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.

Language of life

At twenty months 5’s language explodes. She sings twinkle twinkle little star after hearing it a half dozen times. She says the abc’s and constantly makes small sentences. We are astonished onlookers.

We have no pride in her outbursts, only shock. I am often an open-mouthed observer of this person, so barely able and yet so clearly someone new. I watch her repeat things to me that I do not understand with a patience I still search for. Her grin when at last I catch on is full of pride, and of joy. The value of communication, after a year plus without, is clear from her face.

In the evenings we sit on the balcony and play with seeds, with shells, with rocks. She makes messes and picks them up, pours small objects from one flower pot to another, and asks for help finding rocks that have snuck out of reach under other objects. I lean against the glass of the sliding door and watch, eyes half on her and half on the harbor. These are the content moments, work done, evenings routines not yet upon us. We are happy here, not yet forty five and not yet two, and I try to watch carefully enough to remember.

Two weeks later she says “Yes please 5’s blow it” when offered hot food, and we are shocked but happy with the easy communication. She wanders the house saying “Mommy where are you?” when one of us is out of sight, the kind of comfortable exclamation that has been impossible the past twenty one months. She exhorts her Tita to take her to the bath house, a place that does not exist in this country. She asks for fizzy water and then for its transformation through fruit into lime soda with a clarity born of our own love for both. In between these moments she tells us how she misses her friends, reciting their names constantly. Soon she recites everyone’s names, including a friend’s new girlfriend.

Mostly we are not ready. The family words of scant months ago, of this same year, like ‘pato’, which she used to wander the house requesting, disappear into potato at a speed we did not prepare for.

These words, like the memory of these months, will drift out of our minds with exhaustion, with worry, with the progress of life. And so I try hard, on this Saturday in Tokyo, to write them down, to remember. Twenty one months now, and astonishing.

Another strange night

A view across Hong Kong toward Tai Hang and Braemar hill behind.

I go to bed in a hospital room. From the window I can see our apartment. This is closer to home than any of our other hospital stays, and less stressful. We age, we injure, we heal. Or we go through the traumas of childbirth, and heal. The pain is not always evenly distributed. It is shared though, which is both comforting and real. I look across the sports fields beside the Hong Kong Central library at Tai Hang, at our tiny box, the lights that mean home, that mean people, and relax.

I’ll be out of here in another twelve hours. I’ll probably still have a job. Things aren’t always as bad as they have been, and there’s a lot of hope in our corner of the world. A lot of growth, new words, new abilities. Hopefully some of the old abilities, too, returning after rehab and intention, after focus and time.

We get older, and we keep going to the gym. Our fitness plans remain much the same, climbing frisbee yoga and the occasional jog, on either side of these milestones. On either side of these years. My shoulder, the cause of that stay in twenty twenty, is pretty functional. I boulder on it, lay out on it, swing on it, and carry a small child with it. The rehab took a long time, but I had little to do. Tomorrow’s rehab will be lighter, more like the last op than the shoulder. More like stiches rather than reconstruction. I’m happy with that, happy with the ability to fix things before they’re impossible.

“You woke up smelling horrible every day. Like pain,” my partner says of the three months pre-shoulder surgery. “After surgery you immediately smelled like yourself again.”

Smelling like myself instead of like pain seems like a big step. The gift of a mediocre memory, of being unable to hold my body’s prior feelings very well, is that I do not remember. I hope never to remember. I hope to read these words in a few years and be startled by them.

“Do you re-read your own writing,” a friend asked me in December.

All the time, I said. All the time. It’s a way of remembering, of anchoring myself. Most of these posts are written for me, to help me tell the story of my life, across time, to myself.

Because otherwise I’d forget. Otherwise I might never remember all the things I’ve done. I might not remember who I am, or who I’m trying to be. I definitely wouldn’t remember how it felt, ten or fifteen years back, to discover things I now struggle to notice. I might not remember all those nights listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack in Chinese hotel rooms, happy and healthy or sick and uncertain. I wouldn’t remember all my odd interactions with friends, or what it felt like to drive the PCH before finding a job in San Francisco.

Sometimes, when it’s hard to remember, it’s good to be able to remember, to have triggers. To create them. I do it with music a lot, and with people. Mostly, though, I do it with this site, with writing, and with time.

It’s another kind of healing, perfect for this quiet hospital room.

Places I slept, 2023

The sun blinding as it fades over Lantau

The year ending feels very long. I wonder about this, about perception in a family of three rather than two. Twelve months represents so much change to a being of only eighteen. I expect the next few years will feel likewise.

The list below, considered as such, is an impossible mishmash. I have learned that in some ways we did not leave the pandemic, and we can never really go back to our former lives. The feeling of freedom, and the lack of surprise at travel, may never really return, even though the act itself has. Even though the casualness with which we pack for a new country certainly has. As Ursula Le Guin once wrote,

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

From Lone Stars’ 11th year playing beach ultimate in LA in January, to Malaysia with Hong Kong Masters in December, some of the places represent a familiar type of travel made entirely new and more challenging with a third family member. And yet they were still beautiful, as were Bangkok and Boracay for the same purpose. Malaysia also represented the first time all three of us visited a new country together, a list we are excited to expand.

Mostly, the places below represent trying to do a lot. The sheer number of times in the Bay Area (five) and Tokyo (five) go some way towards outlining the pace. With three family trips to the U.S. and another three solo ones, we covered more of the country we came from than we expect to for quite a while. The world is big, and now that airplanes are more regular, there are many new places to see. As to Tokyo, well, it will be a regular feature of future lists, and hopefully a comfortable one.

As always, I look for themes in these years, in their pace or our hopes. This year the recall is harder than usual, a combination of sleeplessness and focus on someone else with the frantic end that saw me spend but one week in eight at home in October and November. Thus the point of writing things down: in this list I see old friends, a focus on family, and the return of places we love. Clara, at a year and a half, saw Bangkok, Boracay, and Taipei this year, the easy hops around Asia that we missed during the pandemic. In this year’s list I also see the new: our foraging adventures around Tokyo hunting something, some collective feeling we were sure we’d know when we encountered it. We did, and are working to make it a fixture of whatever weird life we are building.

That, at last, is the point, the central sensation of this odd year. As always it takes writing for a while before the core of the thing I’m considering presents itself: we are building some truly new life now, on the other side of our big move to Asia, on the other side of the pandemic, on the other side of the biggest decision of our lives. We are building a future that we can barely see, one in which we have hopefully slept more, wherever the places may be. And what I will remember from twenty twenty three is that, for the first time, it was a future we could start to see.

