Skip to main content

Experiences I Will Never Know About

Eri and I were checking out one of Kenzo's school notebooks tonight.


This page has so much going on, and I love all of it. It made me realize something that I can easily forget - he's a person. He has a life separate from mine, lives each day having experiences that I will never know about, and has thoughts and ideas that I can't nor should get in the way of.

"Thank you for doing everything," she said.

Eri walked with me this morning as I went around the neighborhood and delivered planter box maintenance information and schedules to various folks. 

We stopped at the first house and I rang the doorbell and handed the old lady the three-page information sheet I had made and copied and we exchanged greetings and then I realized this is going to take forever if I ring every single person’s doorbell and chit-chat with them.

I’ve got 20+ more of these to hand out. 

So we started just sticking them in people's mailboxes and made better time. Most folks aren’t home anyway since they have jobs that they have to go to apparently. 

I really like getting to know the people in the neighborhood and even if they’re not home, I now know their names and where they live, so the next time I see them at a neighborhood association meeting I can place the name and the location with their face and their family. 

And then we came across that nice old guy Iso-san. 

I met him again yesterday at the community center when he was making copies of a flyer warning everyone, especially the old people in the neighborhood, about phone scams. Apparently he had gotten a phone scam call and was reminded that he needs to update the warning for the neighborhood. I don't know how old Iso-san is, but he's definitely over 80. Luckily he has a daughter and other family that caught on to the scam. A lot of people aren't so fortunate.

When Eri and I came across Iso-san this morning while finishing off delivering planter box maintenance fliers, he was fixing signs that are attached to a trash collection area. He was covered in dust all over one side and his left elbow was bleeding.

We stopped to see if he needed help. It was 8:45.

He said he was going around to all of the 20 (though I think there are only 18) trash collection areas and fixing broken announcement boards and adding the flyer about phone scams. 

At around 15:45 I was returning home after a walking break/neighborhood association planter box maintenance schedule delivery and Iso-san was working on the trash collection area outside our house. He had a bandage on that elbow. It was nearly 30 degrees and humid.

I zipped inside, grabbed a cold bottle of barley tea from the fridge, and ran back out and greeted Iso-san.

He kind of ignored the cold beverage and asked me to help him with the zip ties that keep the trash collection box signage in place and straight. We made quick work of it. The signage is solid.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

lookin tired/feelin good

I can't even read the clock right. Eri: "You're going to soccer, right? Aren't you a bit early?" Me: "Yeah! We usually leave at this time and get there right on time. We gotta go! Let's go guys!" Soccer club starts at 10 a.m. The boys know that when the long hand on the clock gets to the 8 (9:40) it's time to go to the bathroom and get our socks and shoes on and head down to the car. The big hand was on 8. The problem that Eri saw was the short hand. It was 8:40, not 9:40. I'm going nuts. Slowly . Rapidly. An hour later, after I slowly enjoyed my coffee and disposed of the last beetle (yes, all four beetles have now gone back to the earth) and cleaned his bug box to make room for new bug acquisitions and the boys chilled out on the sofa watching TV, we set off. While the boys played soccer I headed across the parking lot to grab them some juice boxes for a job well done. This is not standard procedure, but Kenzo made his comeback today after ...
1 comment
Read more

Certain Luxuries

I work from home. My office is in Osamu's future bedroom, though he doesn't know it yet. At some point a few years down the line he will probably start to yearn for his own space. For the time being he and Kenzo share the room next door and sleep in a bunk bed and have a grand time playing, roughhousing, and quarreling. As brothers are prone to do. I started the day with a two-hour meeting with an esteemed co-worker who is based in a city far away. He manages a team associated with mine, and I value our developing relationship. We're both in management positions where people depend on us, and for my part as a relatively new manager I respect and try as often as possible to seek out his advice and perspectives.  We're very different, though. We dance around the topic, but it's pretty clear that one of our differences is that I embrace ambiguity and he does not. I think that it's okay if meetings don't end with a clear solution, as long as the relationship be...
Post a Comment
Read more