Back from a workout.\u00a0 Slower today.\u00a0 As I went out on the lanai before I headed for my aerobics, I noticed a disturbance in the calm.\u00a0 A rustle of waves preceded a fluke, it fanned in the air glistening with water, then followed the great body down.\u00a0 A birthday wish from an ocean mammal to a land mammal.\u00a0 Mahalo.<\/p>\n
As I walked along the ocean, I reflected a bit on the peculiar fate of my nuclear family.\u00a0 Mom died early.\u00a0 Dad lived several unhappy years in a marriage ill-fitted to both him and Rosemary.\u00a0 Mary ended up first in Malyasia, then in Singapore, following her interest in linguistics.\u00a0 Mark traveled the world from Vladivostok to Moscow, Moscow to Turkey, Turkey to Israel, then, by some route to Bangkok which he found just right.\u00a0 They’ve both in Asia almost longer than I lived in Alexandria.\u00a0 Though I’ve remained stateside, I have developed, quite independently of them, an interest in Asian art, cinema, literature and, of late, philosophy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, too, there is love affair with the Islands.\u00a0 What is it about our lives, childhoods in the most common of Midwestern smalltowns, parents with no interest as far as I know in anything Asian, that lead us, all three, by quite different routes to turn our faces east?\u00a0 It would be easy to cite the ascendance of Asia in the last two decades as a magnetic influence, but in fact all three of us have had our interests prior to those decades.<\/p>\n
There is one thing common to all three of us, the wanderlust.\u00a0 Mom was overseas during WW II and Dad found traveling significant for its own sake.\u00a0 I suppose this gave us all a sense of rootlessness, or, at least, made it easy to detach ourselves from the familiar, and so opened us to the wide world.\u00a0 What strange motion in the quantum sphere torqued our attention toward China, Singapore, Thailand, Japan I do not know.\u00a0 But, it is a fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back from a workout.\u00a0 Slower today.\u00a0 As I went out on the lanai before I headed for my aerobics, I noticed a disturbance in the calm.\u00a0 A rustle of waves preceded a fluke, it fanned in the air glistening with water, then followed the great body down.\u00a0 A birthday wish from an ocean mammal to … Continue reading Orientalists All Three<\/span>