Tai Hang, HK
Santa Monica, CA
San Francisco, CA (four times, two spots)
Cherry Hill, NJ (twice)
Malibu, CA (twice)
Boracay Island, the Philippines
Santa Clara, CA (twice)
Taipei, Taiwan
Bangkok, Thailand (two spots)
Nishinippori, Tokyo (twice)
Shimbashi and Toranomon, Tokyo
Shinjuku, Tokyo (four times, three spots)
Fort Collins, CO
Stout’s Island, WI
Sugamo, Tokyo
Changi, Singapore
Pune, India
Otsuka, Tokyo (twice)
Downtown Singapore
Batam, Indonesia
New Braunfels, TX
Austin, TX
Brooklyn, NY
Manhattan, NY
Cyberjaya, Malaysia

Prior lists visible here.

Tradition

I think we should do socks full of fruit

Her idea is better than any I’ve had, and she prepares, and we do. It’s 5’s second Christmas, too early still for memory, we expect. And yet let’s be too early rather than too late, rather than caught with no traditions of our tiny family.

“I think we should talk about what habits we want to make rituals,” reads the email from May. Cooking, exercise, packing and maintenance, are at least some of the answers. Trying new things. Being excited about what’s next. With these conversations, done without urgency over the course of nap times, evenings, and long walks, we are trying to shape the family we become. We are trying to discover, like sculptors, what exists within the form of our relationship already, and bring it forth intentionally into the world. The topic resurfaces in late night chats with friends, in their neighborhoods or our own, and occasionally in third cities that belong to none of us. What is important, what family traditions they have, what they mean when they say “the normal American way,” and what, above all else, we hold dear.

In these conversations I so often find myself suddenly, half way through, in someone else’s words or in my own. As with writing, clarity comes from bringing ideas into reality through words. And thus I discover a part of our family that should have been obvious, that is all around us. We value words, and descriptions, and jokes, and shared language. On mornings without work or other expectations 5’s and I walk the block and a half to “the coffee store” together. She’s started to help carry the coffee mug, at least until she stops and says “up”, uninterested in walking any further on her own. I oblige, grateful for these quiet moments, for the small ritual of this walk and the language that describes it. I’m sure these traditions, like many others, won’t survive forever. Thus writing, and posts like this, to trap them in some transmissible form, for my own memory as much as any others.

And so as she asks for more longan on Christmas morning, having eaten all that came in her own stocking while sitting in a pile of rambutans and tangerines, of tamarinds and apricots that will be eaten once the longan are no more, I lean back and appreciate. I appreciate the more hand sign, the “Op!” that means open and follows more as a request to peal the things she can not yet. There are but scant days in all our lives, and it’s better to have put out milk and cookies for the as-yet-unnamed spirits of our family’s holiday already, to have made it a tradition now, so that next year we are prepared, wherever we may be. I look to the friends, here sleeping on our lightly-padded floor to share the holiday, and acknowledge their sacrifice, their priorities. They want to spend holidays abroad, and with old friends. These are priorities we share, having spent the prior holiday on the East Coast, and crashed friend’s New York apartments shortly after.

May we all be able to maintain these traditions, then, of spirits and fruit, of hosting and visiting, of talking and thinking and sharing, for as long as we are able.

Walking thoughts

I walk a mile in the sun near New Braunfels, Texas. It’s not a place I ever expected to be, and so I walk eyes open, taking in the yard signs, the state of things. It’s new country, in some ways. Or I’m new to it. Both can be true. Texas has changed a lot since I lived here in two thousand eight. The world has changed a lot. This man-made lake and the homes along side it probably mostly didn’t exist, or not at the scale they do now. The idea of second homes, of retirement spots, of escapes, took on new meaning in the last few years. Everyone staying in this second home has a second home. Everyone staying here is working, or available to work.

The earlier sentence is one of the most true statements I can make. This is not a place I ever expected to be. True for so much of my life. True for Batam, Indonesia, last week. True for Pune, India, earlier this month. True now and true of our brief stopover in Anchorage, Alaska on Sunday, courtesy of a medical flight diversion. Not that I have a list of places I expect to be, not that I am acting with a plan, but that some excursions come truly out of nowhere, some locations do not fit the narrative.

A hawk sits in a tree fifteen feet from the balcony watching us while we have coffee. Geese fight on the neighbor’s lawn and their kitten comes to visit our daughter, to rub on our furniture and explore new people. We watch the water, we watch 5’s ramble, and we relax. It’s a good break, even punctuated by work calls. We are lucky to have this time, before the weekend’s wedding that is our reason for travel, to be together with family from all over, and to share more stories than one afternoon would hold.

Fall ahead

Ships idling offshore between Singapore and Batam, Indonesia

Finally the pace feels true. After a few years of being unrecognizable, we are again in motion to a degree unfathomable with quarantines, with flight bans. Hong Kong is again a home base that features the world’s best airport train, rather than a home base of remote islands.

In two months we will see Japan twice, much of the US, and I will spend days in India, spend two separate layover nights in Singapore, and a week in Indonesia. And we will train hard for a frisbee team on week nights, lucky to have child care.

It feels as though we are again becoming who we ought to be. There are bumps, there are painful days, hard mornings and evenings. And still with every new opportunity there are moments where I’m shocked at how far we’ve come.

Mostly I am grateful, that 5’s is healthy, that we’re able to play frisbee, that we have help to enable our motion, help to enable our breakfasts together under awnings in Tai Hang’s alleys. It’s a rare gift, to frequently have breakfast together out of the house, while our daughter plays with friends under someone else’s care. Even if breakfast means elevensies after three or four hours on zoom.

We reach out from those folding tables to friends across the world. We check in with those in Japan looking for work, those in South Africa running clinics, those in New York likewise raising children. We message family and colleagues, friends in Australia and friends in Taiwan. It’s a pleasure, to think about all these people, to have the time and mental energy to connect in so many directions. We are lucky.

We are trying. In all directions, at an intense pace. We are making up for lost time, even though we know that time is gone and will never be returned to us. So we are pushing in all directions at once, on our professional lives, on our family, on our physical abilities, on our friendships. We are trying to learn languages, to learn handstands, to learn bouldering, to captain teams, to build communities. We are trying to learn industries, build platforms, implement software, and source hardware. We are trying to take time to watch the sky, to watch the harbor, and to appreciate how lucky we are to be here at all.

It’s a lot. Fall should always feel like this. It’s so nice to be back.

