Early Morning in the Cambridge Hotel

Our weirdly wired brains are a wonder. You know how it is. You’ll be sitting in your office, reading some memo about logo usage, or in the grocery store, trying to decide whether it’s worth it to pay the extra two dollars for organic milk, or maybe (oh the excitement) waiting in line to renew your driver’s license, when in a synaptic flash you remember that horizon of rice fields outside Wuhan, or that banana vendor in Koh Samet, or punching that donkey cart driver kid in Kashgar. I think it’s a defense mechanism – out of the monotony of our daily lives those moments come as bits of salvation: life is way more than this. And this trip has been like that. In line at Whole Foods, sitting in traffic on the 8 at College, or ironing my grey trousers, I might be blessed with one of the following:

• Riding at breakneck speed (exaggeration) on a motorcycle (exaggeration) down a winding highway outside of Jiji, Maya standing on the floor board in front of me, giggling while she gets to open up the accelerator. (And knowing that Maya will never forget this moment as long as she lives.)
  
• Olivia crying when we tell her that she can’t take the wild kitten with her that she found on Bagushan, near the giant Buddha, in Changhua. (And, knowing that Olivia will never forget this moment as long as she lives.)
  
• Watching Dave on the train from Ershui to Tainan, proudly sharing photos of his family and California with a young social worker who works with the elderly. (Like me, he laughs. No, no. You look very young.) (And knowing that he will remember this moment as long as he lives.)

And this, one that I’ll forever share with Sheri. Sitting in that odd little café, drinking blue gin-and-tonics out of hermetically sealed plastic cups, eating tiny sandwiches, staring across Shengli Road at Number 85, where our son lay asleep. We really didn’t plan on ending up there, but once there I knew that all along it’s all that I wanted to do in Tainan. I may have thought that we were going out for dinner and to explore a bit, but I should have known that the unsettled feeling in my stomach was simply the urge to be as close to Luyu as possible, as soon as possible. And I felt three things while eating my tiny sandwich: that my son was real, that I was blessed to have a wife and friend to share these journeys with, that life is damn good.