All Good Things....

As I begin this at 4:45 p.m., Monday, Oct. 3, the kids have just lifted off from Detroit for a 16 hour flight to Shanghai.  From there they take another flight to their home city, Guangzhou.  Fortunately, this is Golden Week, a national holiday, so neither one of them has to work for several days.

While Eric and Lynn began packing on Sunday, I was involved in a lengthy event at church, so I didn't get to see them until about 4:30 p.m., when I met them in Easley where they were returning their rental car.  No more driving for Eric until his next trip home, whenever that may be.  We met Harry and Dad at that new Lebanese place we like so much and had our last meal together.  I know that every time Dad says goodbye to Eric (and now to Lynn), at 94 he thinks about whether he'll get to see them again. I predict he will.  Dad is in great health.

As expected, the kids stayed up pretty late trying to figure out how to pack about 100 lbs. of stuff into the bags they arrived with, plus two bags I gave them.  I had a couple of huge Space Bags, those strong plastic packing bags that you vacuum the air out of to compress your stuff down to a stiff wafer.  Even using two of those, their bags were very heavy. At the airport, Eric had to redistribute the weight to avoid paying overweight fees.

At about 2:00 a.m., I noticed that the power had gone off.  No thunder storm or anything; just suddenly no power.  Oh, brother, I thought.  How are they going to get up at 5:00 and grope around with flashlights while finishing packing, and without any coffee or tea to help them wake up?  But about 4:00 a.m., the power came back on. I knew this in spite of having no lights turned on, because for some bizarre reason, the little counter-top TV we have in the kitchen always comes on when the power comes back on, even though it hadn't been on earlier!  Suddenly I heard men's loud voices, some sportscasters shouting me awake!  Yikes!  So I went to the kitchen to turn it off and then couldn't get back to sleep.  C'est la vie.

Time to curl up under that Clemson Snuggie. It's a long trip.

So, where does that leave me in closing out this blog?  Tired, but very contented. We adore Lynn, and she seems to like us pretty well, too.  She and Harry were the ones getting choked up at the airport. We feel like she's our daughter, and hope that she'll be our daughter-in-law someday. We'll see. It's up to them. They seem to be very good together. He catered to her wishes, and we sensed no tension between them in our presence. And it's been such a joy to watch Eric taking the lead during Lynn's first trip to America. We're so proud of the man he's become.  Now we'll look forward to our regular Skype calls with them, and dream about their next visit. 

A Taste of China

Mrs. Huang (who prepared a huge feast), a visiting graduate student, Eric, and Lynn.

Our host, Dr. Huang, Harry, Mrs. Huang, and a visiting professor.

 

Delicious desserts: Red Bean Moon Cakes, Watermelon, nuts, shrimp crisps, and salted dried plums.

Harry observing the Chinese tradition of leaving your shoes at the door and donning slippers.

Wonderful conversation over dessert.

As we approach the end of this busy, joyful time with Eric and Lynn, we all enjoyed a taste of China on Friday night at the home of Dr. Yong Huang and his wife in Clemson. Dr. Huang is a colleague of Harry's in mechanical engineering, and Mr. Huang is a biologist who works in plant pathology. They also invited a visiting professor and a visiting graduate student.  But there was enough food for 10 more guests! It was a lot of work for Mrs. Huang to prepare so many dishes. I really don't know how she did it, but we enjoyed it tremendously. The Huangs offered wine, fruit juice, and tall glasses of hot green tea to go with the vast array of beef and salmon, vegetables, rice, and other starches (taro root). I wish there were some authentic Chinese restaurants this side of Atlanta.

Dr. Huang is quite a raconteur, so the conversation was lively and varied.  We discussed food, politics (domestic and international), football, child-rearing philosophies (Western and the Tiger Mother style common in China), and everything else.  The evening flew by. It must have been fun for Lynn to speak some Chinese, especially with the other young woman who was there. This kind of event reminds us that there is nothing more fun than many generations around a table, sharing views and personal experiences. We always learn something about Eric when we're in this sort of situation, because people ask him things that elicit information we didn't know.  For example, either we didn't ever know, or more likely, we forgot, that when he was in an international relations class at the University of Delaware, his professor, Yaroslav Bilinsky (who had taught VP Joe Biden), took Eric's class to then Senator Biden's office for a visit and plenty of conversation.

