Empty out

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Empty out

In a forest in Lithuania I watch the sun shift through the trees. In the morning the light is thin shafts, pushing through in odd places. Then, near mid day, the snow is warm and wet and the light broad and full. Towards evening it will grow beautiful, the trees and frozen lake low and side-lit in high relief. Days pass. Eventually I have seen the cycle enough to write.

It’s rare, in the happening world, to have enough time to watch the same cycle of light for several days. It’s rare to have enough time to pay attention, to focus on the color of the branches which are a light brown only revealed in mid day, at the right angle. It’s rare to notice the difference between types of tree, to find favorites. It’s rare to walk barefoot in the snow, even briefly.

Rare for me, anyway.

It’s been years since I walked barefoot in the snow across the Vassar campus on my way to class. Years, though fewer, since I spent enough time sitting quietly to feel comfortable with doing nothing. And having found both activities again, it’s comforting to be at home in them, to step out of the heated house without considering my shoes, just curious about the snow and our ability to see the stars. It’s wonderful to say no to an activity and instead watch the light on the lake, watch the way the tree branches rise as the snow drips off of them in the sun. There are metaphors everywhere in these moments, in the uncurling, in the quiet cycles. I try to ignore them, to instead focus on my eyes, on the fly hopping around the curtain tops, on the smell of cedar.

Thus a few days pass, another gift of airplanes and old friends.

Life between start and stop

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Life between start and stop

These are the good years, I’ve written. These are the years we have with our health, with our children, with our friends even in short bursts. We are grown, we are working on being the people we meant to be, and we have, still, some time. It’s a beautiful phase, and it reminds me that things do not last.

Living abroad is a constant reminder. Much of our lives exists at the edges of systems, in the odd spaces between how things were meant to be used and how they work.

“We’re constant edge cases,” we tell each other. It’s our way of reminding one another how temporary things are. We say it when one of us is annoyed by something. We say it as we try to use banks from one country in another, as we VPN to our place of birth to update our drivers licenses, as we put Hong Kong phone numbers on our Japanese contact forms, as we file ever-more-complicated American taxes. Life like this is built on our willingness to work through things, to learn new cultures but also new types of paperwork, to learn how to file different forms and navigate bureaucracies. All of it is lucky, and all of it is temporary. Our skills age with us, reminders of change. We no longer need paper maps, though there is one on the wall in Tokyo. We no longer need to know how to rent pocket wifi, or where to buy SIMs on landing in Shanghai. We no longer need to know how to get ten year visas to China, or how to register for the electronic gates as a visitor to Hong Kong. Old pieces of knowledge float past us as we renew passports and move houses, the paper detritus reminding us of prior challenges, of small wins.

We say it too as a reminder of the kind of luck that we’ll one day tell of with laughter. We say it to remind ourselves not to be bitter when the rules change, when workarounds go away, when we have to pay full price again, or the staff turns over, or our favorite spots close. Our lives are built in the space between when things start working and when they stop, which makes it good to recognize and appreciate each moment. We remind ourselves that the gifts of security line and immigration shortcuts with a young child are temporary, and to cherish them. We appreciate getting in to climbing gyms with friends on off hours. Eventually, I’m sure, the rules will get more strict, and it will be a story we tell of things we used to be able to do. Everything ends, every ability is finite, every loophole eventually closes. Most restaurants will fade, even our favorites. Many shops we frequent will close when the owners retire. The gift, then, is to appreciate them for what they are, temporary and magnificent. Like carrying beers through security at Pudong airport in the early ’00’s, or like friends getting paid to do weddings in Shanghai as foreigners. Like climbing buildings in Harajuku late at night, long before there were too many tourists, too many cameras. Like watching three movies in a row after buying one ticket, or any of a million other stories of youth. Eventually all these things go away, and the lesson is not to mourn them but to be grateful that we lived in those moments, that we once found those freedoms.

The opposite side is the things that are new, the abilities we have now that we never had, and the challenges that have gone away. We can manage bank accounts in America now, because we can keep US cell phones functional abroad for reasonable cost. We can video call without going to net cafes. We can look up visa rules before going to the consulate. We can send people money in dozens of ways, and use ATM’s in foreign countries. No one ever has to buy money orders, has to carry traveler’s cheques, has to pay money changers.

