Tuesday

I spent forty days and forty nights over the end-of-year holidays in the United States, from the afternoon of December thirteenth to the early morning of January twenty-first. Why so long? It had only been six-and-a-half months since my last trip home (a short stint compared with Sunshine's fourteen). But it made the most sense for Sunshine's shorter vacation to include a comfortable pre-holidays interval. Then I had a couple of dentist appointments I'd made the last time I was in town. These were necessarily arranged around the dental lab's slow turnaround for two different crowns, one a replacement, which had to be completed after the New Year. So this time home just got protracted. It happens. It was a wonderful trip, too--dentistry notwithstanding. I managed to catch up with many old friends and family in Kentucky and North Carolina--folks from as far away as Vietnam, Miami, and my distant past, or as close as my home-away-from-home and friendly neighborhood bar. As much as I loved spending my first Christmas ever with Sunshine last year, our estrangement from home was anxious and guilt-making. I was glad to spend the time with my other family again this year. As adapted to the southeast Asian temperature as I've gotten--those days that seem to be temperature-free have slowly crept up the thermometer--the sporadic mild-twenties chill of NC winter didn’t bother all that much (a slight inconvenience compared with Sunshine’s weekend in frigid Minneapolis), but I did catch a tree-day cold in the midst of which I had a hygienist appointment. Those are short, I said, talking myself out of canceling. So I arrived at the dentist's to discover I had two back-to-back appointments, almost four hours, struggling in the chair with a nose I couldn't breathe through. [Cavin]