Elisa comes to my room and asks for a story. I am her second choice as Aidan is consumed with a game on his iPad. Elisa sits down and I ask “A story?” to buy myself a little time. I am excited and happy that she asked me as I like the concept of being a story telling father however I really have no idea what story to tell. “Elisa”, I say, “this is the story of the jack rabbit and the bear” and I really have no clue beyond that. Elisa rests her head on my chest. ...
The Father is looking for his phone and feeling a little bit disoriented. Or maybe it is the fact that he is looking for his phone that makes him feel disoriented. He never has to look for his phone, it is always with him. He’s in an excited, calm, refreshing, nervous, anxious mood as he calls out to his kids “wait for me, I need to find my phone”. The kids don’t really know what is going on. To kids, things are not evaluated at the “good”, “bad”, “normal”, “not normal” way that they will eventually think of things as adults. This is not to say kid’s feelings are simple or less complicated. In fact, they are more complicated than the adults for they haven’t learned to shut down or funnel emotions yet. Emotions are raw and joyous and painful and numbing and exciting. It is the Father who is cut off from his emotions. He’s been cut off for some time. ...
Elisa hands in her ticket which is scanned and returned to her. She walks through the gate and waits for me to do the same. I join her, we hold hands, and walk onto Main Street of Hong Kong Disneyland. Elisa in her taboo purchased snow white outfit (ie, not legit) and me in shorts and a Uniqlo superman tee shirt. There is Minnie Mouse under a gazebo with a line of kids waiting to take their picture. I ask Elisa if she wants to and she silently shakes her head no. Not the shy, I really want to kind of NO that I would have done at her age. Just a NO. We instead head up to the train station which is my idea to show her the whole park. We get on the train and make it half way around, to FantasyLand, where we depart. ...
My alarm goes off. It is 5:30am. It is Sunday morning. It is race day. I really don’t want to get up but I do and head to the kitchen where I make myself a cup of instant coffee. While my fever from the day before is gone, I feel like crap, and I know there is no way I can race today. The only reason I got up and dragged myself down to the kitchen at all was I wanted to see if this was my normal 5:30am feel like crap feeling or something worse. It was something worse. I went back to bed. ...
She stands in front of the floor to ceiling window 30 floors above Beijing looking out across the city. She can see nothing. Another bad air day in a city that used to count blue sky days. She bends, sitting on the bed without needing to look. The bed sheets are ruffled and tossed about without care. She gets up, removes the sheets, and makes the bed. Sleep did not come easy that night, at least not at first. She had the trappings of a luxurious life at her fingertips and a man that she was, well, interested in. Everything should be happy. Everything should be on track. She had come so far from her home town. She had come so far from her college days. She had come so far from everyone doubting her and telling her she wasn’t smart enough. Wasn’t tall enough. Wasn’t pretty enough. Wasn’t good enough. But here she was and not trapped in some unloving marriage to a man only a parent could love. She was pretty enough, she was tall enough, she was pretty enough. She deserved this. But she wasn’t happy and she could not figure out why. Not being happy didn’t quite capture it. She was plenty happy a lot of the time. It was those other times. Those times when she felt anxious inside not knowing what to do with herself. When she couldn’t relax. When shopping or the man or a good book or a good meal was met with indifference. It was those times that made her know she was not happy. ...
The entire Beijing Allios are sitting down together for a Sunday night dinner which is by itself a bit of a miracle. The fact that I cooked the meal is further evidence. And just to prove the gods sense humor my kids are about to consume the meal I cooked. I take the first bite of the pot roast which I didn’t cook in a stove top pot but in a crock pot. The meat tastes “ok” but not quite as tender as I had expected and certainly not as tender as my separate effort earlier in the week. The sauce, a spaghetti sauce meant to complement the accompanying bow tie pasta is bland. I say so out load. Yang, who is sitting to my left on this night says “It’s great, tastes good” which is a lie; not the first. I notice her plate is filled with the Ayi’s backup plan meal without a hint of pot roast or bow tie pasta to be found. ...
It is not the past nor the future that prevents me from living in the moment. It is the moment itself which I flee. I am listening to Dido’s new album while my daughter is drawing at the park. This will may be the last weekend until April where we are at the park drawing as winter is about set in. In five months she won’t be the same five year old she is now and these moments of her drawing may be gone. But I’m not thinking about that. I’m trying just to focus on the lyrics of the songs, a stanza of which really struck me this morning. “I can walk, with no end, nothing hurts, nothings pain. Nothings missed, no ones gone, moved away, nothings wrong.” ...
It is Saturday morning and I am barely alert when Lydia decides to tell me about the household politics behind the small iPad. In fact, the small iPad is not an iPad or anything Apple made except for the brand. And the brand is strong. The “small iPad” is actually a Google Nexus 7 tablet, circa 2012. I decided to give it to Lydia and Elisa when I bought the Google Nexus 7, circa 2013 version. And, yes, we are that spoiled. So back to the story. The main reason Lydia wanted to tell me about the small iPad politics is for the same reason all big sisters talk about little sisters – vengeance. ...
“On your left, on your left” comes the voice and I turn my head and see the oncoming bike rider. I am startled not by the voice but that someone would bother to call out. That someone would call out on this running/biking trail that connects Bellevue with Seattle over some lake they call Washington. I am not running to Seattle on this day, only about half way there and back, and it is a beautiful day. Sky is blue, temperature warm, air fresh. I run past a mom and her maybe eight year old daughter who are biking on the trail. The go in 200 yard segments. First the daughter bikes in front with the mom following and then the daughter stops and the mom keeps going for a bit at which point she stops and then the daughter starts riding again until she reaches the mom and then she stops. And then they repeat. They are being so safe. ...
It is Saturday morning and Yang tells me that we are going to Xie Dao (crab island) water park with Lydia’s friend’s family at 10am. I am 48 hours away from ending my oncall rotation and my initial thought is to play it safe and stay near an internet connection but it’s been a quiet week so I decide to just go ahead and go. Lydia’s friend’s parents are known to me as “Naomi’s mom” and “Naomi’s dad”. They have three kids, all girls, with a fourth on the way, also a girl. In the five years we’ve lived in our apartment Lydia’s been best friends with Naomi and then Naomi’s younger sister Emily. We’ve had a family outing with them maybe once or twice a year; mostly it is just the kids playing with each other. The Naomi family is moving back to France after seven years in Beijing and have sold their car so I drive them in one of our cars while Yang drives the rest of the Allio clan in the other. Stuck in traffic on the Airport Expressway on the way to Xie Dao my work ankle bracelet kicks in and I get an automated page from work saying there is a problem which needs my “immediate” attention. The voice response system doesn’t accept my acknowledgement so my backup is paged. My backup is also driving and the voice response system doesn’t recognize his acknowledgement either. This causes the incident manager to get paged, which is not a good thing. Knowing this, I frantically go nowhere in traffic eventually making it to Xie Dao which is a zoo. It’s not a water park, it’s a people park. I park and the families minus me head to the water park. I spend the next three hours hunched over the computer, in the suburbs of Beijing, trying to resolve the problem in Latin America which I eventually do. It is not my first wasted Saturday with the kids but my first for this reason and it’s not a good favorite feeling. ...