Today Eric and Lynn are doing their last-minute shopping (can't pass up all those sales).  I made a pan of brownies for Eric to take to A.C. Whitley's tonight where he's having his last Guys Night of watching the Clemson - Virginia Tech game on TV. This time the brownies came out right!   Lynn will be staying home with us; she truly doesn't mind him doing his own thing.  They don't play the "games" that so many couples do; no guilt trips or jealousy.  Nice.

This morning Lynn said that she really likes the American way of being organized so you get to do more things.  I think she means our tendency to plan activities, sometimes too many activities, but we tackle our lives with a lot of energy.  We went on to discuss the American view that you make your own destiny. I told her that everybody asks children, starting at about four or five years old, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  This tells the child that it's in his/her own hands, not just fate or planned by someone else. She likes that idea.

Well, that's about it for now. This gorgeous day is flying by, so I want to get outside and enjoy it before the sun goes down.  I'm trying to stay in the moment, not think about how soon the kids are leaving. Now is all there is.

More Good Times

 

 

 

Dinner with the Haques and Kay Barrett

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday afternoon while Harry was teaching at ICAR in Greenville and I was preparing for a 5:30 meeting of the membership committee at my church, Eric and Lynn paid my dad a visit. They'd intended to take him out for ice cream at the university, but Dad preferred a quiet visit in his apartment. From all reports, it was a great visit. Dad was quite talkative and Lynn was quite curious, so that was a good combination. One of the things they talked about was why most elderly people in America don't live with their children.  Dad had surveyed everybody on his hall, asking if they'd prefer to live with their kids.  None of them did!  But all like living near their kids, if possible.  In China, the elderly live with their kids.  I guess they discussed several other things as well, such as Dad's childhood, his parents, his career, and so on.

At 6:00 we all converged from different directions at the home of our dear friends, Mary and Imtiaz Haque. There were 9 around the table: the four of us, another friend, Kay Barrett (whose kids grew up with Eric), Mary and Imtiaz's daughter, Mariana, and a young man who's a friend of their family, Fraser Henderson. Fraser had taught in China for a while in a place Lynn and Eric have visited. Now he's in medical school at the Univ. of Virginia. Mariana is beginning a new job at BMW in Greenville on Monday. So much youth, so much potential, such beauty and health! 

Conversations before and during dinner ranged broadly. All of the older folks asked the younger ones lots of questions.  And we shared lots of laughs too.  Dinner was prepared by a new local Lebanese restaurant we all like. Great food and great friends, new and old.

This morning I whipped up another batch of blueberry muffins while the kids slept in. Now they're off to continue rebalancing America's debt while I finish this up.  While I'm attending another church event (they all seem to have converged at once during the kids' visit) this evening, they'll go with Harry and Dad to that Japanese restaurant they didn't get to go to earlier in their visit.  Tomorrow Lynn may accompany me to the child development center (if she gets up early enough). In the evening we'll go to dinner at the home of one of Harry's Chinese colleagues.  We're packing in everything we can manage, and we'll probably collapse next week after the kids leave, but it'll have been well worth it. 

Nearing the Home Stretch

Well, Clemson did win that game against Florida State.  Tigertown is a very happy place this week.

Lynn and Eric drove down to Charleston Sunday (but not early; more like early afternoon). They were treated to dinner there by Liz (Whitley) and her husband Mark. (I can't recall their last name.) Anyway, add one more new food to Lynn's list of favorites: raw oysters!  She's a braver woman than I.  Over the next 18 hours they took a carriage ride, explored White Point gardens (aka Battery Park), found an amazing Asian food store where Lynn was able to buy the much prized American Ginseng for her mother, checked out The Citadel, took a childhood friend, John Vinson, out for lunch (it was his birthday), and dined with another Clemson friend, Josh Arant. They packed as much into a very short stay in Charleston as anybody could.

