Before what

The kind of window view I always cherish

I try to always live in the before.

Before whatever terrible event will cut this short. Before our future. Before we stop being able to fly to frisbee tournaments in different countries. Before we need masks. Before we needed visas. Before we were so injured. Before our bodies hurt. Before we were afraid.

So much of whatever superpower I have comes from living in a very brief window between that wonderful day that lives strong in our memories and right now holding on tight to this branch that’s holding us up. It’s the way I scale ledges that will not hold me again, the way I survived a decade of building climbing (buildering, they say now I hear). Mostly survived. Mostly survived. It’s the way I handle traffic, stepping out into it without fear, and the way I have managed to continue.

Parenting is a series of encounters with our own mortality. Between our inevitable physical decline, offset for however long by strong routines, by gym afternoons, by “active lifestyles”, and the clear, clear sense that whatever we do or live for will matter less than we hope to the generations after us, to the generations we are so invested in building.

These aren’t new revelations, and the decline in written correspondence, internet or otherwise, by friends who have children is incredibly clear. Not only do we have less time for thinking, less quiet hours to craft words around our experiences, but we are also so much more aware of the limited importance of our unique point of view, of the experiences that have shaped the self we are now trying to improve. For parenting is a series of attempts to improve ourselves, to be the parents, the people, we aspire to be before our children are old enough to know the truth.

We are learning Japanese, reading children’s books before bed in a language we can barely read. It’s a silly goal, yet it is a goal, it is who we are. It’s who we want to be. And just like that, like our bike adventures this afternoon, across half of northern Tokyo, so much is clear.

We are desperately trying to live, now. While we are able, physically mentally and emotionally. While we are able to, between work trips and zoom calls. While we are able to, after we have been given exceptional opportunities and before we are too jaded to value them. Before we are too jaded to value them. It’s not an easy thing to write. None of this is easy to write. That’s why we share less. We are less sure.

And so I look back to the decades of buildering, to the freedom I feel when holding on to something secure, hanging off the side of our apartment block in Tokyo, checking out a pipe leak. Few people feel that free, even today. And fewer still have the scars, some sharply visible some faded with time, of all the times whatever it was didn’t hold.

We’re getting older, here, teaching our daughter about e-bikes and metro systems, about weather patterns and friend networks. We’re teaching her things we’d never seen, in places we’d never imagined. We’re still learning, all of us, in this before.

I’m grateful. That’s the truth. For every single minute, here now or after.

Practice season

A view of a frisbee field in Bangkok as the sun sets

For much of the past three decades I’ve traveled to chase plastic on grass. More recently on beaches as well, as the sand requires no cleats, which means packing lighter. The frisbee teams we were part of define so much of our memories, both individually and as a couple. Are part of, I should say, as it is the season, and we are out there, sometimes with company. Like all things as parents, practice is at a different priority level, and though we see the field most weekends, we aren’t as reliable as years past.

For a weekend, though, we are back. I land in Bangkok at eight am, fresh off a red eye. Tara’s been in town since the night before, staying with the team in a giant Airbnb. Bangkok’s customs have been improved, and I’m in a Grab on the way to the fields within 25 minutes of landing, only missing some of the first game. For a few hours we don’t think of much else save our abilities, our team, and the effort we can give. It’s muddy, and standing barefoot on the sidelines after the last game, feeling my heart rate come back to normal, I am happy. We are alive, out here in the world. Different, for sure, but still able to run. The end of games Saturday has long been one of my favorite times.

The next day our legs are sore, our bodies surprised but resilient. We wake not to the ruckus of Classy but to the smell of a new teammate cooking. Plus we have a bed. It’s a good change, something our older bodies appreciate. I often tell teammates in Hong Kong they have no idea how many hotel floors we’ve slept on, and I am glad. It’s not a hardship I consider important to growing up with this game. Fewer hotel floors would be good for everyone.