Until we do, buying Indonesian rupiah in the ferry terminal in Singapore, paying over the margin to have cash for the visa on arrival, standing in the long lines because Indonesia doesn’t accept APEC cards, because we have not yet figured out a shortcut. And in that line I smile, aware that this is temporary, that this experience will be a story one day. I laugh because we are once again an edge case, out there between worlds, operating in a way our child will only learn of from our tellings.

The sounds of play

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The sounds of play

From our new apartment, seven stories up, I can hear the cheers of rugby players. For most of Sunday they echo off the windows of the tall buildings in Tai Hang. Yells, celebrations, calls for teammates, coaches whistles. The tones vary with the player’s ages, younger and then older as the day progresses. Sitting with our windows open to Hong Kong’s good weather their enthusiasm is a far better background than the most common sounds, that of cars, busses, and trucks. I remember this apartment in the Pandemic, when there was so little traffic I could hear the birds. Now, years on, the presence of cars still surprises. Combustion engines and multi-ton vehicles are shockingly loud.

In the morning, after coffee for me, granola for her, and milk tea for the other parent, we head to the playground. Living near a large park is one of the best gifts in a dense city, especially at this time of year. The playgrounds are crowded in the best way, dozens of children cycling through the swings, the spinning wheels, the climbing structures. We spend two hours surrounded by other parents and grandparents, each of us with an eye on some member of the wheeling flock of children. The background chatter is of loud birds in the trees overhead, whose morning songs and banter overwhelm the screams of the children as they run and the calls of parents. We try hard to avoid the constant calls of “careful” that follow each child up the climbing structures and over rope walkways. We try hard to let her fall, to trust that there will be tears but no damage, and that learning how to balance upside down on a swing is a joy worth the occasional faceplant. Our success is moderate, in all regards.

In the afternoon, we nap. Her room has sunbeams at noon that linger on the wall as we straighten her futon. Most days we are organized enough to fold it up in the morning to let the tatami air. Not this Sunday, though, and so I simply make the room neat before nap time. Once she is sleeping I do likewise in the room overlooking the park. Mr. Squish, who remembered this house immediately on our return, joins me. He likes this room, with sounds of people, cars, and birds. He likes to snuggle again, now that the temperature is below twenty, below fifteen. We fall asleep to the sound of older children, more serious sports than the morning’s cacophony.

For the first time in a long time we relax, in this house with the windows open.

Flying over my home town

Flying over my home town

We take off over the lake. A long turn under cloud cover gives me a view of Myers, of my high school, and of most of my childhood spots. Just before the clouds obscure everything I get the kind of perfect isometric view of Cornell that marketing would love, the quad paths clearly defined in the snow, the classical buildings throwing jagged shadows on the white backdrop in the low afternoon sun. It’s January in Upstate New York and the trees are bare.

Flying over Chicago, bare trees lie in the white snow
Daylight fades and lines of cars flash
Across the night in red and gold
What a view from my small window

5’s asks me something as I lean across her to take in the view.

“Just a minute, that’s my home town,” I say. “I don’t get to see it very often and I want to look.”

She is silent for the whole turn, only asking to watch again once we are up into the clouds. I appreciate her patience, those few minutes of understanding. I do not take any photos.

It’s been a long time since I lived in upstate New York, since I spent a full winter in this weather. More than half my life since this was ‘my’ weather. After a week of shoveling, of kicking my shoes together before swinging my feet into the car, of revving the engine slightly before pulling in to park to account for the slush and the snow and the edge of the plow’s push, it feels like no time at all. Pumping gas in the cold, scraping snow and ice off the windshield of the rental, pre-heating the engine before we have to leave, all these things are second nature, part of my body as much as my memories.

I see kids and parents at the sledding hill in mismatched outfits of hand-me-down gear and smile. Fivers’ own gear is likewise, borrowed from cousins in New Jersey who’ve outgrown it. We will leave it in a friend’s house in the city a few days later. We are in the tri-state area, and there is no need to capitalize city, no question of what urban agglomeration I mean.

The snow in Brooklyn is deeper than in Ithaca, and the barriers put up by the plow so high that people parking do not even attempt to pull in, do not attempt to straighten out. There is no room for the car in the snow, and no sense in leaving the hard won opening for each wheel to be filled in the next pass.

