  No green smush.  Maybe he is crawling still, convinced, whether in a right, right, right, left fashion, or a “the outdoors is where I truly belong.  It’s my life’s quest to get there.” sort of way, that life beyond the parsley plant was where he needed to be.  Perhaps we’ll meet again if you’ve found a safe place to spin things up and one day emerge from the spinning with wings.  You know best what’s needed to do that.

Text That Has Been

One thread of my China story begins with a Presbyterian missionary family living in Penglai, Shandong, the place that periodically experiences mirages off the coast.  It is the place from which Qin Shi Huang sent sailors off to look for the elixir of life, so that he might be the first to cheat death.  Out there at the head of the mighty Shandong Peninsula, in 1898 Henry Robinson Luce was born. I was a Luce Scholar when I first came in China in 1993 and his vision to accelerate understanding between the U.S. and China is an anchor stitching in my life’s practical fabric. 

If I introduce myself to a large room full of people, as I did this week, trying to explain who I am and why I’m here, I almost necessarily weave Luce into the tale. And all I’ve usually time for is to mention that the founder of Time magazine was raised near Wei Fang, two hundred kilometers west of Penglai, the same city my step son was raised in, eighty years later.  And I mention that he was devastated by the loss of the Guomindang and spent the next nineteen years of his life ruing the American ‘loss’ of China.  Indeed the Foundation’s Scholar program did much work in Asia but little in China until the early nineties, when I was able to come for my first time. 

This week I spent some time with Henry Luce from another unexpected thread.  After finishing the contemporary sociological text “White Trash” I picked up something referenced in that text that has been on my shelf for years but which I’ve never began:  “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men” by James Agee and Walker Evans.  From the inscription inside I can see that my mother gave me this book for my birthday.  Was it twenty years ago?  Was in longer than that?  Perhaps she remembers.  It was always something that I ought to have read but never got around to as I suppose I wasn’t quite sure what it was. 

There are a number of introductions to the first of which, by John Hersey is a convincing hagiography.  Quickly it is established that Agee was brilliant, sensitive, instinctively cool, alcoholic and achingly out of touch with his job at Luce’s Fortune magazine.  And as I read about his dealings with Luce, and remembered the other exchanges I’d read about between the magnate and another of his great writers, Theodore White, I considered how fortunate I was to have been buoyed by the great man’s vision, his legacy, in a way that would not have been possible, or perhaps palatable, when he was alive. 

The following quote is pulled from an early journalistic piece of Agee’s at Fortune and follow’s with Hersey’s introduction text:

“The Tennessee River system begins on the worn magnificent crest of the southern Appalachians, among the earth’s older mountains, and the Tennessee River shapes its valley into the form a boomerang, bowing to its sweep through seven states.  Near Knoxville the streams still fresh from the mountains are linked and thence the master stream spreads the valley most richly southward, swims past Chattanooga, though the flood-gates of Wilson Dam, to slide becalmed along the crop-cleansed fields of Shiloh, to march due north across the high diminished plains of Tennessee and through Kentucky spreading marshes toward the valley’s end where, finally at the toes of the Paducah, in one wide glassy golden swarm the water stoops forward and continuously dies into the Ohio. 

Luce called Agee in and told him that the TVA story was one of the finest pieces Fortune had ever run and that it was time for Agee to learn how to write about business. Word went round that he’d volunteered to send Agee to Harvard Business School, but Agee, by then had had enough of Harvard.  Later Luce heard disturbing reports that Agee didn’t follow very closely, the generally understood, Time Inc. dress code.  All too true.  . . . Luce apparently sent Agee a note to “watch it.” 

More on Agee later.  Luce was right.  He writes beautifully.   

A Daunting Trod

There have got to be a lot of people fretting the same fret.  This shit is nerve wracking.  I feel like I’m on a spacecraft and the vital signs of life support are trending rapidly towards suffocation.  Key indices are increasingly veering off in the wrong direction.  If it continues this way, past November 4th, the craft will be unable to right itself. 

What’s to make of these polls that show the race is narrowing?  What’s to make of the nation numb to the garden hose venal mendacity, flooding our yard?   It is painful to look at the news, because I know what I’m doing.  I’m consciously making light of bad news and culling feverishly for good news.  It was pretty clear Trump was going to loose mightily a month ago.  Now it’s tighter.  Now what will happen is not so clear.

It’s unthinkable to imagine that buffoon with a mandate to rule anything more than his property.  I’ve quipped that I’ll move to China.  But in fact I’m considering moving home and I’d be lying if I said this didn’t give me pause. It gives my children pause. Deplorables, pneumonia, Matt Lauer . . . the news keeps getting served up sour.  We’ve got seven days till the first debate.  Will that change the tone?  Will that initiate something worse?  I feel like a small child, infantilized by this “news” cycle that trump plays so effectively with non-news announcements.  I’m desperate for ‘good’ news.  How ridiculous.

HRC will win the election.  Trump will lose.  This is something I have faith in.  And the country will survive DJT even if I’m wrong. I suppose my faith in that truth is even deeper.  And it will survive HRC if my intuition is correct, as well.  I have faith that her strengths will overwhelm her compromises.  But all this faith-based prognosticating is very tiring and forces uncomfortable questions about why you bother to invest faith in anything at all.  The rule of law?  Retirement?  Progress?  It’s a daunting trod to consider without the steel rails.

But this is the good part of American democracy, such as it is.  This unease should be what motivates people and sharpens arguments, forces affinities.  The fact that we don’t know; that multiple outcomes are possible puts the onus on each person to take some responsibility for the narrative.  Woody Allen once mused his goal was to capture a small fraction of the gripping drama of the last few minutes of a close basketball game, to render that level of immediacy into his screenplays.  The United States does a good job, perhaps an increasingly good job, of bottling some of that, revitalizing interest as it always does, in the fourth quarter, the closer we draw to the agreed upon end point.