Odd Things

Odd things, like a wannabe Texan Ranch in this town. Like a farewell ceremony in which each grade in an elementary school has been assigned a skit to do about me. I made my speech short and business-like so as not to make the kids get too emotional.

The thing is: in Japan, teachers leave schools all the time! The average number of years for a teacher at a school in this prefecture is three! So these farewell ceremonies happen quite frequently. They are as much for the socialization/education of the kids as they are for the faculty/staff who is/are leaving. They force the kids to appreciate, with emotional force, the presence and work of their teachers. One kid buckled during his little speech to me and almost could not finish the words, poor guy... The rest made it well and I was happy that it was not too painful. I knew that it would have been the pressure of the ceremony, and not just the sadness of saying goodbye to someone, that contributed to a students' tears. Still, it is hard to say goodbye to someone, even if they have played a limited role in your life; when faced with this kind of goodbye, one must also face, to a very small extent, the certainty and sadness of all goodbyes (both future, past, and present).

There is nothing I can do to prevent these goodbyes; I can only try to make them painless. In the end, every encounter with these wonderful kids (and the wonderful dog above) are things that I will forever be grateful for. Nothing lasts forever, but at least they were there at some point.

Sometimes I wonder if nature has a stored memory somewhere of all the things that happen in the universe. Have those things in the past really been forgotten, never to be relived or even recalled? How could that be? Are we really "just prisoners here" as the Eagles' song goes? {Ha}. Is there no justice? Are things even more valuable because they are absolutely and utterly lost? Surely, 99.99999% of the experiences that humans have are lost in the vacuum of time and space; are they really lost though, or is there some secret out there?

Questions, questions, questions. But no answers. It is chaos.

While I sit here with just days left, I look forward to coming back to a place where I can be fluent again, where I can have my old identity back. But somewhere else inside of me I am saddened to know that so much of what I've had here I will not have there.... That's life though.