EITHER WAY

Sometimes I think it would be nice to move back to my hometown and get a small apartment and find a job at the arena where I used to play hockey as a kid, Bill Burgoyne Arena, where I could work in the concession stand, serving Cokes to parents who wait patiently for their kids to emerge, stinky and sweaty, from the after-game calm of the dressing rooms, as my parents once waited for me. In the downtime I could read books, jot notes for my own book, observe a place and a time that was once simply part of my life and is now only a memory of life. I could get reacquainted with the city and the people that made me. Not a bad gig, really -- the cold of the arena, the sounds of slapshots and whistles, the faces of the kids. I could take a skate every now and then, I'm sure. Hot chocolate whenever you want. There are worse places to work.

And then I think no, no, Matsue is the place to live, because Matsue is this small town in Shimane Prefecture in Japan, along the west coast, where I once visited because the great writer Lafcadio Hearn, Greek by origin, lived there, writing his thoughts and observations on Japanese life and culture in the nineteenth century, which helped me formulate my own (probably wrong) theories on Japan, and I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt. I went and visited his house, the house that he lived in over a hundred years ago, the house where he wrote many of his books. Very cool (to someone like me). It's a nice town, quiet and near the ocean, and not so small that you would become lost in your own foreignness. There's a few English schools there, and even though I vowed that I wouldn't want to teach English in Japan again, it wouldn't be all that bad, all things considered. A change of pace from the Tokyo suburbs and the Phnom Penh lunacy. There would be the ocean relatively nearby, and temples, and I could work on my Japanese. I'm sure there's lots of local festivals throughout the year that would bewilder and fascinate me.

I think I could carve out a life, either way.