Harry and I missed the kids.  They returned in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning. Eric rose early enough to make it to a doctor's appt. while Lynn caught some ZZZZs.  In the afternoon, Lynn and I looked through tons of baby pictures of Eric and some of the rest of our small family. I gave her several duplicates she wanted. I think Lynn was surprised to see that Western (Caucasian) children change appearance much more as they grow up than do Asian children.  This is especially true of hair color, but also of hair texture and facial features. Eric had straight, very light brown (almost blond) hair as a little guy, but now it's very dark and curly (if he were to let it grow).

Then it was time to prepare one of Eric's favorite meals. While Eric and Lynn went to the fitness center for her to practice her swimming again, I fixed a pork tenderloin with a maple/mustard,/rosemary marinade that's served with sliced Granny Smith apples that have been sauteed dry and then finished with maple syrup.  I used my new rice maker again, this time for short-grain brown rice.  It came out perfectly. Steamed string beans rounded out the meal.  But the most special part was homemade Indian Pudding.  It bakes in the oven for 3 hours and makes the house smell wonderful.  Again, all parts of this dinner were given two thumbs up from Lynn.  Eric was in heaven.

A truly hilarious aspect of our dinner conversation involved our reading a diary I had kept just prior to Eric's birth, and the notebook Harry had kept during our Lamaze classes.  In true engineering fashion, he had taken copious, careful notes.  Ha!  The joke was on us!  Those notes bore no resemblance to what went on during labor, delivery, or after we brought Eric home.  So, we had a good laugh 33 years later.

As usual, Harry was off early this morning and I soon followed. I did my thing at CCDC and then stopped at a florist to have a small table arrangement made to take as a hostess gift when we go to Imtiaz and Mary Haque's home for dinner later today. Mary's nephew teaches in China too, and he'll be there, so it should be a great evening.

We're sadly counting the days now. Cramming in another dinner date on Friday at the home of one of Harry's Chinese colleagues. No specific family plans for the weekend, but maybe we can take that pontoon ride on the lake that we postponed. 

That's all for now.  Off to throw some laundry in the dryer and run some errands prior to my 5:30 church committee meeting before heading over to the Haques.  Making memories every day.

International Trade Balance

Not a whole lot happened on Friday. I went to my usual M,W,F volunteer job at the Clemson Child Development Center for a couple of hours.  The regular teacher is out with injuries she sustained in a fall in the classroom a week ago, so there was a substitute.  I defer to her as the lead teacher. The kids were pretty rambunctious and loud (who knew the voices of four year-old boys could rival those of adult men in volume?), so I retreated to the reading nook and read to a couple of kids.  One little girl has never uttered a word in my presence, so I thought she didn't understand or speak English. Her family is from Mongolia, I think.  Anyway, she did a lot of pointing and nodding to things in the book we were looking at, but when I brought a hand puppet into the narrative and altered my voice when he "spoke," she lost her self-consciousness or her suspicion of strangers, or whatever had kept her clammed up so long, and she spoke!  A breakthrough!  Her English comprehension and pronunciation is just fine, thank you very much.  Guess I just hadn't earned the right to converse with her until then.

I got home about noon and Eric and Lynn were preparing for a day of shopping and an evening in downtown Greenville.  Turns out, it was quite a successful shopping spree.  They spent 4 hours in Belk's in the Haywood Mall.  Four hours!  Lynn says the cosmetics that she bought for her friends at their request are three times cheaper here than in China, and we all know they're not cheap here!  Hope her friends pay her back. So my conclusion is that the American economy has been enriched substantially by the efforts of these two residents of China.  Wish I could have been the proverbial fly on the wall to see Lynn shopping alone. She and Eric went their separate ways to focus on their particular interests. Eric got a bunch of clothes, which is amazing because he HATES to shop for clothes.  I'm not kidding when I write that he still wears clothes he had in high school 15 years ago.  He was always cheap to clothe; that's why we could send him to an out-of-state college, ha ha.