With the wind as soundtrack

Looking across a familiar section of North Park, Colorado

Back in North Park after a few years, I am most surprised by the sound of the wind. Sitting on the hillside looking south towards Elk Mountain some 30 miles away, the ferocious whipping noise contrasts with the stillness and spectacle of the view. Aside from tree leaves rippling in the aspen grove below the deck, the only other hint of motion is the bugs and hummingbirds that flit past. And yet the wind is unrelenting, pushing ever eastward towards Cameron and Clark peaks.

It’s been a long time since I first sat here. Many things have changed. There’s internet, for one. And cell service. And so I write between work calls. What once was a sanctuary is now just another outpost in our ability to work from anywhere. In some ways I miss the old land line and dial up connection. In some ways I’m glad to be able to work while the rest of the family plays, rather than having to stay behind in town. Mostly I’m glad to watch our daughter rumble around a new location, learning and exploring and banging rocks together.

We’ve told her, since restarting travel when she was two months old, that if she’s good on these trips we’ll return when she’s old enough to remember. It’s both absurd and true, promises we intend to keep. And yet I am realizing she already does remember. She remembered her grandparents house on the second visit just days after the first. She remembers things, now, at a year old. Places. Where the rocks are kept. Where the fruit basket is. Small things, surely, and probably not forever, but is that the point?

In many ways we travel to keep ourselves in the world. To keep ourselves part of people’s lives, and our own lives connected to the places we grew up, the people we grew up with. There are a lot of repeated loops, like to this cabin in the hills of North Park. These return trips are what bind us to the place, what makes each memory more real, layered on so many others. I remember proofreading my novel here alone, at the counter, in the summer of 2009. I remember napping on the sofa here with our cat, long ago when he would join us on the flight from San Francisco. I remember shoveling snow, chasing dogs, and running through the brush to the lake. Years go by and each new visit is built on top of those earlier ones. The next time we’re here I’m sure 5’s will be able to walk. I’ll try to remember these windy days and crawling moments, then. To have and to compare, as part of the palimpsest, uncovered in an unknown future, in odd moments or familiar light.

The length of life

A northern Tokyo craft beer festival in front of Otsuka station, September 2023

Walking through Victoria Park I realize we are building something. Like all such internal acknowledgements it is both belated and overwrought. Of course we, in the sense of our partnership, are building something. We have been, for fifteen plus years. We have been, in some sense, our whole lives. For people who are in hardware, in startups, in software, in product, in ops, we are always building something. We spend almost every waking hour working on building things, with varying success. Our lives can be seen, looking backwards, as a series of things we were trying to build, and the current position determined from the way we failed or succeeded at each.

One of my favorite ways of interviewing is listening to people’s self narratives. One of my favorite ways of writing is considering the different ways to construct my own, our own narrative. In some tellings it is whimsical: I moved to Shanghai from Tokyo because of the novel Shanghai Baby and a friend’s hand-written letters from his year in Hefei, Anhui. I had never considered the Chinese language, or the country.

In some tellings it’s calculated: We moved to San Francisco because, in the Financial Crisis, startups presented the greatest opportunity, especially in the sectors we care about (Renewables, Consumer goods). And yet those two can be easily reversed, because we are human, there are at least a half dozen reasons for every decision of magnitude. Our plans are far easier to discern in retrospect.

I moved to Shanghai because it looked poised to be the world’s most important city, and I wanted to know how things were made.

We moved to San Francisco because we had some friends there and neither of us had any job offers elsewhere.

We moved to Hong Kong because, as people in hardware, software, and supply chain, in startups and product management, it had been a hub for years and was an easy swap, SF for HK, the cross-border train weekly and trans-Pacific flights quarterly an easy change from Bart daily and irregularly scheduled trans-Pacific flights (usually urgently). There’s a reason I wrote this, years back.

This site, that record of how I felt in Incheon in 2015, is of course one of the blocks in what we are building. We are building something solid, with weight, out of the ephemeral weather of each day. We have been, of course. My partner laments, after a day spent speaking Chinese in a factory in Shijiazhuang “My technical Chinese is not good enough for these 河北人.” I know exactly how she feels, and yet the feeling is new. Rather it is old, the pandemic having robbed me of my weekly excursions to Shenzhen, the dozen hours a week spent speaking Mandarin and feeling at home. It’s familiar from other avenues too.

The feeling is of the person we are trying to become, and the distance we have to go.

The past few months, lived at a hectic pace as we try to restore the pre-pandemic level of travel to our new larger family, have been exhausting. They have been wonderful. The past four months cover weeks in Tokyo, weeks in Colorado, weekends in Taiwan, weekends in Wisconsin, and long days on beaches in Hong Kong. They cover weeks at work, late nights, early mornings, and short supplies of sleep. These moments, or the gaps between them, like my walk across the park, are our lives, and are proof that we are working hard to grow in all directions. Like our Mandarin, which is worlds ahead of our Japanese, and of our Cantonese, all projects underway simultaneously. Yet in the long run, or when seen from a distance, we are building something. I hope we are building what we seek.

Today, and this week, and the last month, it feels like we are, and I work hard to hold on to that feeling, and to write it down.

What reverberates

The view from Toranomon Hospital towards Akasaka as the sun sets

Time with people. Even though they will all be dead soon too, even though the world is on fire, even though our lives are transient and brief. What matters is our time together, regardless of circumstance. Financial capabilities matter only in the service of our friendships, of the time we spend together.

This is to say we’ve spent thousands on plane tickets to weddings.

There’s no where else we would be, nothing else we would really want to do anyway. Our highest ambitions are to spend more time in more places with more people. Sometimes, of course, with just each other. Rarely. Usually with someone we met somewhere else, in a third place that itself contains so many good memories. Be it Houston’s bars and the BMX long board rides to them, be it Denver pick ups in Fits, be it knocks on doors in early San Francisco mornings, or be it odd Hong Kong evenings scouting the server’s pants at a local bar.

They’re all the moments we travel for, the moments we save and work and grind and learn and think and grow for. They’re the moments we live in if not for.

All too often now my photos remind me of friends I can no longer call. Of people I can no longer email. Of humans our daughter will never meet.

I can’t say good things about those moments, other than that I am lucky to have met so many people, here or gone, in the country I was born to or in those I no longer live in. In countries I never have. For each of those memories I am lucky, and for all the memories we’ve already made that I am not yet so poignantly attached to. May I not be for quite a while more.

Walking towards Toranomon Hospital from a business hotel in Shimbashi at eight am on a Sunday I am grateful. I am finally certain of release, and that this hospital will be just one more story, one more odd memory. I am grateful to be here, then, in the July sunshine, in Tokyo, in the early morning summer not-yet-heat. I am grateful for my partner, for our daughter, for the friends we saw here, for the friends we missed seeing here. For my roommate, more than twenty years ago now, who came down from Tochigi to go for a long walk with each of us, give us a break from our own worries. I’m grateful for the friends who messaged, who looked after our cat, and who share their own worries.

