Turning Point

I Really Think So

A family asks April where she's from and if they can have a picture of her with their daughters. They give her a fan as thanks.

April and Aaron have American omiyage: FOUR lint rollers. April and Aaron have Irish omiyage: A book about Celtic gods and goddesses and a book about the A-Team. (Yes, the televiision show.)

My omiyage is a his 'n' her set of sweat rags, decorated with teddy bears. Carissa named them sweat rags, but really, they're small, thick washcloths that almost every Japanese person carries in summer to wipe off the inevitable sweatage that results from the 32C heat. (I don't have it in me to use one, but I love giving them as gifts.) Even the big designers like Calvin Klein and Ann Taylor market sweat rags in Japan.) I picked them up in Ueno on the day I ran to Muji to buy guest towels. April and Aaron take to sweat rags like fish...in?...water? (Is that the right metaphor?) We went for a walk down by the Ara river this morning and April brought along her sweat rag. I saw happily that she also had tucked her fan into her bag.

It once would have amazed me to see a guard in Ginza carefully wiping down the gate at the construction site he guards, but now that kind of thing seems perfectly normal. Why not keep the gate gleaming white? i think as I walk by.

Yuko laughs her ass off when I tell her: "Americans are really loud, aren't we?" She laughs and laughs that I have noticed this. She says, "You're Japanese!!" She laughs and laughs. "You're Japanese!" she says happily. I want to deny it, but it makes sense to me not to eat in the street, not to point at anything without using my whole hand, not to take a piece of paper from someone unless I use both hands, not to say anything loud on the train ever...that makes sense, right?

I make Jun laugh when I point to my nose to indicate me.

Tonight, Seth cracks me up by telling Yuko, "Fire me onegaishimas'!" when she asked him to fold letters to students.

April is showing me pictures of the Ireland leg of their trip. One picture is of stone walls. The previous picture had been of cows. She says, "The walls are why they don't have cowboys." It takes me a veeerrry long time to realize that I know the word cowboy. The Brain has separated it into two words, "cow" and "boy" and I can't fit them together into one. I think, Cow. I think, Boy. I think, What in the hell is a Cow. Boy? The Brain searches its memory banks for what it knows that might relate boys to cows. I come up with a mental picture of a shepherd. Little Boy Blue. I laugh, and she looks at me funny. I try to explain that I'm not picking up any Japanese, and I'm sure as hell not retaining my Engliish. I try to explain the "Cow. Boy." dilemma. She looks at me funnier.