eye health

The vet’s office had an eye chart. We didn’t ask why it was there. We just went ahead with our dog's exam. And then, when he was done, we asked the vet if we could take his puppy for a walk. He had found the dog abandoned with a leg injury and had helped him to recover. Now the puppy was waiting in a small cage for a German woman to come back and adopt him. No one knew how long she would be. A month? Maybe. Some weeks? Perhaps. The puppy already had his shots so we took him for a walk down the block, past restaurants that were mashing their garlic and preparing the day’s oil. We went around the corner and then came back to the vet's office. We didn't use the eye chart during our visit but on the way home Shi-wen noticed that the puppy had nipped him so we called the vet to double-check about the shots. I think the vet said everything was fine. Then again my Chinese veterinary vocabulary is not particularly rich so he might really have said that we’d neglected to take our eye test. You never know.

glass in the road

Chengdu’s streets are a loosely tied knot that stretches and pulls to accommodate anyone and everything. This swelling and shrinking is a communal choreography built on tolerance. Tolerance of the slow, the broken, the fast, and the rich. Tolerance of the poor, the new, the bicycle, and the Bentley. And tolerance of glass, which, like everything else here, gets strapped to the back of something with wheels and then rolled into the fray. These streets take all comers.