Monday, January 27, 2025

Year of The Snake and Red Envelopes

Happy Birthday and Happy Year of The Snake!

You will be "70-something" this time, but I see no need to be specific since you forgot how old you were when we first met and fell in love and claimed it was 14 when you were nearly 16 and I was 17 a few months earlier. We carried on in between wars over the course of many years!

I play mahjongg with three Chinese ladies once a week and this week our game date falls on Wednesday, the 29th of January, which is Chinese New Year. It is celebrated in Seattle's Chinatown district with large crowds enjoying the great costumed dragons and lions and snakes in the streets, lots of red and yellow decorations and hordes of excited people waiting for the annual red envelopes with cash inside from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, lovers and friends.

Your birthday on the 28th of January is known, on the Chinese calendar, as New Year's Eve since the Chinese New Year starts on the 29th in 2025. The Year of the Snake is a year of wisdom, intuition and transformation.

Of course, since you promised me that you'd love me forever but pushed it down to the lowest part of your heart,

promised me a villa and didn't provide it,

promised me that I'd never be without a piano and a home in which to play it and broke those promises, 

promised that you'd provide scholarship for me to have the highest educational credentials but then cut the funding in the midst of my studies and I had to leave London before I could complete it, not having the tuition for SOAS when I returned from my studies at the courts of Bahrain, 

because of the promises you made to me and then broke, I have logically concluded that you are a knowing and serial promise-breaker, lacking honor.

I hope that you do indeed acquire wisdom in the New Year, that you are transformed into a man who keeps and honors rather than breaks his word, that your word means something to you, that you have the intuition to know what you should do and then do it.

I hope that you have a lovely birthday.

No comments: