From 9:00 to 10:30 in the morning I met with Hori-san, my 82-year-old volunteer community Japanese tutor to practice my Japanese. She was waiting for me outside the neighborhood gate and was, as usual, impeccably (and snazzily) dressed complete with dangly earrings and full makeup. We spent the morning together catching up about the last few weeks (I didn't meet with her when my sister-in-law was here) and I slowly attempted to share a few stories from her visit while she patiently and tirelessly corrected my grammar and suggested alternative words and phrases. Whenever I tell how I bungled some form of Japanese culture she laughs and laughs which makes me laugh even harder. It's not really language practice, it's more like inter-generational/inter-cultural therapy.
Fast forward to 3:00 pm and I'm sitting in the library waiting to work with an undergraduate Japanese student through a university program called the Writing Support Desk. I had worked with her the previous week on some research for her final paper in her History of the English Language Class and we picked up right where we left off. With five minutes left, we looked at her research proposal together one last time and I noticed that she tended to use the same words over and over again. After pointing this out I asked her if she knew of any resources easily available to look for synonyms. She didn't so I opened my computer and showed her a popular online thesaurus. After seeing all of the options for similar words in English, the student got so excited she almost fell out of her chair. I'd never seen a Japanese student get so dramatically stoked about something so mundane and it was hilarious. I started laughing and then she started laughing while still managing to eek out, "I've been looking for something like this for years!" It was the strangest and most entertaining interaction I've had with a student for weeks.
About an hour later I met with a professor whose class I'm observing as part of the research for my MA thesis. She's moving to another university to accept a new job from next term and was starting to go through things in her office. She had scheduled a brief meeting with me in order to pass a few things along such as a space heater for my shared office and a stack of books related to my thesis topic. "Merry Christmas" she said to me as I giddily accepted the armload of presents.
From 5:30-6:30 pm I met with Nanako-san, a middle-aged widow who lives in the neighborhood and who I met at yoga class. I meet with Nanako once a week to teach English, but it's usually more of a gabfest and hangout time than verb conjugation practice. Not only that, but it's always obvious that she puts a fair bit of time and energy into preparing for our weekly sessions and this week was no exception. Nanako-san is a very classy lady who not only appreciates the finer things in life but loves to share them as well. When I arrived, she had a hot pot of tea warming over a candle, fancy teacups, a vase of flowers, high end snacks, an envelope of cash to pay me for 'teaching' and the usual stash of small presents like stationary, stickers, candy and chocolate to 'share with Sean'. Lately, Nanako-san has been trying to help me with my fashion sense. For a large part of the class we talked about nail polish - she got some new, fairly wild, nail polish called "chameleon" that changes color depending on body temperature! My meetings with Nanako always span the whole range of human emotion: we laughed over funny stories from the previous weeks, we cried a bit together because her dog of twelve years had just died, and we got excited about her upcoming birthday. At the end of class, we made plans for her to have me over for dinner the next week and then she thrust a hand-me-down peacoat on me saying that it will look better on me than my athletic winter jacket.
Arriving home, my To-Do list mostly naked of crossed out lines and check marks, I felt a stab of panic for unfinished assignments and looming deadlines but also a wash of gratitude. Looking back over my day, the moments that I remembered clearly and enjoyed the most were those spent with people, not the bits of time I cobbled together to 'work on something important and tangible.' When I think back on my two years in Japan I'm not going to dwell on papers that nobody will read but I will remember Hori-san's saintly persistence in improving my Japanese, the delight in finding a new writing resource, the generosity of an incredible academic mentor and the impressive science of chameleon nails.
Don't get me wrong, I still make plenty of To-Do lists, but I'm trying to make more time to experience and appreciate those meaningful moments in life that are not prescribed by an academic syllabus.
Have I ever told you about Wunderlist? It's an app I use for to-do lists...you can create multiple lists, recurring tasks, and share certain lists with other people so that, for example, you and your husband don't buy the same thing off the grocery list. This isn't promoted or anything. I just like it.