Saturday, November 18, 2017
A Long Journey hr600
I have been estranged from my friends for a long time. There are only
three people with whom I keep in touch by a Christmas card once a year.
They are my kindergarten teacher and two high school teachers. I feel a
lifelong obligation to those three for each reason. I came across one of
the two high school teachers when I was a senior. She had just
graduated from a university and started teaching at my school as a new
teacher. She taught Japanese classics and I was one of her first
students. The Japanese classics class consisted of a mere dozen students
who selected the subject to prepare for the entrance examination of a
university or a college. As the class was unusually small and the new
teacher was young and friendly, it soon became like a big family. It was
as if we had a weekly family gathering that happened to have a specific
topic of Japanese classics, rather than a school class. In my dismal
and miserable high school life, the class was a chink of light. It was
the only place at school where I could breathe and came to life. I took
the initiative in having fun. Mostly my target was the new teacher. I
pulled various pranks on her at every class, such as all students hid in
the cupboards and she walked in the empty classroom, perplexed. On a
perfect sunny day, I suggested having the class outside and she taught
us in the schoolyard like a picnic. I tried what hadn’t been done at my
school before and she just cracked up every time. It seemed I was really
good at making her laugh. The whole class eventually laughed all the
time, and the old strict teacher who had her class next room often came
in to tell us to shut up. She sometimes called my teacher out to the
hallway and reprimanded her. Nevertheless, my teacher never hushed us,
and continued laughing at my jokes and having fun together. She helped
me with those bright hours in my dark last year of high school and I’m
thankful for that forever. She quit and moved to the other school when I
graduated. We have exchanged New Year cards or Christmas cards ever
since. While I write simple season’s greetings on them, she somehow
knows and writes what I want to hear most. For instance, toward the end
of the year in which I’d had a hard time and felt discouraged, her
Christmas card said ‘Hang in there! Things are turning better!’ and made
me wonder how she could ever know. We somewhat have a lot in common
with the way of living, too. In those years, most Japanese women got
married and quit working when they did. While I work and stay single,
she also continued teaching at school and didn’t change her last name to
her husband’s when she got married as the Japanese tradition goes.
Without seeing her in decades, I’ve felt strange bond with her. Last
year, my parents moved and their new address startled me. By pure
coincidence, it’s weirdly close to the teacher’s. I mentioned about it
on the Christmas card to her and then things developed quickly. During
my latest trip for a visit to my parents’, we had a chance to meet each
other for the first time since I was a teenager. The hotel I stayed in
on the trip was located in Osaka because I flew in this time instead of
using a train. From Osaka to the station we would meet though, it was a
two-hour train ride with several transfers. It would be a long trip but
we would bridge a decades’ gap in two hours. I thought of the gap, and
suddenly came to myself. Shouldn’t a reunion with one’s former teacher
be an opportunity to show some achievement for gratitude? I had
forgotten about it because the process to this meeting had strangely
gone smoothly as if it had been happening automatically out of my will. I
had tried and worked hard all those years, but achieved nothing, no
money, no fame. I recalled I had said to her that I would become a
musician when I last spoke to her. During the course of life, I did. But
that’s it. I haven’t gotten anything to show to her. I wondered if our
reunion might be an embarrassment where a teacher would see her
student’s unfruitful result of many years…
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