“There’s just not much place to put the snow,” our friend says after a couple hours hard work to clear a car.

Upstate this is not a problem, or not as much. There are parking spaces aplenty. The Walgreens doesn’t lock up toothpaste. After a decade in San Francisco, which is still my most frequent American port of call, this fact is astonishing, something I repeat to myself several times.

For a few days I get bagels and coffee at College Town Bagels. The clientele is a familiar mix of work boots and sneakers, of locals bundled in from out on Ellis Hollow Road, getting coffee on their way somewhere, and college students typing or chatting.

I went to school upstate, though not here, and find the memories of winter months on campus to be fleeting, to be a small part of the total, though by the calendar they must not have been. Now, when I meet someone who knows Ithaca, almost always via Cornell, winter is the first thing they mention. Perhaps that’s because there’s no winter in Hong Kong. Perhaps because it dominates their memories.

I remember the big snow of ’93, which last weekend’s snowfall was compared to, briefly in the anticipatory phases. I’m grateful that the years of my child hood are still a reference point locally. It makes me feel at home, or at least like someone who’s endured. Like someone who understands that we should shovel out the driveway before the first plow, and after it again.

As the regional Delta jet picks up through the clouds for the 30 minute flight to JFK and I lose sight of the lake I settle back and attend to the needs of the youth. I’m grateful for her patience, and for all the flights that got us here. I’m grateful for the time spent driving her around in slush and snow, bundling her in and out of car seats in winter jackets in a way unfamiliar to Hong Kong children. I’m glad she went sledding, fed the birds, and made popcorn. I hope we’ll both remember how it feels, winter in the hills of the north east.

Quoted lyrics from Luluc’s ’Small Window’ off of their 2014 album Passerby.

Ferry light

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Ferry light

One evening, on the ferry from Hung Hom to North Point as the sun sets, I realize how often we are on a ferry. It’s a great feeling for a child of the Finger Lakes, to be so frequently on the water. It’s wonderful to have boats be a routine part of transit, be something both mundane and, like the view of Hong Kong and the harbor in the sunset, totally spectacular.

Clara takes ferries a lot more than we do, a wonderful perk of her Waldorf school, which has a campus on Lamma. Mondays and Fridays we drop her at the pier at 8:15, where the class meets to take the 8:30 ferry. It’s a reasonable ride, thirty five minutes or so. The view is special, around the western tip of Hong Kong Island, through the shipping lane that enters Hong Kong harbor. Every time we take the trip I try to catch a picture of the container ships up close. Every time I think the picture does not do the scale or the ferry’s proximity justice, and hope for better luck next time.

The ferry is a good proxy for the school bus in these early years. Tuesday to Thursday she takes the train all the way to school, with us or her nanny. An escort door to door is fine for three and a half. The ferry with her classmates and a few teachers is an entirely different opportunity. Much like my bus rides around the upstate NY countryside, the ferry is an opportunity for her to learn odd language and discover other children’s school snacks.

“My classmate shared her sandwich with me,” she tells me one day when I pick her up. “It was ham and orange cheese. I want you to make that kind of sandwich for me.”

With specific instructions like that even my poor cooking skills are enough.

Some days she gets off the ferry with mischief in her eyes.

“Dad, I’m not wearing my socks. They’re in my backpack.”

Some days she’s wearing her back up clothes, the attire from departure now soaked and in a ziploc. Beach days, when the weather is warm.

These are good moments, just after I spot her in the stream of people leaving the ferry pier, just before she spots me and starts sprinting to me arms wide. Sometimes I chat to the other parents, folks on their lunch breaks, when the ferry is running late. We’re all happy to wait, happy to have these few moments off, knowing the children are on a boat on their way back from a good adventure.

Growing up riding the ferry is a pretty good life. I remember seeing young girls on the ferry out of Sorong in Indonesia one morning. After a red-eye from Jakarta we felt as far out as we’d ever been, utterly discombobulated and uncertain. Watching the girls in uniforms get on the ferry in their every day routine made me feel both grounded and embarrassed by my discomfort. People go to school everywhere, I thought. The memory makes me happy now.

And this evening, taking the ferry back to the island after exploring a new playground with some friends I am struck by the beauty of the city, by the ease of this ride, by the number of people outside on both ends. These are the good days, I think again. For Hong Kong’s weather and for our life on the water.