Saturday, December 17, 2016

Smile, it's a beautiful day

This happens to be my 500th post on TenguLife, and as such please indulge me a little. Allow me to recount a story from the closing days of December 1991, in the depths of downtown Tokyo, I was in a bar, long since fading into history, when the girl of my dreams walked through the door. And here I am today, all these years later, walking the sights of Tokyo, the two of us still holding hands. And it's a sunny day.

When we met she spoke no English and my Japanese was remarkably close to useless. Luckily her friend who was with her that evening had spent a couple of years in LA and helped us out at the beginning but after that, it was just her, me and a dictionary. Conversations were confusing, slow and difficult but we persevered, sometimes with hilarious consequences as we tripped over each others language and culture.

This was in the days before Google and the mobile phone, the two great facilitators of the modern era. Arranging a date via answer machine was almost always a hit and miss affair, you just had to repeat the time and place three times, hang up and hope. But slowly we figured it out, developing a language the two of us could understand but others, may be not. And now our son is leaving for university. You really can do anything you want to do in life. You just have to try and give it a go. Have a wonderful day.




1 comment:

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