And at the end of the day Sunday, well and truly tired, I once again stand on the grass barefoot. It’s a weird sensation, to be out here again, just two of us instead of three. It won’t be that common. More likely, like Malaysia or Bangkok last year, like dozens of weekends, we’ll spend the evening as a family after running hard. For this weekend, though, I’m happy to have a moment without responsibility. Our games done, we watch the finals with a beer. There aren’t many moments like this in our new life, where we have no one else to keep an eye on, nor any need to run ourselves. As the sun starts to set I try to remember the feeling, to store it up for the next few months.

Or at least until the next tournament.

Historical, in a way

Our memories, I’ve often written, are fragile things. They are temperamental stores of meaning that capture in bursts rather than extended pans. For each critical moment, a last conversation with a friend or being present at someone’s wedding, there are hours and hours of unremarked-on time traveling to each. These points are not the highlights of our lives, but they are our lives. We are made in large parts of transit time and sleep, and scarcely remember either. Those hours, though, make our memories. Down time is not just down time. It’s time to think, time organize our experiences into the structures we’ll recall later.

Sitting in the Singapore Airlines lounge at HKG I think about the time I’ve spent here prior. Years of solo travel: late night returns to San Francisco after weeks in Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhuhai. In those years much of my thinking time happened in transit. Hours on the road served as a buffer zone, as time to assimilate hundreds of small moments in factories into stories, into a self narrative and a report on work done. Much of inhab.it came from those times, or from similar ones. Lazy Friday afternoons at Cotton’s after long bus rides back from Shaoxing crafted half a dozen posts, and more real letters. Later missives started in the Virgin America terminal at SFO, long-since rebranded. Or at the Pullman Hotel in Shanghai, after days at printers in Pudong. Or at the Pullman in Chang’an, after days tightening injection tolerances, days waiting for tooling changes. Posts come from quiet Saturday mornings in Hong Kong after crossing the border back late at night, or from the La Quinta in El Paso or the Holiday Inn Express in Juarez.

These moments, each quickly pulled back to my mind by considering a location, and where I wrote when there, do not represent my purpose. They do not represent the thing I was on the road to do, nor the people I was there to meet. Instead they represent the moments I had to think, and the hours to myself. These are rare, now, seemingly ever more so.

An hour alone in this lounge in HKG, in a place I remember well, where I often now sit feeding a toddler, is a good reminder that these moments aren’t gone. Much like the rest of this trip, two weeks out in a series of odd loops, our old habits are still inside of us, waiting to be called by circumstance or choice.

Possible lives

The youth of tomorrow today stepping through the doorway of a shrine in Fukuoka

On the Shinkansen passing through Hiroshima I think about events of twenty plus years ago and possible other lives.

When I was young I never understood the phrases uttered by my elders.

“I haven’t been to Italy since the ’80’s,” they would say, in ’97 or ’04. “Loved it, but I don’t know, it’s probably changed”.

Why hadn’t they been back, I wondered, in ten years? What had kept them away if they loved that earlier trip? Surely I would not make that mistake, surely I would return more frequently to places I love.

I loved our time in Hiroshima, twenty two years ago.

More shocking than the gap, though, is the distance between what I imagined then and now. That trip was to a place neither of us lived, just friends exploring the world. It was the kind of trip I assumed would be common, would be a regular part of life. After all we were young and had already been so many places.

We are older, now, and have been so, so many more places. The lists grow long enough that we forget trips, forget why we were in one city or another. Some of them we’ve even done together: a weekend in Oakland, two years ago now. A long weekend in Colorado, fifteen years ago. Weddings, ours and others.

It’s still too short a list, for a friendship that’s spanned twenty five years. Life happens, of course. That’s what the younger me didn’t know, or couldn’t understand. Life happens, not in the big moments but in the day to day, in the small commitments to sports teams and jobs, to family and fitness. Life happens whether we do or do not.