I’m grateful to be human and alive, for however long it lasts. It’s wonderful to know so many people in so many ways. No matter where we may be.

Through America

SF bay from above with container ships in motion

On the back end of a good set of days I look at the Pacific from the wrong side and breathe. The air is clean here, a bit north of Los Angeles proper, still connected to its urban sphere. The airport we’ll head home from on this loop is just visible in the distance, a string of planes approaching. The weather, wet for southern California, feels welcoming. After a week on the east coast I am comfortable again in this country, operating by car and with poor cell signal.

Visiting America is an emotional journey. We have to prepare, to set aside the way things could work for the way things do work. We set aside walking to restaurants and to work, set aside trains from the airports and clean public bathrooms. In exchange we are hosted by friends we miss dearly in houses with kitchens nicer than any we’ve ever inhabited. Their children are larger, are two, four, five, eight almost nine. We watch these small people grow in leaps between visits, thrilled each time at their new abilities. So too will they be soon by YT, I realize.

Visiting America is a mishmash of meeting friends for dinner, meeting colleagues in co-working spaces, meeting potential customers in unfamiliar offices, meeting family in houses from our childhood. It’s a mishmash of memories and new experiences. On an e-bike one morning I swing by Four Barrel, my favorite SF coffee shop. For years it was two blocks from home. In line I find some fellow ultimate players and say hello, that it’s been too long. San Francisco is a city dense with our history, and I’m happy to revisit it, even momentarily. Yet half the time there is utterly new, meeting colleagues in buildings I’ve never seen before to work on companies that didn’t exist when I lived here. The variation is confusing, often within half an hour, from debating a hiring plan in a hotel conference room to biking to my host’s house on streets I’ve ridden dozens of times.

In many ways America is peaceful now, for us. We come on vacation, or half-work half-play, lingering a bit to see old friends. We re-kindle our commonalities with twenty odd hours of chat, of intense sharing. We go to the batting cages, to gyms, to bars and restaurants, for long walks, and to ultimate tournaments. We laugh, and we check in on our memories. It’s a good break from the stress of our lives, even if it brings stress of a different kind.

Places I slept, 2022

View from the shore of Lake Biwa looking north east

In retrospect 2022 was the hardest year. The best summary is that it ends much better than it began.

Hong Kong spent the first half of the year in the kind of pointlessly strict lockdowns we’d thought finished. Despite having the highest death rate per capita, proving the futility, the government kept the economy and borders largely shut until April. It was a hard time to be once again unemployed. The optimism that had risen with vaccines and the prior year’s travel faded as we were ever more cut off from the world’s re-opening.

The spring did offer a few specific joys, highlighted by Tara’s success at work and my own ability to freelance for US companies. Being able to recommend and hire friends and former colleagues in China has been a wonderful side effect of the closed borders.

The pandemic ended suddenly for me in April, on boarding a flight to Ireland for a new job. Getting paid once again to go to new countries and learn proved that the world I missed so much was not truly dead. Until it happened, I hadn’t realized how doubtful I’d been. Kinsale was beautiful, and Dublin likewise. Meeting new colleagues in the US afterwards was a pleasure. Being able to see my folks in Ithaca and friends in Brooklyn on the layover from Ireland to SF was exactly the kind of gift that used to be so commonplace. I’d forgotten how good that kind of surprise opportunity felt.

Most importantly, I made it back and then through quarantine (1 week) and Covid (caught in Hong Kong despite the quarantine) before Tara gave birth. Clara is healthy and napping as I write this. It’s cliche to say she’s changed our lives, and yet.

After eight months of struggling with our plan for the future, in September we resolved to stay in Hong Kong and live like we wanted the world to be. We moved (one block) and went to Thailand in the three weeks before Tara’s maternity leave ended. It was wonderful, both walking on the beach in a foreign country and having Hanna join us from Colorado. We may have eaten breakfast at the same well-loved French cafe in Bangkok every day of our visit. Seeing that places we miss had survived the pandemic was a truly wonderful feeling. And Hong Kong, in what would prove to be a turning point, dropped inbound quarantine while we were on the road. Clara has never done a hotel quarantine. I hope I can say the same for her next year.

After Tara’s promotion and the ensuing grind of October, made more difficult by my work trip to the Bay Area, we needed another vacation. Japan, finally re-opened, was a perfect finale to our year. We saw old friends and new while doing plenty of wandering with a baby attached. Clara loved the onsen and tatami floors, so now she has her own. Tatami, not an onsen. Feeling comfortable on the road these last two trips has reminded us of who we used to be, and still are: people who aim to be comfortable anywhere. They also made keeping this list again a pleasure.

The places below then are a mishmash of memories, some hard, some joyful. Spending a weekend in Oakland with Kevin was a wonderful gift, as were the two visits, not reflected, by Tara’s folks to Hong Kong.

As always, here’s to the next year. May we be less scared to try and may our bravery be rewarded.

Tai Hang, HK
Central, HK (staycation)
Kinsale, Ireland
Brooklyn, NY
Ithaca, NY
SF, CA (three spots, one twice)
Oakland, CA
Tsim Sha Tsui, HK (quarantine)
Lumphini, Bangkok, Thailand
Ao Nang, Krabi, Thailand
Walnut Creek, CA
Oakland, CA
Haneda, Tokyo, Japan
Osaka, Japan
Nagoya, Japan
Gero, Japan
Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan (two spots)

Prior lists visible here.

With new eyes wide

A view of Hong Kong island as the sun sets, with orange and blues streaked together over the peak.

In the last light of one of the year’s last days, we lie on her futon and stare at the peaks of Hong Kong Island. They are capped in pinks and golds, wreathed by the light of the sun that has itself sunk from sight. It’s a beautiful view, one of the world’s best, as far as cities go. The lights are coming on across the city, and the sky up top is starting to settle into the truly dark blue of space. The air, blown back in from the ocean all day, is soupy, the petrochemical mass perfect for refraction. Like LA, sometimes Hong Kong has the most beautiful smog-driven sunsets.

For five whole minutes she lies on top of me utterly still. On my back, my view is of the sky down to the building tops. Her weight, held upright by my right arm, is scant enough that I do not grow stiff. Her view is perpendicular to the ground, facing the island. She can not see the scrolling lights of the ICC. It’s not dark enough for them to dominate the skyline anyway. The purples slowly drip down into the golds, until the hilltops are ringed mostly in a deep rose. It’s subtle, the matter of a few minutes. Perfect for a post-nap six-month-old’s attention span. I’ve never held her this still and not asleep.

