Journal of a Sabbatical

October 29, 2000

winter

Today's Reading: Circling the Sacred Mountain by Robert Thurman and Tad Wise, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese translated by Sam Hamill

All of a sudden it's winter. Complete with snow.

A big wind blew in yesterday afternoon and last night and by this morning it was freezing cold. When I woke up at 6:00 this morning the sky over Providence was still blue and I thought the prediction of snow showers was wrong. Exhausted from too many short-on-sleep nights since I've been back, I rolled over and continued sleeping until Nancy woke me up significantly later. Snow flakes blew in little eddies outside the window.

Once again the wait was too long at Downcity, and we can't even blame the Brown parents this time. The wait at Rue de l'Espoir, where we haven't been in ages because it's always crowded, was too long also. We didn't even try Zog because we were so frustrated with them last week. We'd never been to Z-Bar and Grille and they claim to serve Sunday Brunch so we tried it. The omelets were delicious, and they came with roasted potatoes instead of the usual hash browns. They served fresh-baked crusty Italian bread with olive oil to dip it in. Tasty. The coffee was decent as well, making it unnecessary for me to go to the Coffee Exchange afterward to get some flavorful coffee. Breakfast was satisfying once we got some.

Snow was still swirling in the air, though not accumulating so it seemed like a good day for a long browse at the Brown Bookstore. I've been anxious to get the next volume in The Story of the Stone as I finished volume 2 - a cliffhanger - on the flight home from China and have been wondering what happens next ever since. As soon as I found the Chinese literature section again (gee, I've been gone so long I've forgotten the layout of the Brown Bookstore?) I picked up all three remaining volumes. That should guarantee I don't have to wait long to find out what happens next.

In the poetry section, I found Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, a Sam Hamill translation of a whole bunch of different Chinese poets from anonymous war laments in like 100 B.C.E through the great poets like Li Po and Du Fu all the way up to the 14th century. Hamill is generous with about 60 Du Fu poems. Du Fu wrote 10,000 poems, of which about 1500 or so survived. It must have been hard to choose 60. I've been looking for more than are in my yellowed Penguin edition of Li Po and Tu Fu ever since I came home. Visiting Du Fu's (or Tu Fu's depending on whether you use pinyin or Wade-Giles transliteration) thatched cottage in Chengdu reminded me of how much I liked the Tang Dynasty poetry.

With the snow and cold winds we scrapped our plans for a walk on the East Bay Bike Path and instead went for tea at Tealuxe. We got a pot of gen mai cha (green tea with roasted brown rice - Nancy really loves that) and crumpets, which felt cozy and soothing on a blustery afternoon. We sat for a long time while I read aloud poems of Du Fu from Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese between sips of tea. Somehow that made it a little easier to accept this sudden onset winter.