Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Sometimes on weekends I go for long walks. We live near a big park with a giant pond, and Americans I've known who have walked this park say it's one of the finest parks they've seen, rivaling Central Park in NYC. I've never been to NYC (which is weird) but I have my doubts. The park is good though. It serves me well. I used to take walks with the boys when they were little; in the summer I'd take them for soft cream and french fries at the little hut that sells these for two months out of the year. In the fall I remember I once made them ham and cheese sandwiches and thermoses of corn soup and they wore big jackets and swished kicking through the bunches of leaves. We played baseball using pine cones for balls and broken limbs for bats. That memory will die with me, I expect, as they were too young to now remember it. They don't now take walks with me. Parents of young children, take note: Every season is different, and the joys you have now you should savor, for they will someday be gone, replaced. I won't belabor the point.
The park has cranes, turtles, great orange and red and dun-colored carp, big rat-like nutria, many many various-sized and -colored cats who make their home in the thickets and bamboo, and, once, I saw a fox. My wife does not believe this story ("What would it eat?") but I know what I saw. All kinds of pigeons and crows. You can see ducks floating out on the pond (more of a small lake). Once my youngest boy took his birthday present fishing rod out and practiced casting from the big rocks at the pond edge.
In certain times of the year there are fireflies, and you go and all the lights are off and you walk in pitch black by the creek that trickles down up the hill into the pond and the fireflies--hotaru in Japanese--bloom suddenly in that amazing bioluminescence and float up and back into the dark of the trees. Again, something we took the kids to a few times, years ago. My wife took my hand, as she sometimes--rarely, but sometimes--does, revealing what often seems a lost romantic streak. Women are magical. They do piss me off, yes.
I go for long walks sometimes but now alone--people have more important things do do--but I don't mind going solo, and probably prefer it sometimes. I do not listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks. You can see retired Japanese on bicycles with a bank of phones set up across the handlebars to play Pokemon Go. I do not know how it works. The local Filipino dudes fishing off the bridge, expressly against the signs which say "No fishing off the bridge," but I guess they can't read Japanese. (橋上での釣り中止).
People run in the park, and walk, and kids ride their bicycles through. In season, people spread out their light blue tarps and do cherry-blossom-viewing parties in the area with the cherry and plum trees. I walk all through the park and sometimes out the other end, where there is a trail along a narrow river, and across and down a hill through rice fields and into a cemetery. There are stone altar koro with candles or incense sticks. The other day I unwrapped one from the plastic bag in the little box and opened the drawer there where there were matches and lighters. I lit a stick and prayed for the dead, then added a prayer for the living for good measure. It is a Buddhist ritual, and my ex-girlfriend, a Catholic, used to say she felt Buddhism and Catholicism had a lot in common. I didn't know what she meant then and I still don't, but I suppose in very superficial ways the trappings are the same.
I could sprawl this out into a winding yarn even longer than it is. This makes my life sound very sedate and somewhat boring, and probably compared to many of yours my days are probably pretty dry. I write this in a way as a counterpart to this post and this other post, both of which made considerable impressions on me. I typically don't imagine I live in some idyllic wonderland--certainly if I wrote about my wife's hometown, which is like the Shire, only Japanese, I could make it seem as if I do. But I don't fear assault, and I am not routinely plagued by crime or filth or discomfort beyond a couple of guys fishing off the bridge.
As I write this my son is complaining about the fish eggs in the maki my wife brought home. She is insisting it's not ikura but he is having none of it. He is eating without his shirt on, something my own mother never let us do. They're all speaking Japanese, and I'm on beer #2. I just made a slip and when my wife said "You can't see your father's clavicle" I said "You used to could." This has caused a realization that I am actually not a standard English speaker. You can take the boy out of Alabama.
I'll try to improve my posting style to have more structure. I expect someday I'll miss these times, too, by which I mean this family table but also this, just posting on the Motte.
I like the nature here, and walks by myself. There are a huge number of foxes in central London. You see them pretty often, but you hear them howling every night. There are parks and greenery and trees everywhere, more so than any comparable European or American city that I have visited, squirrels so docile or unwittingly domesticated that you could pet them, friendly giant pelicans that waddle around the park and take pictures with tourists, and a very large number of swans. There is also the opportunity to regularly watch nature’s less savory interactions, especially between pigeons and seagulls, since we have great numbers of both. I once watched a seagull rip a pigeon out of the sky and dismember it, and sometimes you do find a brutalized pigeon corpse laying in the middle of the street or on the sidewalk; what at first glance could be the work of a car reveals itself pretty quickly to be that of a seagull.
Like you, I feel lucky to live in a place with little obvious squalor and crime, although certainly more of both than in Japan. There is a long-standing minor epidemic of phone snatching by men on mopeds (with no or removable plates, wearing balaclavas, thus presumably challenging London’s vaunted system of mass surveillance), but there are signs everywhere not to take your phone out on the street, and I find an Apple Watch is good enough to check texts and change music. These thieves do not seem to snatch the ten thousand dollar handbags I see even frail and elderly women around here carrying, interestingly, perhaps because their fencing pipeline is less developed or more easily penetrated by the police. We have some homeless, but they’re largely friendly-enough native military vets with a drinking problem or, Kurdish or Roma migrants who come as families, and who unroll their sleeping bags at night under the awnings of the department stores. They’re friendly enough, and the terrifying and dangerous schizophrenic tweakers one sees in American cities are completely absent. At least where I live, you can walk around at any time of day and night and deal with minimal real risk of interpersonal violence.
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Trite though it may be, I’d say more of a Miyazaki impression. Magical slice of life.
I always enjoy your prose.
Second this. I think that a quiet, peaceful life is highly underrated. I also enjoy reading about everyday life in another country, as I'll almost certainly never experience it. I might visit Japan, but it's quite unlikely that I would ever live there for an extended period of time and settle into everyday life (nor in any other country, for that matter). So it is a delight to read about even if it seems boring to @George_E_Hale .
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