relaxing

Weekends away

A two story concrete castle play structure in a park in northern Tokyo

On Thursday we slip out, taking calls from the airport mid-day. By dinner we’re in Tokyo, eating sandwiches and milk on the Skyliner, holding on to the grip handles of the Yamanote, and wandering the little streets we know before bed. It’s a good way to start a long weekend. It’s exactly what we were hoping for.

On Friday the ladies visit the aquarium, a day out in the kind of chill rain Hong Kong never gets. It’s 5 C and we’re happy, wearing clothes we’d almost forgotten we owned. Winter feels like a long time ago, in our lives, and 5’s has never really felt one, only a few days on the east coast of the US last year. She says “rain” and “cold” as we wander, both relatively new words.

Mostly we enjoy the kind of simple empty life that is common in new places and rare in our homes. It’s rare to have weekends without schedule, without sports or birthdays, friends or planned gatherings. That’s good, because we live for the groups, for the sports and activities. We are who we share our lives with. Mostly. Other times it’s nice to take the tram to stations we have only seen from mapping apps and to explore new parks without larger ambition. We find castles this way, and a view of train lines. We find swings and slides and so many children. These are the parts of Tokyo we’d hoped to learn, entirely new areas. We have a new way of looking at a city we both love, through the eyes of a toddler searching for rocks, for seeds, and for playgrounds. The kid infrastructure here, like I tell my friend, is amazing, new kinds of play areas, castles with double decker slides.

In the evening we bathe together. The Japanese style shower before tub enables a certain kind of sharing, a certain family style, that’s hard to do otherwise, especially in the cold. Here it feels normal, and the weather makes 5’s clamor for bath a couple hours earlier than normal. It’s the kind of evening I hoped for, no tourist spot or life reason to be in Tokyo, just the quiet reality of being here, of living like this.

Twenty plus years later I still feel more comfortable here than most anywhere.

Later we go to dinner, a local place that caters to groups of young working folk, good food, big drinks, and not very expensive. I love it, the combination makes a perfect spot for our family. 5’s charms groups of ladies and we already know the staff. As we pack up a group of eight middle aged women come in to share a meal, a kind of social gathering that doesn’t feel so rare, here on the north side of Tokyo.

We walk home happy, a quick stop at the grocery store for yogurt and strawberries, and then read books and roll on the floor before bed.

“This is your twenty year old self’s dream,” a friend told me, back in October.

I’m not sure, any more. The twenty years between then and now are hard to see through.

I am happy though, here in Tokyo in twenty twenty four, exploring parks and buying groceries, taking baths and eating out. It’s a good break from the rest of our lives.

Off hours

The kind of quiet Monday I last enjoyed in the spring sneaks up on me. I rise early and make coffee, acknowledging the cat by leaving the sink tap dripping for a bit. He prefers to drink running water with quick laps of that tiny pink tongue, and I prefer to let him. In the dark of the kitchen we make space for each other, me pouring boiling water over grounds and him two paws down in the sink, two paws up on the counter, making tiny splashing sounds.

We retire to the office once the coffee is done, where I scrub emails and reach out to factory staff to plan visits later in the week. It’s too early for them to be on site yet, and in an hour I’ve accomplished enough to pause until they reply. The cat and I wake Tara with tea and move to the sunroom to read the news and lie on the rug until she arrives. We read and she plays the guitar for a bit until the neighborhood is fully risen. These minutes of morning together are likewise a gift of this kind of Monday, and we appreciate them. Quite often one or the other of us is traveling, is at the train station early or the airport even earlier, and there is none of this shared peace, reading while the children next door leave for school.

After a while the neighborhood is awake, children out and office workers likewise. The shops open and deliveries start to arrive, and Tara departs for work, a short bus ride or walk. Again this commute is a gift of our life here. No longer are the bus rides an hour plus of private shuttles down the peninsula. As she leaves I set the robot vacuum to work, appeasing the cat with a high perch safe from the trundling commotion. He accepts this reluctantly, and naps while I follow up with the responses arriving from factory staff and US teammates. These colleagues are conducting a ritual I know so well, that of the Sunday evening email scrub to prepare for the week. It’s a part of life I have left behind in my journey to the future. In return I now work Saturday mornings, a few hours of quiet catch up on the end of the US work week. These hours are a fair trade, as they overlap with some factories sixth working day. I’m happier with this schedule, trading Friday dinner time emails in the US for Saturday morning ones, letting Tara sleep in while I chase shipping documents and wire transfers. There’s an unspoken rule in this exchange, a pact we all mostly keep: one day a week without email. Saturday in the US and Sunday in Asia are sacred, a shared time for everything else in our lives. One day a week of peace. And as a result the last quarter of my weekend sometimes comes, strangely, on Mondays.

So it is that afternoons like this Monday, where replies trickle in and there is no specific urgency to any situation, sneak up on me, for they are not planned. Instead, upon realizing myself so gifted I head to the gym or to the grocery store. Occasionally I write, or nap with the cat. Days like this are rare. Last week on Monday I was on a 7 am flight to Taiwan. The week before I was already in Japan. The week before that I was already in San Francisco. More than a month, I think, since the last of these quiet mornings with the cat. And so I relax and appreciate the gift of living once again in the future, in UTC+8, and working at least partially in the past.

Time away

In a shop on Rue de la Roquette a man buys white peonies. They are in bloom and smell excellent. He intents to purchase five and ends up with ten. On the table of their rooftop apartment, next to the balcony doors, ten is a good number. He doesn’t mind the earlier linguistic confusion. It is that kind of week.

In the mornings they wander the Seine in cloudy weather. In afternoons they eat lunch on the balcony, often at four, and nap in the sun until six. They read, and write, and talk about the last eight years. Sometimes, after a bottle of wine, they talk about the next eight. Mostly though those conversations involve work, peripherally, and so are avoided. They look at photos of a year previous and celebrate health. A year prior they weren’t aware how hard things would get. Now they are both healing, both able to run, and both thinking of the future as a gift rather than challenge. Twenty fourteen at last seems lucky in the late afternoon light, and they can reminisce without tears.

Let’s leave them here, on this rooftop in Paris, for a while.