After the shopping spree they ate at a Jamaican restaurant on Main street and met A.C. Whitley. Lynn finally saw downtown Greenville in its upbeat weekend state and really enjoyed that. They left Greenville pretty late and decided to buy food for today's tailgating at an all-night store like WALMART. They got some things there, but also needed to go to a Clemson grocery store. By the time they got there (2-ish in the morning) they discovered that even in an open-all-night store, beer can't be sold after 1 or 2 A.M. in SC.

At about 9:30 this morning, with very little sleep behind them they wolfed down breakfast while I made a pan of brownies for them to take to the game. I hadn't made brownies in decades, and I followed the directions to the letter, but they were so gooey that I could barely get them out of the pan even when they'd cooled.  I packed a bunch of plastic forks for those brave friends who wanted to eat a brownie without having a hand covered with chocolate. 

As I write this (5:50 P.M.), Clemson is beating Florida State (watching it on TV), so if they can hang onto their lead, this'll mean Clemson will have won their first three games.  It'll be a happy time in Tiger Town tonight.

Eric and Lynn plan to leave early tomorrow for a very short, one night, trip to Charleston. I guess strong coffee and maybe a can of Red Bull will get them there. 

While the kids were fixing the American trade imbalance, Harry and I grabbed dinner at a Thai place in Anderson and then went to see the new Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball.  Saw several of my UUFC friends there too.  Very good movie.  Tonight we're eating at home and will watch a DVD. This is no time to get into that post-game traffic around Clemson. 

It's all good.  We have everything we need. Everything.

Togetherness

Looking at our Family Tree chart showing my first American ancestor's arrival in 1630!

Finally, a home cooked Chinese meal: chicken stir-fry with bok choy. Thanks for the lesson, Lynn!

Ah, to wake to the sound of rain was blissful this morning. Sadly, it didn't last long, but I guess it helped the plants a bit.  Harry was long gone to work when the three of us got up. I made the kids some pancakes from a recipe on the Jiffy Corn Muffin box.  Harry and I always enjoy those and put walnuts in the batter. We serve them with warm applesauce and genuine Maple Syrup.  This was another hit with Lynn.  I think she's really a New Englander at heart.  The final test will be next week when I make that long-promised Indian Pudding.

While I was messing around on the computer, Eric showed Lynn the hand-written Family Tree that my mother's Great Aunt had made back in the 1960s.  It traces my maternal line, with a few of her male ancestors thrown in, I think.  Pretty cool to realize that my first ancestor to come to America did so right after the famed Plymouth Rock crowd.  And the woman who made the chart also wrote an extensive family history, so we know all about several English, French and Portuguese lines too.  Lynn says there is nothing like this in China, as far as she knows.  Nothing written down, anyway.  It's all oral history.  And everybody's families have always been Chinese, so nobody's all that interested in it.  She thinks it's cool that Americans get to do this, since all of us (except for the first people to cross the Bering Strait) came here on a boat and had to make whole new lives.

When Harry got home the four of us headed to the fitness center in Keowee Key. Harry and Eric hit the gym for some cardio work; Lynn and I headed for the pool.  The pool is indoors and usually heated (too hot for me most of the time), but today it was much cooler than usual, so I didn't mind.  Lynn, however, was quite chilly for the first few minutes.  Then she practiced the swimming techniques she's been learning and I watched over her.  We spent about 30 minutes at that and then the guys came and got us and we all headed home to warm showers.

