The good years

The momentary pink across the clouds as the sky fades to black

As the sun goes down and the water features are turned off I apply bug spray to myself and the youth. In a slow procession we move from one park to another; from the running water and streams we head to the castle, dirt, and playgrounds of Asukayama koen. Our group gathers bikes, changes wet clothes for dry, buys snacks, orders pizza, and settles onto a picnic table for the evening. It is a Sunday in July in the summer of twenty twenty five and I am sure these are the good years.

The children in our group of three families range from two to six. We the parents are in our late thirties, early forties. Our mid forties. Most of our parents are still alive. Some of our grandparents are still alive. We are all healthy, all still able to run and to carry. Well, save for my broken arm, though on this evening it doesn’t stop me from pushing swings, spinning carousels, carrying children, and eventually climbing the monkey bars with them, gingerly in the dark.

As a person I am not always good at appreciating things. I am always considering improvements, or other topics. One of the best parts of parenting is the constant requirement to be present, to sit and watch on the playground, to help draw silly animals. It’s not automatic. There are often other things I feel I should be doing. That feeling is not the truth, and learning the difference has not been easy. Is not easy.

Occasionally, though, the good is so strong and so blindingly temporary that I am aware. As Bourdain said, “I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize”. I may not yet have learned, but I can be compelled. And so, on this July evening, as the light shifts and the forceful heat of a Tokyo summer day fades into the kind of beautiful dusk that feels automatic to the season but is in fact too rare, I look around. I watch the children, one biking and the rest running after. I watch the couples, new friends, telling each other stories of how they met. I watch other families in their own small gatherings, with their own children and friends. I watch the band, that plays for half an hour in public, an odd collection of all ages making music together. I watch the Shinkansen, the Kehin-Tohoku, the Toden-Arakawa, and the Shonan-Shinjuku lines from a pedestrian bridge as the children yell “train, train” and run from one side to another chasing the lights.

I am lucky, in these moments. The past few months have been hard, and injuries are never kind to the mind. Good then to have a few long summer evenings in the park with friends. Good to emerge dirty, exhausted, and satisfied.

On the tram home we say goodbye with the gladness of those grateful for the hours.

“That was the first time we got to let him run like that,” one of the parents will tell me later. “He was all scraped and dirty, and it felt good.”

“My daughter too,” I’ll say, and, “it really felt like summer.”

Milestones

In the course of a few weeks we pass a collection of significant dates. It’s a tell of the family which get marked publicly and which we simply mention to each other before bed. Some are full-on celebrations, balloons signs cake and parties. Some are family dates we remember with calls, with FaceTime and gratitude.

Some are the quieter memorials of a text or two to those who know, marked with no conversation.

These moments, each of them important each of them a humbling note of what it means to still be alive, are our lives. They are the summer of twenty twenty five. And yet in some way they are new, too.

Three years old is a step above two, as far as language and dexterity go. Surely each year will feel this way, at least until 30. It’s a fact that doesn’t take away from the sense of importance.

Likewise our parents aging no longer seems like a given, instead requiring some gratitude. These are the shifts of middle age.

And then too there are the milestones of injury and recovery, which have silenced this site the past few weeks. We heal, we breathe, and we inch back towards the people we aim to be. Mostly we are grateful for the support, and even more so that it has been so long since we needed as much.

Whenever the weather

a sliver of Victoria Park and the sun on our rooftop

The family sleeps, finally, and I sit outside. It’s been a long week. They’re all long weeks, in some ways. We work till midnight and again at 8 am. Clara plays hard until she comes down with the fever that Kristel had earlier in the week, so we go from no child care to caring for a sick child. Sleep suffers further. Tara travels to China and back one afternoon. We buy legos.

In between we try to run in the park, or along the harbor, or by the library. Tara takes C to find new books, our first HK library borrows. We host C’s friends on Sunday, and have the type of long evening with friends that has been rare. Lingering outside as it gets dark, feeding people dinner, cleaning up piecemeal as people move inside. Children’s parties usually end by 6, and the entire evening feels like a reminder of something I’ve never experienced.

I’m reminded of fireflies, and of old colleagues turned humans I miss.

In the mornings, while Panadol is still bringing comfortable sleep to some, I pet the cat, stretch, and sit outside to write. These quiet hours are good for me, despite the tiredness. They’re when I keep in touch with people, and myself. The best things to do are the things that don’t feel like work, and writing and reaching out have never felt like that way.

May they never do.

Alley days

A Tai Hang alley, sans occupants

In an alley I love a trash collector sleeps with his feet up on one of Hong Kong’s emblematic carts. Earphones in, hat pulled low, he enjoys the respite, however brief. It is lunch time, and the line at the dai pai dong down the street is long, but the workload low.

