Sunday, July 26, 2015
Hidemi’s Rambling No.548
After I landed on Los Angeles, I took a bus to Anaheim from LAX. It was
playing outdated rock music on the stereo and running on a patchy
freeway that had eternal traffic. Out the window were rows of shabby
houses along the freeway. Everything was so familiar that I felt as if I
had been here last month, not ten years before. It seemed that I had
just awoken from a long dream of ten years in Japan and actually never
left here. I thought nothing changed after all, but realized I was all
wrong about it afterward during my stay. The biggest change that
surprised me most was people. Until ten years ago, I had lived or
visited regularly here, and people weren’t nice. At a fancy beauty
salon, when a receptionist was about to lead me to a seat, a manager
stopped me and asked me to leave. I was told that the seats were full
although the salon was apparently empty. At a deli, a salesperson
ignored me and wouldn’t take my order. She took an order of a white man
who was standing behind me in the line instead. I used to encounter
unkind people with horrible attitudes and racism almost every day. For
those experiences, I had braced myself for similar bad treatments on
this trip. As it turned out, what awaited me was a miracle that I never
had them at all during the whole trip this time. Every single person I
met was nice and kind. When I took a local bus and was standing, a man
offered his seat to me, saying his stop was next. I have a storage unit
here and went to open it for the first time in ten years. Because I paid
late a couple of years ago, the lock had been changed. I explained the
matter at the office and the man with a Southern accent pleasantly came
over to my unit. He didn’t mind extra work inflicted by me and cut the
lock with a circular saw for free while burning his fingers a little,
smiling and laughing all the way. I was wearing a pin of a movie
‘Tomorrowland’ during the trip, and seven or eight people who spotted it
talked to me. Everybody was smiling and friendly. I’m not prettier or
richer than I was when I lived here. While I remain the same, people’s
attitudes toward me have dramatically changed. I wondered where those
then-mean people had gone. They might as well have been abducted by
aliens who in turn put down new nice people. As the trip went on, I had
been getting more and more in high spirits. It had seemed silly that I
spent months ahead of the trip worrying so many things. I was elated
enough to get a lot of souvenirs. At the checkout, a salesperson, who
needless to say was polite, said to me smiling, “It seems your card
can’t be processed. Do you have a different card?” Everything in my eyes
suddenly went black. My charge card was maxed out, which meant I
completely used up my entire budget for the trip. I paid with my
emergency-only credit card and my shopping spree came to an abrupt end. A
new worry that I would manage to cut and contrive expenses when I
returned home grasped at me. I felt an urge to be drunk…
Labels:
Anaheim,
credit card,
freeway,
Japan,
Los Angeles,
max out,
miracle,
overseas travel,
pin,
racism,
shopping,
Southern accent,
souvenir,
Tomorrowland,
traffic,
travel,
trip,
U.S.A.,
worry