July 9th

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Wuhan; it’s about 6:30 in the morning. I got up at 4, made some coffee and played guitar on the terrace, overlooking the campus and part of East Lake. I bought an acoustic guitar on Monday. I’ve been practicing all year and didn’t want to stop. It has been raining here a lot accompanied by some great thunderstorms with lightning striking horizontally like magnificent chicken claws and vertically like sudden rivers slashing the sky. As it became light this morning, I thought I saw pebbles on the tiles , but the pebbles were moving slowly, and as it got lighter I saw (as I suspected) snails with lovely brown shells making their way, and me being a little bit like the Chinese (who will eat just about anything) wondered how they would taste sautéed in a skillet with some garlic, chives and butter. I picked one up and it of course tried to retreat inside its swirled little house though its moist thick body couldn’t quite make it all the way in. “Don’t worry,” I said putting it back on the tiles to marvel as it moved along.

July 9th

It’s raining, raining, raining, a gentle rain coming gently down on all the bushes outside my window. Where have all the blue butterflies gone? They must be under their umbrellas. In a few days classes will begin and I won’t have all this leisure to write things down. I’ve just left the guitar. There is nothing more wonderful than strumming it to the rhythm of the rain.

This morning I woke a little too early and went up to the terrace for my guitar practice, which was frustrating because mosquitoes were all around. Intermittently with my playing I was slapping my thigh, ankle, knee, but I kept playing to the end.

Later, preparing to go to the track and jog, I locked my room to go and realized I still had my glasses on (I don’t like to exercise wearing glasses), so I unlocked the door, went back in to take my glasses off, but I put my hotel key down, took a sip of water, as if that was what I’d intended, and left again, with my glasses still on and my key locked inside the room. It was 5 AM. I didn’t want to wake the maid, so I hid my glasses behind a flowerpot and went out to the track to jog.

5 AM is still dark in Wuhan. More and more people appear with the light. There were some of the same faculty from last year out there exercising and everybody had smiles and hellos for me. I was glad to see the blind man with the big fan walking around the track with his wife in hand. I waved and she waved back. Some things haven’t changed though the old couple that did Tai Chi for the last two years haven’t appeared and I wonder about them. With the sun coming up over the big clock of the Humanities Building, I returned to the hotel, didn’t want to wake the maid, and sat sweating hearing on my iPod Roosevelt Sykes sing a song I wasn’t expecting called Calcutta, so enchanted I listened over and over again. When I got back in my room, I played along on the guitar and it felt great getting the rhythm. Roosevelt sings

I got a sweet little baby
Sweeter than apple butter
I got a sweet little baby
Sweeter than apple butter
She’s a long gone chick
She dropped in from Calcutta

I’m not sure what long gone chick means in its fifties blues jive bee bop lingo but in my head I comfortably changed it to

Just flew in
All the way from Calcutta.

And I changed baby to sweet little angel too to go with the flying. It doesn’t quite fit the blues pattern switching back and forth in equal measures from G to C two times and then goes on one measure to D and follows with C for one measure before going back to the very dominant G. It has been such a joy making this song my own with the rain coming down, and of course I know if I hadn’t forgotten my key this morning this song wouldn’t have happened with me adding a stanza of Hari Krishna (thank you George Harrison) and another about the weather:

It’s been raining all morning
Hour after hour
It’s been raining all morning
Hour after hour
You can hold me, honey
I’ll be your umbrella

The last hour has been how the world should be, peaceful calm creativity. The raining has stopped. The sun is coming out. The blue and green butterflies have put away their umbrellas and return to entertain me in the bushes outside my window. Perhaps my wash hanging on the terrace will finally dry.