On this Sunday, passing through Hiroshima at high speed, we are on our way to see another friend, or to see another friend’s family. His daughter is eleven, his widow grown wise in a way we’d prefer not to. They understand, in ways I still don’t, what it means to live in the present. That’s why we are on this train, why they will meet us at the station. So we can spend one evening together, wandering Fukuoka. One evening, after five years, is not long enough. It’s barely enough to hear all that’s happened, to hear the high points of our plans for the future, of her school, of work, of houses and retirement and parents.

One evening is not long enough for me to feel comfortable remembering, to feel comfortable telling stories. Next time, I tell myself.

And thinking of Hiroshima, of that trip with another old friend, now twenty years passed, I resolve: don’t let them wait. Don’t let the next time be so long. Whatever the cost.

“Come to Japan in the fall,” I tell my friend in LA via text the next morning. “We have to make it happen.”

“November,” he says, and my spirits rise.

Seen things

The sky fades at sunset over the harbor in Hong Kong, with TST in the foreground

For two years, we have the kind of view that I will never be able to capture adequately, never be able to share completely. From our vantage point we watch the rain roll in from the north, pour down on distant islands and sweep over Kowloon until it obscures one of the world’s tallest buildings, until it finally pushes across sports fields and the park to crash against our glass-walled box. As the view disappears I feel lucky to be alive.

Looking left, up the hills of Hong Kong island towards the towers of Leighton Hill, Beverly Summit, and Jardine’s Lookout, I play a game, unfocusing my eyes against the mass of towers. I watch windows, elevators, and stairwell lights flick on and off, looking at the patterns rather than the details, creating my own personal pixel art. A few seconds unfocused like this are enough to see two or three lights turn on, or off. It’s beautiful in the way of Star Wars cities, of Bladerunner. The impossible density of Hong Kong made visible due to my height.

From the twenty seventh floor we can see twenty odd tennis courts, eight soccer pitches, three pools, six basketball courts, and two pickle-ball style short courts. Plus a running track, a school quad, the central library, and a half dozen hotels, office towers, and neon signs, all without considering the apartments, without considering the harbor, without considering Kowloon or the distant islands. The view is all encompassing, and the architects took advantage, constructing our entire tower on an angle so as to maximize it, and filling the walls with nothing but glass.

We will probably never have a view like this again. It’s a product of Covid, of us putting our travel budget into our apartment, of lowered rents, and of good jobs. Two years later it feels absurd, like something we should reconsider. We do.

Tonight, though, watching the rain sweep across the harbor, blotting out the neon temporarily, I know I’ll never forget this, and I’ll struggle to describe it. So I try, sitting on the balcony until the rain passes, eyes wide to memorize. And then I return to the table, to write while looking out at the Star Ferry, at M+ and the rest of TST, at Langham Place all the way out in Mong Kok, and at the towers of Admiralty, just barely visible behind Times Square and Hysan in Causeway.

This is a lucky view. I can see probably 800 hotel rooms scattered among the towers, and the lightning that strikes the tallest one in front of me is four times its height. The cruise ships that pull past in the mornings are huge, and yet temporary against the mountains behind the city, against the peaks of Lantau visible on clear days.

The fireworks, when they happen, are just in front of the yacht club, which I have watched closely with binoculars, looking for boats bearing friends. The fireworks at Disneyland are visible on a clear day, small plumes on the horizon.

The flight path north out of HKG goes straight overhead, high enough to be beautiful rather than a nuisance, and we watch the varied liveries for fun. The tram line runs just in front, far enough away to likewise be picturesque but close enough to hear, sometimes, from the balcony. The elevated highway along the water, the new walkway out towards north point, the walk of stars along the TST waterfront, all these things are visible, and beautiful.

It is the kind of view filled with too much to write about, too much to describe. On Saturdays we watch the junk boats pull out from Central, carrying their party crews to bays out around the corners of Hong Kong. At sunset we watch the clouds, the sky, and the water change colors from bright to oranges and pinks, until at last the sun falls behind the mountains and everything fades into purples.

I don’t expect to have this view for long, and I will try to remember how much I’ve seen while sitting here, these past two years.

I’ve seen things, indeed.