I watch the shadows of the hills against the skyline, reflected in her eyes. It’s a strange feeling, seeing someone so clearly a blend of our families take shape. The square jaw and face shape is so familiar; I’ve been waking beside it for fifteen years.

Her room smells perfect. It smells like vacation, and memory. The tatami is brand new, and the scent of fresh straw permeates everything. The room smells like our onsen in Gero. It smells like the hotel in Osaka where she laughed and rolled for hours. On top of the tatami, the single futon folds perfectly in thirds exactly as mine did twenty years ago in Saitama. Though a single, it is big enough for two or three of us, at least for a while yet. I’m still trying to introduce the cat to it. He loves the one in our room, which is thicker, a solid mass of cotton. This one, softer and more malleable, will take him time. Or maybe that’s the occupant, who he’s fascinated by and annoyed with in alternating measures.

Either way, lying here in the afternoon light looking out over the harbor and peaks feels like a new phase. She has her own room with it’s own scents and objects, a new person and a new story being written. At the end of the year, that’s the biggest change, the thing I’ll remember most.

Patience for me

Light across the rooftops of Tai Hang one day

In the early afternoon, as one lady projects (a family verb meaning “does things around the house that aren’t daily chores”) and the other naps, I sit quietly and watch Tai Hang. The light is great, late summer humidity giving the approaching golden hour a helping hand. The squawking birds wheel and yell, perch on rooftops and cavort in bunches above the low buildings. The balconies and roofs of this small neighborhood are empty, the day’s sun still too close. This morning, a breezy 28 C, was the first sign of fall’s approach, the kind of morning that perks everyone up, that gives the dogs and children an extra bit of energy. Fall is not yet here though, in early September, not in Hong Kong, where the heat will linger until November. Just it’s finger tips, brushing over the city before the full light of day. And so in the afternoon we swim in the public pool, indoors, and nap, one and then the other, until the heat fades.

Hong Kong has wonderful public pools, part of the athletic infrastructure that shapes both the space and the population, who are active, are athletic, are fit and adventurous. In so many ways the foundations laid here are good, and should be built on. In so many ways we are trying to build, to be part of this city. On Saturday I chat with neighbors, with shop owners, with the fruit stand family, and am happy. It’s been four years and Hong Kong feels like home.

The question, then, is how to be patient with myself, with our trajectory. Patience is an oft-mentioned requirement of parenting, a commonly mentioned challenge, to have enough. Yet in all those tellings it is patience for the child, for the burdens of care, for the pain and limitations of childbirth, of rehabilitation and recovery, and of physical growth. These, to me, are the external requirements, the clear and valuable lessons of being part of a family, of trying to build a structure that can raise a human. Patience for each other, while still too limited, is a common goal, and a well-understood shortcoming when it falters.

Less discussed, and perhaps less easy to build, is patience with one’s self.

In our family this too is a constant thread, due to injuries and rehab, due to the challenges of climbing and frisbee where our goals are so frequently beyond our bodies’ abilities. We council the other to give their body the time it needs to heal. We try hard to remind each other to have patience with our own sore knees, with the wrist never quite perfect after that motorcycle accident, with the back that refuses to bend smoothly, and with shoulders that are never again as flexible as we’d hoped. We try to be the buffer between what the other person wants to achieve and what they are able to, to cushion them from their own disappointments.

It is not always easy.

Harder still is to give ourselves that gift. Harder still is to be truly patient with our own slow pace of improvement, with our own slow progress towards strength, towards competent leadership, towards deep friendship and emotional intelligence. Harder still is to be patient with the years of our life that seem to drift by without the kind of growth we’d hoped for, without the experiences we once thought we’d have.

In many ways these are the challenges not of children but of the pandemic, not of our family but of our expectations. Yet the same call for patience comes to me in seeing one family member asleep across the room and feeling the immediate need to accomplish things in this bit of time. The true need is for patience with my back, sore from rocking her to sleep, and with my mind, tired from the work week. The challenge is not in being calm until she nods off but in being calm once she has done so, in being productive, whatever that means, without feeling like these moments are fleeting. At forty three I am half way through the average lifespan of someone of my gender and country of origin. There are not infinite days to come, but there are enough to let the body and mind appreciate this sunset, and watch these birds for a while. There is no need to move quickly, and nothing I am missing, other than perhaps a good photo as my phone is in the other room.

Ah well, the sun will set again tomorrow. Time instead to watch the sky.

Faith in each other

A month in, the clearest part of parenthood is the reflection it provides. In the late nights, in the long days with sparse sleep, we see few things clearly save each other. Our ability to rest, to walk, to eat, to see friends, and exercise depends on our partner’s abilities, on their tolerance, and on our mutual trust. We have, in this small child, a way to finally see the compassion in our relationship, and our kindness for one another. It is humbling, to understand that our ability to hold the baby while she cries and our partner eats is perhaps the best gift we can give. It is clarifying to understand that our push for an extra smile when she will not sleep takes more energy and is therefore more appreciated than anything else we’ve done in weeks. And it is revealing to understand that our ability to do things, from lunch with friends to climbing workouts to dinners out depends entirely on our partner’s ability to be ok when things go wrong. We serve at the pleasure not of a higher authority, but of each other, a pleasure that must be re-iterated daily. Would you like to go out, would you like to go to the gym, would you like to meet friends? Each one requires explicit confirmation, and the understanding that it could take extraordinary effort, extraordinary patience.

Mostly they do not, and Clara is peaceful, is at peace with our decisions. She is ok with electronic music and ambient heat outside the pizza parlor on a Friday night, where we eat on a bench and share a beer with friends after a long week. She is ok with the bright lights and bouncing tunes of the climbing gym, with the many voices and odd sensations of an afternoon at the swimming pool. She tolerates a ferry ride, an MTR ride, and many taxi rides, without outburst. In some ways we adventure at the pleasure of the child, and I think in some tellings this would be true. But it is not, for while she has a voice, and uses it at will, she has no say in the initial agreement, in the planned outlay of patience and effort. That is instead an agreement built on all our years together, almost fifteen now since those early scooter rides in Shanghai. Almost four now here in Hong Kong, where the idea of family became more possible.

And so we continue to grow, our true selves revealed to each other in the things we are willing to smile together after. It has always been this way, of course. In many ways our four hours together in the back of a flatbed from Nong Kiaw to Luang Prabang remains the clearest mirror, held up to our relationship in pain, guilt, and the joy of adventure. It is good, then, to find new joy together in these late nights and the early mornings they blend into.

