adventure

While the commonplace belief that not much ever happens in this city may at times be true, on other occasions the social whirl picks up. The latest of these eddies has had a bittersweet quality. My exchange students completed their internships and yesterday graduated their programme. Some are staying on for skiing and travel, others are returning home to the last of the humid Kanagawa summer immediately.

These young women are modest and tend, I think, to measure themselves by a deficit rather than a credit model. One explained in her farewell speech how she had aimed in coming here to overcome her “weak points”, one of which she identified as speaking in public. I don’t think their teachers see them in the fashion: we notice instead their persistence and resilience, their willingness to take hard knocks and refuse to give up. I hope in their studies and work to come they have time to reflect more hopefully on what they’ve experienced and accomplished here.

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Friends, I have been out and about, which is why there has been so little activity here of late. I italicise those adverbs in order to convey, in some skinny way, the exhilaration of having a break from the every day. Not the tender pleasures of life at home, in which the señor and I slowly consume our merged collection of DVDs (“it’s only a film, h-bird,” he said as I gripped his arm during the final two or so hours of The Seven Samurai), and in which the too-longness of the dogs’ nails is recorded in the score-marks on our arms as they attempt to insinuate their hairy selves into our couch-sitting, all at once. No; the every day from which I have happily flown is the predictable minutiae of work: interesting students, affable colleagues, tasks completed without too much throat-clamping pressure of time (unlike the first-semester blues), but a routine so familiar to me I sometimes dream it and think my day’s finishing when it begins.

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