'Grass Writing'

I'm sure all you hardy souls would be undaunted by the wetness descending from the heavens today...not yet the 'atmospheric river' breathlessly predicted by the local television weatherman but persistent and, well, wet. We Californians are wimpy in that regard and have no desire to go outside. John seems to be taking the threat of flash floods a little more seriously than I am (a complete reversal from the last time it rained ) and did go outside briefly to check his drainage ditches up in the field   It is ironic that our neighbors who lost their homes to fire are now being further delayed,  just as they were about to begin building foundations, by rain.

This is something of an emergency blip especially since I think I have probably posted it before but I am very fond of it and it does have an interesting story. Back in about 1980 John and I traveled to China. It was just a year or two since Nixon 'opened' China to foreign visitors and John, in his role as Oilman, was there on some kind of business. 

Our trip began in Shanghai, an elegant trading city built by Europeans but brutally repressed during the cultural revolution. There were very few tourists around and because one of our group of four , Cy Yuan,  was Chinese,  grew up in Shanghai and spoke Mandarin, we were allowed to travel without a state sponsored 'keeper'. 

We bought this scroll from a man at an easel in the open market who made it on the spot from a poem that I selected from a collection, printed printed out in English to choose from. As he was finishing it, he made a mistake which, needless to say,  we were completely unaware of, but he  insisted on doing it all over again. He explained that this kind of calligraphy, so unlike the square blocks of kanji most Westerners can recognize if not read, was called 'grass writing'. The second scroll didn't look anything like the first one but he seemed satisfied with it and signed it to me, dated it (the smaller writing down the left side) and handed it over. I saved the bit of paper with the poem on it but lost it somewhere in our travels. 

Maybe some day I will meet someone who can read it and translate it for me. In the meantime, it remains a keepsake from an extraordinary trip to a country that was still immersed in the dubious benefits of a terrible cultural repression.