The week, it was Golden: part 1

Nice to see you again.

I am back at work after a very rambunctious ten-day holiday in which I not only took pictures of myself next to a huge ceramic pumpkin, but I also walked through a town full of old people in nothing but a cotton robe (which provided just a touch more covering than the very small hand towel my cousin Linds thought we were given to shield our private parts from creepy eyes. “This is what we use?” she asked skeptically when I gave her the thin cotton towel. “Well yes,” I said, “I didn’t know you were so modest.” As it turns out she’s not modest at all when encased in a milky white pool encrusted with granite stones and shaded by leafy bamboo stalks. But when the poor girl though we were wandering through town with our butts jiggling, trying to make the very small towel cover both our boobs and the family jewels, well, she was a little nervous.)

The guests-Linds and Auntie-flew the coop this morning. We put them in a taxi headed for the train station after giving the driver very specific instructions and reminding him that they do not speak ANY Japanese. So don’t even attempt any of the famed Japanese politeness. They will not understand you. Also, do not take them to a dilapidated and non-functioning airport at five in the morning like you did my mother and sisters because they almost missed their plane, and in fact would have missed it had the sisters not done a kind of interpretive dance by the side of the road titled “this is what an airport looks like, please take us here”.

They dug their bobbie pins out of our tatami mats, boxed their ceramics in cardboard boxes that they will have to strap to their backs papoose-style to make it through the train station, and lumbered out of the apartment, down the three flights of cement stairs, past the gecko on the wall outside, and onto a train to Hiroshima. They kept insisting they were light packers, all empirical evidence notwithstanding (Evidence the first: Linds had a down jacket stuffed in a suitcase pocket as protection against our 80-degree sunny weather) and yet their main strategy to lower the weight was to not fill the water bottles up until they were at the train station. Because I’m sure it would have been the weight of two 8 oz water bottles making them collapse in exhaustion and not the three ceramic teapots and cup sets that were each packaged in enough bubble wrap and foam to make the Garbage Man froth at the mouth.

These two days in Hiroshima will be their first time in Japan sans guides and the strapping young man I call my husband to help carry their luggage, and if it weren’t for the lure of the pastry shops that keep them trudging from one street to the next, I could see them getting to Hiroshima and settling down in the train station, unable to lug their boxy stuffed suitcases to the hotel. (Evidence the second: for at least half of the 10-day extravaganza they lugged around 25 pocket plastic kleenxs, a pile they have since ditched and is now taking up space on our low living room table.) As the countdown to their big launch on Hiroshima flicked from one bright red number to the next, they kept asking us to draw them new maps and write down phone numbers and my aunt even snatched a post-it note with our address written on it from the refrigerator and afterward ensued a bizarre (yet heated) argument about whose post-it note it was and if it should stay on the refrigerator. I’m pleased to announce that I settled the dispute by saying that we do know our own address here and can simply WRITE IT OUT AGAIN for the person coming to sleep in our bed and eat out of our leaky refrigerator this August.

They became increasingly worried about missing the train and went from trying to catch an 8:48 train to a 8:36 and an 8:03 and finally settled on a 7:56 which would put them into the main station an hour and a half before the bullet train departs. Which means they will have plenty of time to walk the 10 feet from one platform to another and then fill up their water bottles which will be empty because who wants to haul water when you can have an iced espresso straight out of the vending machines that show up, like mirages, every five feet? Johnathan and I were just glad we weren’t going with them because although we had everything under control for the whole 10 days and did not, in fact, miss or even nearly miss a single train, they refused to trust our sense of time. Just before leaving Okayama, the home of The Peach Boy legend, we herded them into a grocery store to buy boxed dinners for the train, and even though it was an hour before the train left and we could see the gates through which we needed to pass to get to the right platform, Auntie kept clutching my arm and looking at her watch and sweating right from her blond roots. She went straight to the prepared meat section, snatched something off the warmer tray and then headed for the checkout line. I intercepted her and, pointing at her tray, asked, “What is that? Meat?” She said, “You know, Linds and I would just really feel better if we weren’t running to catch the train. We just don’t want to be running.” And I said, “Oh, so you’re going with the chicken?” We got them to the train on time-in fact, 45 minutes early as requested-and we all sat on the handicap benches while five trains whisked in and out of the station.

Back on our island we took them to the giant white statue that rivals the Statue of Liberty in both height and girth, although ours is of a blindingly white Buddhist goddess of fertility which has a little bit of a different feel than the green lady with the torch. We went on a search for a baseball cap that culminated in an interrogation of one of my first year students after he said he liked baseball (and ended with him saying he didn’t know anything about baseball caps, didn’t know where one could purchase such a thing, he was very sorry, but he swears he doesn’t know). Linds bought clothes (Evidence the third: each time we went shopping–even though they both swore they weren’t “shoppers”–she came back with a SACK of clothing). Auntie and I bought the same Alice in Wonderland fabric although mine is mostly of a light blue because she, in a sly move, ordered the last of the grey before I could drag a sales lady over. It was a strange situation, that fabric store. We grabbed an elbow of a cute saleswoman, pointed out the fabric and then she snipped of a piece, stapled it to a receipt and sent us to the checkout. Behind the women wheeling and dealing the cash there was a chute that eventually our bundle of creative joy would fall out of. They must have had a whole army of snippers and scissorhands on the 4th floor blocked off from any light, because the ladies with the pens only dealt in cash, and the fabric descended on us from above, as if the seven gods had sent it down.

And frankly when you’re ordering electric blue Alice in Wonderland fabric it’s not hard to think that heaven is where it came from.