Flowers for sale

A common sight in summer, near busy intersections, are ladies selling sweet-smelling flowers, gardenias I think. Hang them on your backpack, rearview mirror, or set them on your table to make your summer smell special, infused with the best of memories. The lady pictured here, near the entrance to a Shanghai subway station, gave me a second flower after I took her photo. I think that means we are friends. :-)

Little things

Some friends of mine have an adorable 4-year-old daughter who speaks great English. When they were over at my place recently, she wanted to play hide-n-go seek. She's not very good at it, but I pretended that she was hard to find. I kind of feel sorry for kids in China. With the one-child policy, most of them don't have anyone to play with except adults. That means they are really pathetic at playing games.

 She fits into amazingly small spaces. She's tiny.

She displaced my water bottles that were previously residing in the box where she decided she was meant to reside.

 Some game was going on in her mind. Not sure what kind of game, but she was happy.

My house is not child-proof. I spent the whole time she was here picking up stuff and putting it out of her reach … things like Mimi's water bowl and Mimi's dry dog food (the little girl decided to mix them together).

Mimi did not find this 4-year-old intruder to be adorable at all. Oh contrare, Mimi thought the girl came to steal her food; she failed to hide her irate feelings over this. So Mimi had to go to jail while the girl was here, and by jail I mean inside the kitchen where she could see out the sliding glass doors. Poor Mimi. 

Domestic disturbance

Every evening when I take Mimi for her bedtime pitstop on the grass downstairs, we walk on the sidewalk past a building where there is often noise -- screaming in fact. A family lives on the second floor of a ten-floor building and consists of a man, a woman and a child. Other people may reside with them too, but of these three I am sure. They don't have curtains (or at least they are not closed most of the time), the windows are huge, and as is common in these parts, I can see clearly and directly into their apartment -- especially at night when their interior lights are on.

The woman of the house is the screamer. She yells at her husband as he sits at his computer and ignores her. She yells at her child, a son who appears to be about 10 or 11 years old. He ignores her just like her husband does, but she follows the child from room to room, screaming at the top of her lungs. No one in her house can do anything right, and she yells unceasingly. Every single day, even though I vary the time of the nighttime walk, she is yelling. There is no peace in that home. How can they stand it? I can't even stand it, and my exposure to it is small compared to those who live under the same roof as her.

A few months ago though, I noticed it stopped. I wondered what miraculous dramatic change could have possibly silenced the screeching complaints of that miserable mom.

But tonight, as I was walking by, I discovered she was at it again. 

Alas, it seems it never really stopped. 

The weather is really hot now, and everyone has their apartment windows and balcony sliding doors open to catch a breeze. During the winter, their windows were shut and I didn't hear the yelling.

Too bad. Because they really and truly do need a miracle over there.

Happiness

Here's a friend of mine. She's bubbly and full of joy in person, so this picture seems to capture her essence perfectly. Thank God for sweet friends. And thank God too for a camera to catch these moments!

Invisible people

While the woman waits, the shoe repairman turns her shoe onto his stand and works diligently to repair it. Almost every day of the year, regardless of the weather, he can be found on the sidewalk near the park. He carries his machine and tools back and forth each day to the spot under the trees. 

On this day, the Chinese woman informs him that a foreign woman is taking his photo. He smiles, continues his work and tells her it is no problem because the foreign woman is his friend. I live near his sidewalk shop and pass by on a daily basis. I don't know his name, but I smile, talk to him, and acknowledge his worth as a human being. I think that most people walk by him and don't even notice he is there. Some treat him as if he were less worthy to stand on the planet than they themselves are. He's one of those people on the periphery, the kind of person that we block out of our minds unless we need them to do something for us, like fix our broken shoes. There are others like him in my neighborhood, considered poor on the socio-economic scale of things. The trash collectors, the egg seller, the fish vendor and the guards all come to mind.

