Family

My alarm wakes me up mid dream at 5:30am. It is four days into the work week and the 5:30am wake up isn’t as jarring as it is on Monday. I spin around on the bed into Cat’s pose trying to loosen myself up. I’ve been feeling very unloose lately. Pee. Brush teeth. Put on workout garb and head downstairs. The fall morning light is waking up with me as it shines through the apartment top window. Aidan is sleeping on the coach as I begin my minute working on in the adjourning kitchen/dining room combo. 25 minutes later I am done and ready for breakfast which I premade for the week. A quick microwave and I am sitting down eating, drinking instant coffee, and checking the overnight sports news. I shower and I dress and then it is 6:50am when I wake up the kids. ...

It is the last day of the October golden week and I am feeling a bit of dread. Something is not right but I don’t know what it is. The feeling of dread comes over me from time to time like an annoying neighbor. Familiar, yet resented. I am taking Aidan and Lydia to Chaoyang Park. Aidan on the promise of basketball and Lydia on the promise of Cotton Candy. We are expecting the basketball courts at the park to be crowded as they are most weekends but on this day they are mostly empty. The rest of the park is crowded with some kind of food festival. My Chinese is getting worse and worse which is part of my dread and so I use Aidan to ask how much the court fee is. 20 RMB per person (about $3.50) so I give the attendant a 50 RMB bill to cover me and Aidan. As I pull out the 50 the attendant is checking out the other notes in my wallet and he asks me for the small bills. I make a gesture for him just to take the 50 and give me the 10 RMB change. He pushes for the small notes trying to be helpful and pointing inside my wallet where he saw a 5 RMB bill. This makes me angry and again my Chinese fails me and again my dread builds. ...

My night is drifting between a vivid bike race dream and hearing my dad’s neighbors. The bike race dream has me competing against a large field of riders but only two come into focus. In my waking hours it is not clear who the other two main competitors are but I’m pretty sure I knew during the dream. I am biking some kind of obstacle course and have to alternate between biking free and carrying my bike over things or up and down stairs. During the race the two competitors sometimes help me and encourage me. Sometimes they are just indifferent. My kids pop up in the dream from time to time. Lydia encouraging, Aidan helpful, Elisa proud. When they show up in the dream I feel confident. The obstacles subside and I am riding free. ...

It is maybe five years ago and I am sitting in a bar that is masquerading as a Mexican restaurant. I am with a friend but for all practical purposes I am alone. I recognize a man sitting a few tables away as a co-worker from a previous project. Someone I had not seen really at all since I abruptly left the project a year before. I waited for a break in the conversation with my friend which was surprisingly difficult given I wasn’t speaking and only partly listening. I walked over to the other table and said “hi jay” and he turned around. I was in full introvert trying to be charming mode and didn’t notice right away that Jay didn’t recognize me. He didn’t recognize me because he wasn’t Jay. ...

I am walking along the sidewalk in Phuket keeping an eye on the kids and trying to avoid the hawkers of goods only tourists could want. We turn the corner in the direction of our hotel when Elisa saddles up to me and grabs my right hand with her left. I look down and say “Hello Elisa” and she responds “Babi, I love you”. Elisa turned six in August and started first grade today. First grade is the first real day of school here since Kindergarten starts from the time they are three and is a kind of combo pre-school and education experience. I think back a couple of years, to the summer of 2011 when I worked from home for 14 months. I would take Elisa out every day after lunch to the “big playground” and sometimes she would play and sometimes she would just nap in her stroller. I’d sit in the park and watch her play or sleep while I listened to my podcasts. When my work was done for the day, I would take her downstairs to the apartment playground and watch her play some more. All this time with Elisa had some effect. Her English was better at the same age as the other kids. And she was really close to me. ...

Lydia, Elisa, and I are playing nerf basketball in my apartment. Lydia has made two long distance shots so far, the same as me. She has a grace about her when she moves and a joy when the ball goes into the hoop. Then she announces she is done playing. I negotiate for her to play until the next basket is scored and she says “ok”. This is Lydia. One moment a gift. The next moment her feet dug in, protecting. One might say she is like her father. Her father would. ...

In the kitchen sink sits the small green plastic strainer that my mom used to catch organic things as she washed the dishes. It is now used to filter cigarette ashes when my father washes his ashtray which isn’t really ashtray but a small dish. Kind of an ode to when he quit smoking 40 years ago during our Russian River family vacation (happy joy joy). Truth be told no one except him really knows for how long he quit. There was the cigar phase and then the sneaking of cigarettes phase. Men do like their secrets and this was one of his. ...

I have a time travel machine, however in only goes in one direction. My mind, however, has another kind of time travel machine and one that mostly only travels in one direction as well. To the past. The year is 1997 and I’m thinking about CJ. CJ was my Labrador retriever and taught me to run in the rain. Or I should say taught me to love to run in the rain. In 1997 I was living alone with CJ and between my work and grad school at night I wasn’t home very much. This wasn’t good for CJ as he had a lot of energy. To do my job as a dog dad I would walk up early with him every morning and run with him and when I got home at night, no matter how late, I would take him running again. On the weekend I went on especially long runs with him. Rain or shine like a mailman without mail. ...

Shunyi is a suburb of Beijing where the people with enough money can live in a very comfortable low security western style jail. If you have not been to Beijing, yes, I am being sarcastic. If you have been to Beijing and Shunyi, you will know what I mean even if you think I am wrong. I should back track. Unwind this puppy. I am a fundamentally open minded person (at least that is what I tell myself when surrounded by myself) and can understand that for some expats and rich Chinese the Shunyi suburb lifestyle is the best Beijing has to offer them; it’s just not for me. Not with its moonscape with dust landscape and the quasi chic experiences even though I do see the appeal of a house with a basement. ...

I am standing at the counter with Lydia waiting for our drinks. Cold drinks on this hot Beijing May afternoon. Lydia is getting a mango lemon drink and me, feeling super, went for a Strawberry milkshake and by the looks of things it was going to be a good one. Just as I started to wonder why it was taking the stand’s worker so long to blend the milkshake a boy, maybe 12, scooted between me and the counter and right into any sense of space I had. My good mood disappeared and over my right shoulder came the boy’s parents asking him what he wanted. They could have whispered in my ear, they were that close, but instead if felt as if they were yelling over my body to reach the boy. At first I held my ground in some kind of childish demonstration and when that had no effect I became even more childish and stepped away with a flurry and stood at the edge of the street, fuming. Lydia walked up to me and put her arm on my back and said “relax, dad, relax”. And I did. Is it possible this girl isn’t even 10 yet? ...