Half-Full Halls

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoNo clinic today, though that didn’t make it a day off. A stem cell infusion was scheduled for the morning, the sort of booking that sets the tone for everything around it. Infusions need patience and careful attention. It’s a slow, precise process, and the main skill involved is not rushing it. Everything went as it should, and it was all done by lunchtime, which is about as satisfying as a morning gets: one important job, done properly, with the afternoon still to come.

Lunch didn’t live up to the morning. I had mee bandung, a dish I’m fond of, which is exactly why it’s disappointing when it falls short. The broth lacked conviction, and the whole bowl seemed to be going through the motions. It’s a small letdown, but with a dish you love, an average version feels more like a broken promise than a bad meal. I finished it anyway, out of loyalty to the idea of it.

Family news arrived in between. Julia is back from New Zealand after her family trip, still full of mountain air, presumably, and already packing again, this time for Japan on Friday. Some people travel the way the rest of us check the post. In the short gap between trips she found time to collect Mak this morning, which is very like her: just back from one adventure, nearly off on the next, and still the one who does the driving.

I was home early, and Anita had decided we were eating out. In our house that kind of decision is an announcement rather than a proposal, and I’ve learned to treat it like the weather.

We went to Pavilion Damansara. It’s a huge place, the sort of building that seems to stretch on into the distance. It was busier than the last time we’d come, which was nice to see, but only about half the shops are open. That gives it an unfinished feel, like a stage only partly dressed. Long stretches of shutters and hoarding sit between the lit-up shops. Malls in their early years always seem a little hopeful, as if waiting for a crowd that hasn’t quite found them yet. This one is getting there.

Naturally we stopped at Kinokuniya. A bookshop that size works on me in a predictable way: I go in meaning to browse briefly and come out realising half an hour has gone. There’s a calm to those aisles that nowhere else in a mall really has, everyone moving a little more slowly and speaking a little more softly, as though the books might mind.

Then dinner, and home. Nothing elaborate, just a meal out with company I’d choose every time.

A morning that went exactly as planned, a lunch that didn’t, a sister-in-law between continents, or whatever Julia’s next stop turns out to be, and an evening wandering a mall still growing into itself. A full day, quietly.