First days

Looking southwest from the Peak in Hong Kong, across Wong Chuk Hang, and Aberdeen to Repulse Bay, Stanley, and the ocean, where container ships pass.

Like anything new, the first days are a bit of a blur. We sit in a room overlooking all of Hong Kong and try to take in the view. We are looking at the face of a new human, someone never before met. We are looking out at an island, at hills of jungled green and reservoirs that mirror the trees nestled in the valleys. Expensive homes dot the hillside below us, and beyond that the flat areas of Aberdeen, Wong Chuk Hang, and Repulse Bay. Past all that container ships pull towards us and away. The main sea route in and out of Hong Kong feels busy enough. Only the skies are quiet, with no airplanes in sight for much of the day.

The view is shocking on a clear day, all the way north to land that is not in Hong Kong, that is part of the greater country that surrounds us, some twenty miles up the coast. It’s a view worth millions, a view utterly unavailable in most major metros, and the thing that sets Hong Kong apart among world cities.

Mostly we ignore it, focused instead on the new person who has joined us. Our spare moments are spent texting family and friends, sharing photos and chatting about the new responsibility we’ve taken on. It’s a weird one, learning how to care for a human who most definitely can’t care for themselves. Like every new parent, I’m sure, I’m shocked at how unready we humans are released into the world. Unable to walk or talk, and not particularly close to either. While friends with older children say that the time goes quickly, by any reckoning three, five, eight, or eighteen years is a long time. Thinking back to the start of our relationship, fifteen years prior, makes it clear just how long a commitment we’ve made. Life will not be boring.

We look forward to the learning, to sharing our lives with someone new. After all my years avoiding housemates, it’s a bit of a strange choice. I hope that the cat feels the same enthusiasm, at least eventually.

In the afternoon, we are lucky and nap together. The pleasure of three people tucked into a single bed is pure joy. After an hour, when the nurse comes to take the new member for a checkup, we realize how free we are, going to sleep without any responsibility, without worry or hesitation. In the first few days of parental leave, rather than adding to our stress we have ceded our normal tasks, our professional goals and targets. In the hospital for another twenty four hours yet, we have not yet assumed the full burden of our new role. I have no complaints.

Looking north I can barely see the buildings of North Point over the hill, the tops of the AXA tower and One Island East poking above the mountain. I can see Red Incense summit, where we watch the sunset and fireworks. I’m excited to take Clara up there, to show her the world we live in. To show her the place she was born.

Shaped by people

My grandfather, Keith Seegmiller, reading to me when I was small

Often the people who shape us are a surprise. The freshman year roommate from the other coast that turns our expectations upside down. The weird studious kid in our college circle with whom we share a variety of countries with, and a trail of physical correspondence that spans twenty years. Even these examples are somewhat predictable, people in our near orbits, people at the same schools. Sometimes the shaping folk come from stranger orbits than these. They come from small towns outside of Tokyo, or outside of Shanghai. They are colleagues who grew up in clothing factories, whose voices and smiles we can still see, fifteen years on. They are colleagues in San Francisco, who sat with us on a median in Dongguan and gave us life advice, often recalled on this site, to “always do whatever’s next”.

Often the people who shape us are entirely predictable. They are our family, they are those in all the globe most similar. They are those whose eyebrows we share, those our facial expressions have called to mind since we were young. They are those who shaped us, our young intellects, with book recommendations, with conversations, with visits to Fallingwater and art museums. They are those who shaped us with their joy in rivers, their love of fields, and their curiosity about the world. We are lucky, to be shaped by those with curiosity. We are lucky to be shaped by people now gone.

Not all endings are the ones we chose. If life provides any lesson repeatedly it is that people are rarely ready to be done. People are rarely ready to be finished with their studies, their career, their relationships, their lives. Sometimes they shape us with their lives, rather than with their actions. As I say often, we are creatures guided not by opportunity but by example, and there are few stronger than those we grow up around. If their kitchen tables are stacked with magazines, we will flip through them when bored. If their walls are covered with maps, we will become engrossed on the way to the bathroom in the afternoon and forget our purpose. If they like long walks through fields as the light changes in the early evenings, we will too, and these hours will become important without our really stopping to think why. Our examples shape us not through conscious imitation but through the pull of the familiar. When given choices we drift towards things we understand, towards things we have seen before and find familiar. We drift towards what we think we know.

It is on those teaching us then to be broadening the familiar, to be constantly increasing what will seem comfortable when encountered again. From architecture to art, from global history to local water politics, we are luckiest to learn from those interested in the world and engaged with their surroundings. These are the lessons we’ll need to learn, the kinds of traits we’ll seek so hard to pass on ourselves.

Sad, then, to have to do it without those that so shaped us.

Make time

Light in London one afternoon in October 2006

Stephen King’s commencement speech to my Vassar class was a good one. His message, that “you can’t take it with you,” never left me. Every year since I try to do more with, and waste less of, what I’ve got. The efforts aren’t always successful. I’ve spent a lot of time playing games and goofing off, and a lot of time on skills I don’t always need. Mostly, here half way through my forty second year, I’ve spent a lot of time.

My grandfather, on the phone a few weeks back, just eighty seven, said “I never expected to be this old.” The line echoed in my head all week. Who does? And yet underneath the statement is the simple math, that he is more than twice as old as I am now. We have time, or we could have time, if we’re lucky and healthy and work hard at making more of both.

“You said you needed time, and you had time,” Ani sings on a song Tara’s been learning to play. We do, I think, though never as much as we’d like, not with the people we most want it with. I think of the methods, of the sums. Half hour phone calls, hour long video chats, and text strings that cover years, that drop for days and re-emerge with new questions, new thoughts for that friend from years ago. Mostly I think about the good days, about the long weekend in Amsterdam with a friend I’d met in Tokyo. It was after the World Cup in 2006, and we spent the weekend relaxing and wandering the canals. I think about how there are no pictures of that weekend, how without both of us to remember, I’d have forgotten it entirely by now.

From October of that same year there are photos, somewhere, of our time in London together, of our brief wanderings as I jammed more travel into a busy year. In those photos we are young, and happy, and as unfinished as anyone in their late twenties can look. We are still en route to so much, still before so much.

Life, it seems, is like that. There’s never a sense of how far we have to go, only of how far we’ve been. Sitting on the floor of our office in Hong Kong on a Sunday, writing while Tara chops ume for pickles, I think of how lucky we were to have folk visit before travel stopped. How despite all the urging we did, we probably didn’t do enough. Because there might not be time, after. The world is here, now. Or it was, and, vaccines done, we hope it will be again. I’m getting ready, on these quiet weekends of chores and writing, for whatever’s next. Getting ready to move again, to act again, and to be part of other people’s lives again. It’s been a while.

