Perspective

There are some lessons I need to learn over, and over, and over again – and still they don’t stick.  Yesterday was one of those days where even the simplest task seemed to take on new layers of complications.  If asked, I would probably have answered, I was having a bad day.

Close to an hour after Josh left for school I got a call from him.  “Mom, the shuttle took off almost 20 minutes late and it went to Jiuzhou Port before Gongbei, so I am going to be a least a half hour late to school.  Can you e-mail Mr. Farwell (the principal) and tell him I will be late?”  I e-mailed the principal, informing him of the situation and also requesting that he let me know that Josh did, in fact, eventually get to school.  While waiting to hear back from him, I spent some time catching up on the Caring Bridge journal from a friend battling leukemia.  Her most recent entry talked about the very real possibility she will need to have a stem cell transplant.  She was waiting on the results of a blood test and if she is positive for NPM-1, and negative for FLT-3, she could continue with chemo and not need to have a stem cell transplant at this time.  

After hearing that Josh did indeed arrive at his school, and repeating –NPM1, +FLT3 in a combination prayer and mantra, I set off to catch my own shuttle to go to Jusco, a department store in a downtown area of Zhuhai.  When I arrived at the location where the shuttle buses usually wait, there were no buses, and instead I found a pink sign announcing a change in the schedule and the routes. 

There used to be two shuttles  - one that ran on the hour and went to Ziuzhou Port – with a stop right near Jusco, and another that ran basically on the half hour and went to Gongbei.  Now there was only one route, it would travel first to the port then to Gongbei and it ran less frequently.  This explained why Josh’s trip to school that morning did not go as smoothly as in the past and threw a kink into my plan.  There was no 11 o’clock shuttle, and I didn’t feel like waiting until noon for the next one. Having taken the city bus (either #3 or #69) home from Jusco in the past, I figured it would be just as simple to take the city bus there and marched over to the bus stop and hopped on #3 heading south.  I watched the familiar landmarks go by, then started to watch carefully for the stop right in front of Jusco.  I never saw it.  Next thing I knew we were heading into the tunnel on our way to the extreme southwest side of the city – Gongbei.  At this point I felt myself growing furious and frustrated.

As the bus twisted and turned along its way, I went back to focusing on “positive for NPM-1, and negative for FLT-3” and telling myself I really did not need to be anywhere today, and I would find my way back.  Arriving in Gongbei I decided to wander through the massive underground shopping area before catching a bus to travel back to the extreme NE part of Zhuhai where I live.  With the right attitude a trip through the underground can be quite entertaining.  Ninety percent of the merchandise is jiade (fake).  I checked out the knock-off Kipling bags and found a few with labels that said Kiplig.  But really, I did not have the right attitude that particular day, and decided to just find my way above ground and catch a bus back to more familiar territory.  Not surprisingly, finding my way out to the main street where I entered turned out to be a more formidable task than I counted on, and by this time I was getting really hungry, and as my dear friend Sue W. would say, “peckish.”  Eventually I did find my way back, boarded a #69 bus, and convinced myself that this one had to stop right by Jusco, because I had taken it home from Jusco many times.  Again, familiar scenery, landmark after landmark, and then I saw the Dragon Union Station!  And I knew we were back near Tangjia and somehow I missed the Jusco stopped yet again.  I got off at Hai Yi Wan Pan, walked into Park and Shop, bought two pieces of Pesto pizza, sat down on the bench outside, ate my pizza and stewed.  I had now spent almost the whole day riding buses and still had not gotten where I was going.  I had also dripped oil from the pizza down the front of my shirt, so I returned to my apartment, changed my shirt, returned to the shuttle stop and caught the 2:30 shuttle that, in the end, took me to Jusco.  My main task was to pick up a fitted sheet for Josh’s bed.  With the humidity here, and no dryers, you cannot count on anything line-drying in a timely fashion.  While none of the sales people speak English, the woman working in bedding found a piece of paper that identified items in both Chinese and English, and once we established that it was a “fitted sheet” I was looking for, I began using a combinations of mime and picture drawing to communicate I was looking for fitted sheet for a boy (initially she was handing me pink floral patterns) then clarifying it was a “big boy” after she started handing me blue sheets with various cartoon figures.  Finally we settled on a “manly” blue stripe, I returned to the bus stop and caught the #69 bus back to Hai Yi Wan Pan, and felt satisfied I had accomplished what I set out to do.  Back at the apartment, I took the sheet out of the package and discovered it was a “flat sheet.” 

At this point, I gave myself a short lecture on perspective, repeated my “positive for NPM-1, and negative for FLT-3” mantra and sat down to read the New York Times Global edition on-line.  The first thing I saw was “Earthquake and Tsunami hits Japan.”  The article had been posted 15 minutes before I turned on my computer.  It had all happened in the last hour.  Then I turned the television on and watched CCTV – the English language station.  Over the course of the evening I watched the images become more and more devastating.  I called Josh and asked him to be home before 8:30PM, because the road to our part of Zhuhai travels right along the seashore, and initially our province (Guangdong) was included in the Tsunami warning.  The warning was lifted, but I was still relieved when Josh arrived back at the apartment.

I don’t know why it is so hard to keep the big picture in view.  March 11^th truly was a horrible day for millions of people in this world.  Tragedies continue to mount through out Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and so many other battle weary nations. Journalists and dissidents are still being detained here in China.  It will be days before we know the extent of the devastation in Japan.  In retrospect, I didn’t have a bad day at all.