SOME THINGS I SAW THIS MORNING

Saw a high school girl on the train platform, alone there among all the suited older males, practicing her cheerleader moves without restraint or the slightest embarrassment. More major changes ahead for Japanese culture.

Saw a veteran commuter guy on the train who carefully positioned a folded handkerchief under his chin before allowing his head to totally loll forward and great quantities of large Zs to pour forth. A real pro.

Saw a ten-year old schoolgirl on the train staring wide-eyed at the foreign man with the long white hair. Having never seen such a thing before, she had trouble believing her eyes. She stared intently and unabashedly, therefore, until her convictions were once again in order and all in her world became normal again, including me.

At the terminus, saw the "Free Hugs!" girl again, alone this time, no takers visible, her sign now dogeared, her benevolence undimmed, a walking beam of sunshine.

CHICHIBU TRAIN WINDOW RIFF

Delight the way the trains from Tokyo travel straight through the lives of the people in their path taking only the road they need, zipping past kitchen, bedroom, bookstore, office, country avenues deep in leaves of gold, ivied walls of Meiji time, roofs and roofs and roofs stretching, reaching away to Chichibu...

Glimpses down arms-wide alleys of countless untold stories in the slant of afternoon sunlight on the scarlet of fallen leaves, a woman stands still and is gone to an old woman in blue squatting on another street, chatting...

It is bright, there are ceremonies, a man on a bicycle rolls out of the sun, offices full of others, quiet empty lots, old folks in the shady park, small rivers bridged along the ways that are of silver amid the green of grass and gray of stone, in small parks are ducks on springs waiting for the kids...

Laundry in the sun, broad tracts of actual trees, big white blocks of former graffiti, new houses going up like soldiers marching out of the city, local folks on bicycles waiting for our train to pass, now and then a station center with its mirrored buildings like eyes of crazy giant dragonflies...

Schools, middens, houses in valleys, black trees with orange leaves fired by the sun, roads under roads under railroads under roads across rivers even out here it's all getting modern, now rice fields now 'burbs, yet still there are long deep forests with no one in them not far from millions and millions in rooms, but then this is Wednesday...

Mushrooming sports clubs, parking lots, rising slopes of houses, little girl in braids and yellow hat at the bottom of canyons of balconies, then sun through curving slopes of trees and shady cemeteries, flashing glimpses of lives once lived, glimmers of narrow waters then broad, smooth and blinding beneath the bridge to row upon row of harvest-rounded tea trees, all the tiny country streets conforming to random zig-zag of original paddy pathways argued over centuries, madness to drive if you don't know the way...

Stations get more and more country, less and less hurry, with less and less English, more and more museum, going from never-saw-so-many bicycles or stacked-up elevated highways to fading old houses tucked in shrinking corners throwing nothing away, stacking it up outside beside the daikon rows reaching green in the curve of the widening road...

Mobs are waiting to board the train to Chichibu they stream on, arms full, eyes full, ready ready ready to festival...

The leaves are reaching that rusty color now beneath the half-moon sky full of galloping clouds, horsetails curved at their silvery ends like the curl of the pale moon...

A single board bridges the fast stream before the tunnel, things get sleepy...