From boxes once again

Looking out of a Chennai hotel window at the city

For the first time in years, I have a day off in a hotel in a country not my own. For the first time in years, I am sick in a foreign country, and hunt familiar cures. My colleagues bring me coconuts and local concoctions, which I appreciate. It’s been a while since that happened, too.

These are not the adventures we seek, though they do seem to be some of the ones I write about. Outside my window in Chennai military jets do barrel rolls and launch flares, celebrating Ghandi’s birthday and preparing for the upcoming air show. The spirals and tight maneuvers are as impressive as ever, a reminder of what humans can build, and what the edge of possible looks like. “They’re basically space” my partner used to say, watching the Blue Angels in California, and I agree. Would that we used them less for war. Still, I am grateful for this view, once gain granted something I have never expected to see. Cities of accident, I called them long ago, and while they are not particularly accidents, this time, they are definitely not places I had on any kind of list.

Below them people play in the pool while birds wheel above, the best part of this view. Chennai feels dense with animals. Small chipmunks scamper across the pool deck when people are absent, and the birds perch on the edge constantly. Pigeons float up to a ledge just beneath my window, and a hawk lingers in the wind. Further off I can see stadiums, towers, and new construction. I can see a half-built and abandoned apartment building and smaller concrete houses that, with their unfinished walls, show marks of aging expected from this humid climate.

After a day of rest in Singapore last weekend, where the surroundings were more commercial and the hotel room far smaller, I am feeling better. Sometimes the breaks we need are enforced rather than planned. The gift of these days, then, is both in my lack of other plans due to the focused nature of work travel, and the weakness of illness that saps my body of it’s normal activity requirements. For the first time since my last illness I take more than one nap a day and feel no regrets for missing something. For the first time in ages I do not mind what the world is doing, instead content to hold my own body and mind together.

And yet I talk to people. The world is changing, they tell me. “My plane from Delhi to Singapore was full of VC’s heading home,” says a colleague, “All the money in one place all the opportunity in the other.” We live in these small capsules of learning, of shared experience, aggregating our conversations and readings into a world view. “Delhi is a great food city now,” another colleague says. From Chennai I can not say, but there is a sense of an entire section of the world becoming visible. This is my second time in India, both for this job. Neither has given me a deep view, nor covered the kinds of things I would on my own initiative. That is work travel. It breaks us from our patterns, puts us into situations we would never otherwise approach, and shows us people in their normal context, working hard. In most contexts we are all working hard.

I’m grateful for the window into Indian office life, into Singaporean and Indonesian factories. I’m grateful for the time on ferries between countries not my own, on domestic flights in other nations, and on windowsills like this one, looking out at the world.

Even if the cost is high.

A really good moment

Looking out from the Kesei Skyliner on the way into Tokyo at the evening sky

We wave goodbye in front of the station.

They turn right, under the Yamanote line and towards their hotel. We turn left, towards home. We walk slowly, at toddler speed, through streets we know. Past the temple, re-opened at last. Past restaurants and the sento. It’s a perfect fall evening, cold enough to reward jackets yet not cold enough to stop us waiting for our table at dinner outside.

There are only a few nights in life where we feel as though we’ve done everything right. A bit later, looking out from our balcony at Sunshine 60 after my partner has taken the child to the sento, I know that this was one. Like Anthony Bourdain would say about his nights in the back of a truck after a long day filming, great moments are often only clear long after the fact, and one of the great ways to grow is to recognize them sooner.

We spent more than an hour waiting for a table at a kaiten sushi chain near the station. I’ve never waited an hour and a half for a table for anything in my whole life. That’s the first sign everything’s alright. An extra hour and a half with my best friend since 17. An hour plus with his kid and my kid, with his partner and my partner. Time spent talking, with no other requirement, with no other place to be. And then enough sushi to fill all six of us, to satisfy everyone’s desires. The whole way home I thought how good it felt, to have both families just a few blocks apart, to be able to wave goodbye knowing we can get coffee together in the morning.

We showed them our neighborhood. They walked home from the station, everyone full and happy, no place they’d rather be. In a life where we are lucky to have 20 hours, where we are lucky to see each other once a year, this extra couple hours, this long evening and short walks home through Tokyo feels like the luckiest thing.