We said we needed time, like Ani sings. Have we had time?

New traditions

On our street the old couple sets out their boxes of fruit and vegetables before we wake. Today there are passion fruits and cherries along with the standard oranges, apples, and pears. On the far side from our window there is lettuce, cabbage, mushrooms and potatoes. Next door the local restaurant does a brisk business in toast, eggs, fried pork and some noodles. Up and down the street chairs and tables are set out and proprietors take in the air. It is Christmas morning and the world is quiet, but not empty.

For the first time this pattern is familiar. Unlike the year before we do not hoard groceries before the two day holiday, Christmas and Boxing Day. We are comfortable that the grocery store and fruit stand will be open. In the afternoon our neighborhood is alive, someone somewhere hammering on a tin sheet trying to fix an awning. Mostly it is the foreigners that are quiet, not visible on rooftops, their apartment windows shaded and dark. Of our local establishments only the coffee shop is closed. I am glad that they get a break, the Australians and locals who run it. Outside, on it’s steps, a couple takes photos of their Akita, lush and happy in the cooler weather.

The weather is relative, of course. Twenty one C is not exactly cold, not to these children of Colorado and New York. Not, probably, to that dog bred for northern Japan. A balmy Christmas is still new to us, and for the week leading up to it we are uncertain of the season, busy with other pursuits. Finally, though, with the Christmas tree in the building lobby and carols sung by groups in Cantonese outside our train station, we acquiesce and agree. Far from family and with many friends traveling, we spend the days quiet, reading and chatting. These are always some of my favorite days, the quiet ones at end of one year and the beginning of the next. They are time for reflection and for planning, for taking stock of growth and remembering our hopes.

In these years we barely give presents. We share a few, with friends nearby and those we encounter on our travels, or those elsewhere when inspiration strikes. Mostly though we grin at each other, carrying fruit back to our apartment in the sunlight, lucky already with what we wanted most.

On the road

We spend a week in motion in a rented Kia, exploring toll roads from Illinois to New York. We get gas in Ohio and an Easy Pass in Pennsylvania, and stop in neither state. It is a quick but thorough tour of relatives and friends, and despite the pace nothing feels rushed.

It’s been a while since we drove the east coast, down 81 and through Philly. Longer since I drove from Chicago to Ithaca, a part of the country my companion has never seen. We encounter fierce rains in Cleveland and the Endless Mountains, and see great lightning in Cherry Hill and Rumson. It’s the kind of tour that sees us admire flowers, play tennis, and hold snakes. We eat in back yards and dining rooms, at local restaurants in Brooklyn and at Google’s cafe in Chelsea. I even get a couple of bagels from College Town Bagels in my home town, and eat them while driving.

We do better than the above listing suggests though, and on our flight out of Newark I am happy and relaxed, and then asleep. By the time we land in Denver for the next stretch I feel sated, rested, and comfortable with the conversations we traveled those miles to have. We’ve gotten better at pacing ourselves, planning less and focusing more on each evening, on the mornings around the kitchen table and the walks to get breakfast. Fewer photos, less posting, and more focus on the people we came so far to see.

More and more I am grateful for our abilities, for the freedom to fly so far and be so unburdened. As I once wrote about being thirty eight and biking to the gym, there is a luxury now to being able to spend time with friends and family, despite the choices we have made to move so far. The conversations are brief, often a single hour or a single evening, yet they are real.

And so with each such loop of short visits we share a bit more of our lives, and we remember each other a little more clearly. With the tools of rental cars and trans-pacific flights we are pushing back on the erasures of friendship by distance and time.

20 hours

When I was young it was hard for me to understand why my father and his best friends lived in separate towns. They had gone to high school together, moved apart for university, and stayed. Individually the decisions made sense, but as a group, for the friendships, the decisions made quality time rarer, made being a part of the day to day impossible. They still worked to maintain friendships, traveling for events or birthdays, making the long distance phone calls that used to cost money.

I no longer am surprised by these decisions. I haven’t lived in the same town as my best friend since college, and haven’t lived even in regional proximity with most of my good friends since the location where we became friends, be it college, Tokyo, Shanghai, or San Francisco. In many ways this has forced me to make new friends, people who are now in that category of “too far away to be daily contacts but still remain my favorite people”. It’s a strange category but one I keep adding to. Which leads me to the topic, and my new focus on short chunks of time.

In relationships separated by long distances, everything becomes discrete, a single visit, a single evening, a cup of coffee. In the best cases we get a day and a half together, one night and the following day. Call it twenty hours tops, to both remember the old times and share current challenges, to have longer conversations about serious topics and laugh at common jokes. These opportunities are short, but real, repeatable with most of my circle every calendar year. My abilities here are a gift of work travel and the result of personal dedication, because I know now that regular contact will not happen if not prioritized. The world is too big and our lives too full to allow accidental gifts like this evening in Las Vegas to cover all our desires. And so my most important friendships are built in chunks of hours, and require a kind of focus, a dedication, that has improved my life. Knowing that our time together is rare we all prioritize the moment, and are willing to be unavailable elsewhere to make sure the conversation is our focus and our thoughts are not overwhelmed by minor obligations, background stress.

The results of this mutual focus is incredible, and something I have grown to appreciate over time. At first I was let down to realize that, like my father, I’d created a life where my favorite people were rare guests rather than regular members. Lately though I understand that the depth of commitment required to sustain friendships across years and borders has resulted in my best sounding boards, my most true conversations. In twenty hours there is little time for superficial, and we quickly jump to career questions, business challenges, and family. The questions and ideas posed to me in these brief meetings over coffee in New York or drinks in Los Angeles drive my mind for months, often until the next meeting with a different member of my ever-expanding circle.

And expand this circle I do, with new friends gathered at each stop, in each new city. The best moments, then, are of realizing how large the circle has grown, how many of these distant deep friendships there are, and how much they sustain me and enable whatever is next. As expected Hong Kong is providing the next home base for this growth, for new friendships to blossom into deep ones and old acquaintances to swing through. In just a few short months in the city we’ve hosted friends from Singapore and San Francisco and seen family from both sides, which are good indicators of the new life’s pace. Writing this from Los Angeles, while my best friend is briefly at a meeting, is another indicator of my own circles and how they will be maintained despite the move abroad. Through twenty years of friendship we’ve continued to find time together, whether we live at opposite ends of the state or across the Pacific.

