SEVEN (ELEVEN) ON THE COUCH

Early this morning, while hustling in and out of the 7-11 near my station, I found myself humming along to the muzak bubbling forth from the convenience store's speakers, and it took me a second to recognize the tune, and then I realized that it was the theme song from Welcome Back Kotter, and the fact that it had been converted to muzak, and that I was listening to such a bizarre rendition of a beloved seventies' sitcom from my early childhood in a convenience store in Yokohama, provided a much needed early-morning boost to a rainy day in May. I am now in Japan, reasonably adult, but somewhere, in some other realm, I'm still seven, on the couch, and Mr.Kotter is still trying to get Epstein and Washington, Barbarino and Horschack to sit down and shut up.