Then began preparations for a genuine Chinese dinner that we've been planning for days. Lynn cut up the chicken into small pieces and tended it in the largest pan I have (don't have a wok), while I washed the baby bok choy, and chopped the onion, garlic, and ginger. I got to use my new rice cooker for the first time (it worked perfectly).  Lynn was the head chef, declaring when each ingredient was done just right. We served the meal in the Chinese style: deep bowls, into which each person scooped the rice first, followed by the chicken, and topped with the wilted bok choy.  Yummy!  It really reminded me of the flavors we enjoyed in China last winter.  We used the lovely chop sticks Eric had given us last year until we had to switch to forks because our rice was traditional American rice, not sticky rice.  You can't eat our rice with chop sticks. Lynn was so happy having a taste of home, her home.

That's about all for today. Tomorrow I'll go to CCDC in the morning. Harry will go to work and then will meet a bunch of his graduate students at the Michelin Tire test track in Laurens, SC, about 1.5 hours from Clemson. So it'll be a long day for him. We may not be able to have our Friday night date. But the kids will have a full day of taking advantage of a big sale at the local Belk Department Store (name brand shirts - buy one, get 2 free!), and then off to G'ville again where they'll meet up with Eric's friend A.C. Whitley for a lively evening downtown.  Lynn doesn't drink, but the bar scene doesn't bother her. On Saturday they'll go to the Clemson - Florida State game.  They'll make some brownies for tailgating this time. Lynn told me, "I think I'm gaining a little weight. My clothes are getting tight."  As I wrote before, "Welcome to America!"

Joys and Sorrows

Tuesday, Sept. 20 was a mix of 'this and that.'  I played the role of Domestic Goddess when I wasn't glued to the computer trying to catch up with e-mails. To think that as recently as 2005 we didn't even have a computer at home boggles my mind.  Now I have a so-called Smart phone too.  Once a new gadget enters our lives, there's no turning back.  We're more free and more tethered at the same time.

Well, Eric and Lynn managed to escape my frenetic domestic pace for a while, anyway. They went to Harry's office where they met one of his Chinese colleagues and then walked around campus a bit. When they got home we all dove into a dinner of ribs, corn-on-the-cob, broccoli, and finally  --  Eric's birthday cake: gingerbread that Lynn and I made from scratch.  We topped it off with vanilla ice cream into which I'd mashed finely ground crystallized ginger.  You can't have too much ginger!

Wednesday, Sept. 21 was rich with emotion.  I took Eric and Lynn to a lunch meeting of an organization I helped to create back in 1979, the Association of Women Professionals. I've always considered AWP to be my second child, so whenever Eric's in town I take him to one meeting.  In the past he's presented programs for the members; first on what it was like to live in Egypt, and later on what it's like to live in China. I think I'm the only member who brings her son to AWP every few years, but he doesn't seem to mind a bit, and there are women who love to see him and catch up on his doings.  Having Lynn there was a big thrill for me. As a representative of the youngest generation of professional women, she could join the group if she lived here.

That was the joyful part of today.  The sorrowful part was that after the lunch meeting we went to the funeral of one of Eric's friends from junior high and high school.  The young man, Chuck Puerifoy, age 32, died last Saturday of a heart attack after having spent a great day with his father at the Clemson-Auburn football game. How sobering it is to lose a contemporary to a heart attack when you're in your early 30s!  Several of the guys from Eric's class were there and as they'll come to experience again over time, it's sad that you only see old friends at funerals. 

From there we went on to a happier event, a trip to Whole Foods in Greenville.  Lynn bought some tea from the only tea farm in the U.S., the Charleston Tea Company. We'd taken some to China last winter, and apparently it was a big hit with Lynn's parents and friends.

Our basket loaded with goodies, we then drove into downtown Greenville to meet Harry for dinner at a Thai place, Lemon Grass.  Harry had been teaching an afternoon class in Greenville at a branch of Clemson University, the International Center for Automotive Research (ICAR), so it worked out nicely.  Lynn insisted on treating us to that meal. We tried to dissuade her, as she is young and needs to save her money, but she really wanted to do it, so we caved. Saving face is still very important to the Chinese (and everybody else).

Home now and ready for bed. It was a day of joys and sorrows, which pretty much describes life.  For us, mostly joys, for which we are very thankful.