Here then, if you’re reading this, is to the next time we’re in the same place for an hour or twenty, and how those moments will not just sustain friendship but improve it. The past two decades are proof that this method works for me, just as the past four decades have proved it to for my father, who is this weekend en route to his high school friend’s daughter’s baby shower. May we all be in our own ways so lucky.

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.

Weekends without hurry

On off weekends they rise late.

The cat, having long since missed weekday breakfast time, finally can wait no more. He climbs to the head of the bed and sniffs their sleeping faces, his nose close enough for each breath to have force. When even this close attention does not work he retreats and yeowls in the strained voice of a cat that does not meow. His short sounds wake the sleeping humans, and the ritual of coffee tea and kernels satisfies all three. It is almost noon, and they sit in the sun of open kitchen windows without talking, letting the last of Friday’s sleep fall away slowly. The cat, fed, covers his head in water from the dripping tub faucet and then watches pigeons across the street. He is content now that the people are awake and still home. These are his favorite days. He lies on the kitchen table, facing the window, his paws dangling off the edge. It is not the pose of a hunter.

They read and then write postcards to distant friends as a break from fiction, to free themselves from the worlds in their heads. Eventually she is hungry and eggs, homemade sauerkraut, and bagels follow. Somewhere in this process they move past the time for silence and into a quiet chatter about the neighborhood, potential plans, and the cats’ strange war cry upon sighting a fly. If able he will chase and consume, but more frequently after letting loose this strange vocal challenge he loses sight of the fly completely and wanders the small apartment confused until, bored, he returns to the table to watch the open windows from whence the fly first came.

Weekends that move this slowly are a gift. On mornings like these all three lounge without urgency, glad of the company, weather, and time.

Directing ourselves

At an old friend’s house for the weekend we enjoy the rare time to think together. In between adventures and barbecues we discuss our lives. Goals, hopes, and simple steps for self improvement fly back and forth. With days together there is no need for specific scope. We pause on new backpacks and suitcases before moving on to new houses, jobs, our families, and vacations. Books, movies, and funny videos found on the internet litter the three days of conversation. Towards the weekend’s end, with our enthusiasm tempered by the calm of long days together, the important topics return. Family, work, and hopes for both.

These are new topics for us, though the seriousness of intent is old. For years we have focused on adventures and apartments, cars and sports. Smaller things that were big at the time. Now, with children at breakfast and wives who are not drinking at dinner we are more careful with our words, more aware of our ambitions. Cars seem like things again rather than signs of freedom. Houses feel more like homes and less like temporary parking spots. And our hopes for work are shifting, from fifteen hour work days to Friday afternoons at the beach with company from out of town.

Driving to the airport later I think of how fast these changes have happened: less than five years. An awareness of mortality, I think, and a belief in the importance of our time here. Part of this change is the joy at having friends who are likewise changing. Having old friends to talk to here in Los Angeles, at home in San Francisco, in Tokyo, London, Shanghai, Portland, and New York, makes each day in any of them feel precious. These friendships, more than anything, are the background against which our awareness and our changing selves becomes clear.

Days later a friend says he thinks of other people’s children as a reminder of his aging. In his words I recognize the same idea as the prior weekend’s conversation, that our view of others gives us a new sense of time. We are not aging faster because our friends have children, but we are more aware of each year as our friends take more permanent steps. At twenty five in our circle no one owned a house, few were married, and there were no children to plan around. Now breakfast with a stroller is not uncommon, and recent changes in mortgage rates are a conversational reference point. In some circles, at least. In others we spend time in the mountains, we dance, run, and climb. We commiserate via IM from New York to San Francisco about the fact that the phrase ‘birthday party’ involves cake instead of wake boarding, balloons instead of pistols. And then we each close our laptops and head to dinner with another set of friends who have serious news.

We are aging, if not growing up. And in the hours in that Santa Monica back yard we talk for long enough to discover what this change means: it’s time for new projects, bigger and more permanent than what has come before.

Forgetting

“You know him, but you probably don’t remember his mom, she was an…” This is how stories begin in my parent’s home. I do not. It has been decades since her son and I shared a playground in middle school.

Decades.

The children we once knew have grown, moved, married, and are contemplating children. Some parents, like mine, remain in old circles and wonder at our forgetfulness.

The loss is not intentional. Rather too great is the world, too many are the people. We do not mean to surrender these memories of childhood, they are forced from us by the onslaught of days. To manage we devote our meager resources to our current locations, to our new homes. On the East Coast for a few days of stories and family, I learn of another method, long practiced, for defeating the limits of memory.

My father’s parents drive me south to Philadelphia. We have scant trips like this together and many things to share, tales of those gone and those unable to join us. We alternate between the two as the miles pass. Sometimes we speak of our future desires, my own hopes to visit Scotland this fall among them.

“It’s really beautiful out at the north edge of Scotland,” says my grandfather, “I forget the name of the town, I’d have to look at my notes. Anyway, you ride along…”

In an astonishing moment an entire world previously unknown appears to me, revealed after decades. The same decades that have hidden my childhood companions suddenly contain copious detail, personal history, the travel of those with no limits on time.

“Notes?” I ask, thinking of my poor scribbled collection of memories from earlier travels, from years abroad.

“From everywhere we’ve ever been,” he says.

“Every night when we get back to the hotel,” adds my grandmother, “he writes while I read my book.” With that my own urge to organize and record no longer seems so strange. The first image I see is of our cruise in two thousand six, me writing in a lounge high on the ship late in the evenings, others having retired to their cabins. I imagine him sitting at a table, looking out over the Mediterranean, writing.

A day later I have copies of his notes from three weeks spent in Scotland in nineteen ninety four and can add format and handwriting to my imagined evenings. The notes are in a kind of short hand, and the hours driving together lend me the sound of his voice as I read them, which I do for much of my plane flight home.

9/10 Saturday Stayed — Toured Hadrian’s Wall — Housesteads Roman Ft. (high on ridge, impressive remains & views, walked wall — really windy)

Almost twenty years ago. As with so many written things I picture a book of these travel diaries, with appendixes that list the miles traveled per day, that list the names of each hotel, as they are recorded on the paper in front of me. I see a book of things forgotten and yet not lost.

We have a finite memory. Most things slide in and out. Relationships, good times with old friends, one-time travels to distant lands, even these drift from our fingertips though we do not mean to let them. What then of the details of Japan, of Shanghai, of our travels, houses, kitten? On the bus home from the airport I think of this site, of my attempts to record time and place, and vow to continue. Looking down again at his notes as I sit in the fog of San Francisco I am amazed at the details so long forgotten and so quickly returned to hand.

inhab.it

lived in places

family