There was a time when I probably wouldn't have noticed the shoe repairman either. But these days I make a conscious effort to acknowledge every person I meet, with a goal of making each one feel better about themselves than they did before I crossed their paths. I think that's how Jesus would treat them. They are created in the image of the God who made them. 

I'm reminded of the Chinese ceramic bowl that was purchased at auction last week for 2.2 million dollars. The most recent owner had found the bowl at a garage sale for $3. For a thousand years, the owners had failed to realize the value of the item in their midst. The very thing that was tossed aside and treated as junk turned out to be superbly rare and expensive. 

It's like that with people. We tend to undervalue the very ones who are priceless.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/19/us-art-chinesebowl-idUSBRE92I17H20130319

Afternoon at the coffee shop

Gifts from Mike and his "girlfriend" -- the flowers were from them a while back, the homemade goodies in recycled jars and the wooden goose basket were from today.

I spent the afternoon at a coffee shop talking with a 25-year old young man I first met a few years ago. (He says he is 27 years old, but based on his actual date of birth, he is really 25). Let's call him Mike. Because it wouldn't be cool for me to give you his real name.

Warning: This story doesn't have a plot or anything, I just thought some of you might want a glimpse into everyday life.

Mike, a reserved type, is nice looking, is a mechanical engineer and has a good-paying job. 

Back in December he introduced his girlfriend to me and I quickly discovered they were living together, planning to get married at the end of 2013. He expounded on that today. 

Turns out they are already legally married, and plan to hold their wedding ceremony with invited guests at the end of 2013. (In this country, the act of marriage registration makes the marriage legal, not the ceremony itself as it is in America. Lots of Chinese married couples choose a later wedding date after they are registered.) 

I don't know why Mike introduced his wife to me as his girlfriend in December though. Why not just say "this is my wife?"

Mike's wife only had one week off for Chinese New Year, so she's back at work this week. Mike himself has three weeks off. He is bored sitting at home out by the quiet lake, so he wanted to visit someone. So he called me up. He wanted to practice his English as much as anything. We met at Starbucks. Fortunately, there are lots of Starbucks in this city; unfortunately, we initially went to different ones, postponing our meeting for half an hour or so. 

He brought me some homemade snacks his mom had made. She made sugar-coated peanuts and sesame toffee squares. He and his wife also picked up a souvenir for me while visiting a tourist mountain on their trip home for the New Year. (They drove home for the holidays, because they have a car.) I am so touched -- I feel unworthy that they thought of me during their trip. 

Mike didn't come from money. His parents are poor farmers, growing their own food. His mom has 10 chickens, a cat, an ox and used to have a pig. We looked on Google maps to see where their plot of land is several days' drive to the west of here.

Mike's worldview is so different from mine. For example, he was excited to tell me he had a dream and Einstein was in it. Yep, he dreams about Albert Einstein, the scientist. I can't even imagine having a dream about anything to do with science. Or about anyone with a bad hairdo for that matter.

Mike wishes he could go to England to meet wheelchair-bound scientist Stephen Hawking, and he was carrying a biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs with him today. It seems much of the world is in the business of building heroes that have nothing to do with Jesus, though He's the only one who will remain standing when all else fades away. I am so unimpressed with just about everyone else the world tries to sell me on as a hero. But I didn't want to ruin it for Mike, so I just winced smiled as he talked about them.

Deep down in my heart I had a mental picture of how I hoped our meeting would go today. After discussing deep questions that his soul had pondered since my Christmas party, Mike would drop to his knees right there in the middle of the coffee shop, repent (with tears streaming down his face) and become my spiritual brother today. Alas, not today. It didn't even come up. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

After taking an e-bike, subway, bicycle and taxi for my outing today, I finally returned home. 

I'm kind of chuckling over the fact that a popular 25-year old guy called up someone my age to spend the afternoon with, but it's actually not that unusual. It's one of the things I love about this place. Anything can happen.