Next to him an Ayi takes a break under a canopy, watching videos on her phone behind the house she cleans. It’s a good reminder of what phones have given the world, an escape for the working class. It’s a good reminder that the world is still out there, around the corner, even if my life is too often on a zoom call with similarly-computer-based humans.

I miss my old jobs. I miss the hours spent on long distance busses in China in ’06 and ’07. I miss the hours spent on high speed trains and trans-Pacific flights from twenty eleven to twenty eighteen. I don’t miss the hotels, the fancy dinners. Rather I miss the opportunities to encounter the world, to meet people who had moved from farms to the factories of Dongguan or Zhuhai. I miss meeting the locals of Yangzhou or Ningbo, of Shaoxing or Changzhou, the people doing well for themselves in the boom years of Chinese globalization. I miss too the small factories of Manila, of Osaka, of Daegu and towns in between. These are the places I learned about people, about trust, and about process. Hours at lunches and in lines, hours checking products and talking to supervisors are where I discovered the odd combination of needs and benefits that drove globalization. Those hours were how I learned we are all part of the same world, people at all levels, in every direction.

Here in Hong Kong, in a professional life dominated by zoom, I appreciate the alleys of Tai Hang more than ever. They remind me of the people I do not get to see. The people who move, carry, build, teach, inspect, package, assemble, feed, wherever they may be. I miss them, and am glad for a reminder after noodles and coffee in an alley.

Music, in physical form

“Tracey’s voice is so lovely,” a friend writes. He’s hearing Amplified Heart for the first time, on vinyl. I’m celebrating the ability to share something with someone. I’m celebrating the ability to physically give things, in the way share used to be meant. In the modern world physical goods are equally a gift to the sender: the delivery of vinyl nearly demanding a response, nearly demanding a listen.

Mentioned a half dozen times on this site already, the nineteen ninety four album remains in my top five records. First given to me in Kawaguchi in two thousand two, in the era of ripping minidiscs of friends’ CD’s, Everything But the Girl’s perfect album has soundtracked much of the intervening twenty years. It’s still something I reach for on waking with space and time, on Saturdays or public holidays.

Playing “Troubled Mind” this morning after the above text, it matched my own brain so well, befuddled from working till two am.

I remember that song from nights spent watching the Saikyo line pass from my Yonohonmachi balcony. It was the first train line I’d ever lived near enough to see out the window. My vision of a “goods train” was built on the sound of that line blended with the coal trains that ran up the shore of Cayuga to the power plant in my youth, on whose path we would flatten pennies.

Two weeks ago we played Joan Armatrading in our tiny Tokyo apartment, the central lyric ringing out through open screens.

“You called all the way from America, and said I’ll soon be home girl.”

The record, well loved, is a gift carried from that country to this, from one home to another. The joy of music in physical form demanding a spin, demanding entrance into the space we share. And the words, long a Saturday morning favorite in our Hong Kong homes, feel both familiar and brand new.

The soundtracks of our lives are intentional, self-created structures of repetition that anchor elements of the people we once were to our current selves. My dozens and dozens of plays of Jai Wolf’s remix of Kiiara’s “Feels” are tied so specifically to the weekend in Shanghai I first discovered it, to the metro out to Waigaoqiao for ultimate, to the type of long commutes made better with obsessions.

And yet our soundtracks are the product too of our friends, of their music overheard or shared. Our soundtracks are built in partnership during relationships, and as a response to them when they end. So often old songs long forgotten become the anchor for something new out of the coincidence of shuffle, the ease of access. Our vinyl collection in Tokyo is a strange reminder of the physical space those songs now occupy, the cardboard box that houses music that can not be listened to in Hong Kong.

Save that it can, and that our dalliance with such items is a way to anchor our listening, rather than necessary to enable it. We are working to build a new world, and that world has specific songs engraved into mornings and evenings, into the family moments and the late night ones. It’s a world of the Sound of Music, an old copy dug out of record bins near Ikebukuro, and a brand new copy of Blue purchased in Shibuya. The afternoons of sunlight on the balcony are built on copies of the Jezabel’s Brink and Star’s Set Yourself On Fire, and the evenings to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Burials’ self-titled debut.

Like my friend hearing Disenchanted and 25th of December for the first time in Ann Arbor, our listening is supplemented by what friends have given, from Joan Armatrading to Nirvana and Daft Punk. As we play them all in rotation we remember the friends, their gift and their intention. Some times, building block towers with Clara to tunes I know well but did not bring to this space, I look up, realizing that “Landslide” will always have a new meaning, of tiny magnetile towers tumbling, and say a silent thank you to the visitors who brought us both.