There’s no more. That’s enough for this life.

In the wind

A container ship pulling into San Francisco bay past Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge

I stand on one of the docks stretching into the harbor in San Francisco and watch the sea lions. Twice I try to take a video of their playful noise, and they, used to this tourist game, go silent immediately. The wind is brisk. All non-runners wear jackets. My companion remarks that San Francisco looks beautiful, and it’s true. Alcatraz is much closer than I remember. That may be because this is not my San Francisco. In the ten years we lived here I ventured to the Marina / North Beach / Chrissy field area no more than a couple dozen times. Over or around the hill, it was a long way to go, and after our friends moved, we had no need, save the climbing gym in the Presidio, which is itself a different world.

On this morning, the clouds hang just low enough to be felt, and just far enough, on the other side of the bay, to have no impact. It’s picturesque in a way I do remember. The air is crisp in a way that feels good for the body.

Later, work complete, I drift down and around Embarcadero, stopping for a coffee briefly. It’s another section of the city I know but don’t own, something visited after work or while playing Pokemon Go all those years back. The ferry building feels nice, in a way more alive and welcoming than I remember.

“Larkspur, to your left, Larkspur, to your left,” calls a woman out front. She’s middle aged and white, which stands out in service workers here. She helps some German tourists who hustle off for their boat. Near the shared bike parking spot a three pedicab riders wait and chat. An interesting job, I think. Good tourist places support such a variety of jobs. In North Beach, near the hotel I’d spent the week at, there are nightly comedy clubs and a variety of performance spaces. SF does still feel full of artists and visitors. After a year of running our work gatherings in the Union Square / Tenderloin area, the fresh air and tourist attractions are calming.

At the Embarcadero, post coffee, I message friends and get back on the e bike. Cheap rental e-bikes are transformative for a city scape, and I drift slowly south and west through streets that grow ever more familiar. Like Shanghai, I am never lost, though, like Shanghai, I sometimes have forgotten specifics. A couple of visits a year for work have kept things fresh despite the six year gap. I wonder, post pandemic, how my memories of Shanghai would hold up. Street grids take a long time to change.

Finally, in the Mission, I meet friends in a place where I still know an owner, in streets where I know which buildings were built when, and remember the turnover in dozens of shops. Some things are newly gone, or changed, but the area feels more alive than it has. These swings, Friday afternoons that turn intense weeks of work into, eventually, Sunday mornings at home in Hong Kong via slow e-bike rides, drinks or meals with old friends, and eventually a car to an airport and a long, bumpy flight, are how I connect our new life to my memories.

It still works, I think, jet lagged in the Hong Kong humidity.

The world still works.

Sometimes that’s enough.

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 the ability to stay, mentally, in a very brief window between the type of “sunny day on the grass relaxing without worry” memories we all recall as good times and right now holding tight to this branch that’s holding me up. It’s the way I scale crumbling ledges that will not hold me a second time, the way I survived a decade of building climbing (buildering, I hear it called now). Mostly survived. Mostly survived. It’s the way I handle traffic by stepping out into it without fear, and the way I have managed to continue to live in uncertainty.

Parenting is a series of encounters with our own mortality. Between our inevitable physical decline, offset for however long by strong routines, gym afternoons, “active lifestyles”, and the clear, clear sense that whatever we do, what we are living for, will matter less than we hope to the generations after us. Will matter almost not at all to the generations we are so invested in building.

These aren’t new revelations. The decline in written correspondence, internet or otherwise, by friends who have children is incredibly clear. Not only do us parents have less time for thinking, fewer quiet hours to craft words around our experiences, we are also so much more aware of the limited importance of our unique point of view. We can clearly see the limits of the experiences that 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, or 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 to, 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 am grateful for the the freedom I feel still. Glad to feel secure this week when hanging off the side of our apartment block in Tokyo, holding on to a ledge to check on a pipe leak. Few people feel that free, even today. And fewer still have the scars, some sharply visible and some faded with time, of all the times whatever it was didn’t hold.

We’re getting older. We are 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.