Our appointment started at eight a.m. on the day after we arrived at the airport. I’m not one for flying, and I’m certainly not one for crossing times. It’s hard enough to keep my ordinary days and times together, but when I start gaining a day here, or losing five hours there, or arriving home earlier than I leave, things get strange and they get strange faster as a springtime damselfly.

If you’ve travelled you already know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, well, if you haven’t, you needn’t have to worry about it. But there is a big world out there. And, yeah, I do suggest you go exploring it if you haven’t already started. Some people I know make a living out of the excusing and complaining businesses. Well I’m here to tell you those businesses are no good in life. That’s why there’s been a lot of me and the wife’s doings in these here parts.

Here I go, going on about something where I haven’t even giving you the time of day or let you in on the goings. I’m sorry about that. The wife tells me I do it a lot. I just start in on a conversation as if the other person knew what was swimming around in my brain as well as I did. I’m not saying I do know what goes on up there most of the time, mind you. I’m just saying that I have more contexts, and the wife thinks I should share those contexts with people before I get much further into the goings. My wife’s as smart as she is beautiful, and there’s plenty stories I can tell on how pretty she is. When she’s about it’s like I’m throwing my body in front of an escaped river that’s churning and storming its ways over new parts that never did seen water.

My wife and I been married going on fifty years now. We never did have a real ceremony or nothing. It was more a last-minute thing. Now I ain’t going to fib and tell you about a shotgun or a boiling red father-in-law or anything unnatural like that. We were honest folks and we thought long and hard about it. And in the end we decided to pick up and carry it over to the clerk’s office. Samuel Watson his name was. He was a good man. He knew my father from way back and he happily obliged us. We dressed in our Sundays and we went over and raised our hands and everything, and when we left we were man and wife, and we’ve been that way ever since.

Now my wife got it up in her head that that was all good and everything for the time. I mean we were kids back then. We couldn’t see much behind our own heads walking backwards. Our brains were filled with such ideas back then. Not that they’re not chock full of goings on now. But it was different then. Then we had plans and dreams. Now we’ve seen most of those dreams and all we got left is a stack of plans higher than the Giant Sequoias, or so it seems at times. The wife and me, we’re working that pile. But it’s not like before with the dreaming. Not that we mind much. We had enough dreams that when they stopped coming we weren’t surprised or nothing.

So the wife sees these here parts in her travel guide and there and then decides we’re travelling. She’s a reader, my wife. She reads everything. And when I say everything, I mean stuff that’s never even been under the sun. The woman can’t walk five feet without turning a page in a magazine or newspaper or some book or other. I love her death for it and she gets so much from inside those pages that I sometimes wonder if she’s already been everywhere and done everything, and she was just guiding me through the experiences for only my benefit. Not that I would put that past her. No doubts my wife would do that. As I said most of the time I’m just along for the journey, and the least I do is try not to bang into any rocks to slow her down.

She sees these photographs of Taipei in the autumn and she knows that’s where we going. They have these here photography places there. It’s not like in the states where we grew up.