THE SEA AND THE PLAINS

Into our room the two of them enter, the young one and the old one both babbling away, our past and our future united as one. At first one blames the room's poor acoustics for what little is heard -- low, muffled, indistinct tones, like notes on a piano that's slowly being tuned. Gradually comes a strange sort of relief when it is clear that neither the room nor, more importantly, oneself are at fault for this lack of comprehension. The others themselves are speaking much nonsense. (Oh, how good it feels to blame someone else!)

The boy is not more than two, if even that, and his words are a motley mixture of the real and the fantastical, one syllable guffaws giving way to extended monologues only he seems to get. (And how he so clearly enjoys revelling in his own private realm. His laughs and his giggles splitting his own tiny words into two, three, even four separate parts, so that what finally emerges is a nonsensical stream of spittle and sounds.

His much elder comrade in nonsense fares not so much better. The child's high-pitched patter is substituted by the elderly man's guttural grunts, but the pitch is the same, and the pace is as quick. It is as if the old man is eager to get it all out, clarity be damned. He, too, has bubbles of spit playing games on his mouth. There is a melancholy undertone to this sloppy style. Surely he must know that what he says is not being heard; his eyes' vacant gaze suggests a deep inner wound. A long life of dialogue replaced by a monologue -- is that wound enough?

The boy doesn't mind. Something within his young sensitive mind unconsciously goads him to keep spouting forth blab, for good or for ill, at that age who cares? Eventually, all will laugh at his witty few words. Months and years of conversation await, and soon all will know what you say and you mean.

From my privileged vantage point at the side of the room, looking at the old man, I glimpse no similar voice whispering in his tired mind. While the boy is thinking thoughts that have yet to take root, the man's firm foundations of belief and intent have already been uprooted. (Time will do that, no?) He is scrambling for words that have long passed away. What's left are mere fragments that can't mesh as one. While the boy is continually adding, something, everything, is being subtracted from the man's aging soul. He would think this a tragedy if he were aware of its indifferent intent, but his mind is a mold of the sea and the plain. Raging waters are replaced by the quietest, widest flatland, like the prairies he once drove through while heading out west. Words can't help but drown in that water and get lost in those fields.

Still. In this spare room, amidst such unlikely companions, can another, larger force be detected? For words are but hints of what hearts truly want. Perhaps this underlying desire desire for communion can tell us what sloppy speech obscures.

Let me out! the boy shouts.

Let me in! the old man pleads.

A primal, potent need to be heard by both that must come from somewhere near.

Let us leave this room quietly, while they're still chatting freely. I'm sure they will part, and only one will remain. (I won't dare say who, but I'm sure you can guess.) We'll shut the door softly, and tiptoe away. Soon that young boy will start to make sense, and most of that innocent infant charm will be gone. Before long that old man will stop speaking for good. The words will have faded forever.

Perhaps some cosmic exchange is at work. The young feed the old with their knowledge and letters. In return, what is given so freely must now pay its price. A psychic system of bartering that makes humans flow. Energy exchanged never dies; it merely changes form. One withers while the other grows tall.

If we walk down the hall at a slow steady pace, we might just hear an electric undercurrent beneath their strange words, the strike of a spark that spreads a fire both will set.

PICTURE A BOY RIGHT OUT OF ROCKWELL

Picture a boy right out of Rockwell, American in tone, Japanese in technique. Scene from the street, sitting at his desk, the window his frame. A child's messy plan sprawled out in front of him: pastels and pencils, papers pens. The bare, skeletal, fragments of a mobile something-or-other yet to be built. His tongue sticks out of his mouth in that form of universal concentration that spans across cultures and must be implanted within us from above upon birth.

Somebody should be painting this, I thought, walking by, glancing quickly. (Staring into anyone's home is an oddly intimidating moment. One feels somehow responsible for an open window and a desk too close to the edge of outside. Especially in Japan, where everything is at odds with itself and each other, people and buildings bisecting each other until humanity merges with train lines in flux.)

Would Norman Rockwell have been up to the task? That essential chronicler of a midwest America that may not exist? Or, it it ever did, such a time and quite the place it must have been! One where innocence at play and adults at work somehow coexisted in a common sense of balance and trust. To extend such a midcentury metaphor of decades gone by to the Japan of today seems somehow strained, mostly because an atom bomb from the forties inevitably enters any discussion of America and Japan, no matter how long one changes the topics and forces one's smile. (There are, after all, only so many topics to talk about. Even the trivial has its depths, eventually.)

Everything is amplified by these streets and this place, where American soldiers work less than a mile away from that little boy sketching his future with the chalk of today. Mere decades okay a big bomb went kaboom. It's not unreasonable to conceive that relatives of this budding artist or engineer felt their bodies burn quickly and their life slip away in such an explosion. And it's probably certain that Rockwell himself, or those from his clan, fought and died against the relatives of this selfsame child.

Oh, the reckless complexity of the past! Let it all stay dead and done, if you please. Let us watch a boy do a Sunday's good deed without considering all that has come and all that will follow. When Americans still occupy a land all its own, such concerns find their way to the front of the line. Race, and all its mysterious, ineffable irrelevance, makes me wonder why some are born here and others there. Why decisions decided by people long dead still make us sit up and look at her skin.

For now, I'll let the boy be, and let the questions of nations lay nestled in newsprint. If Rockwell had verve, it was in the life of the faces he drew with such care. They had a life beyond what we could imagine, and so does this boy I saw for a second. Even as I write these words, he is probably waking up and getting ready for school, downing his juice and packing his bag. The past has no concern for someone so young. He will step out of the frame that he does not know exists and enter his own little world of school play.

A LOVELY BUT LONELY SIGHT

A young couple kissing their final goodbyes before parting is a lovely but lonely sight. When such an encounter occurs on a train station platform, we have moved from the realm of reality to that of a cinematic melodrama, but even melodrama has its roots in the rubic of life. Cliches are enacted wherever we go, and life need not be original or novel to force its effect. Watching this scene play out activates the voyeur in all of us, the original watcher that wants to observe. I pretend to be studying the schedule of trains hanging over our heads, but secretly watch as they play out a scene for which they are the stars and I am an audience.

One suspects that something is surely amiss, for lovers at rest rarely look so languid and dreamy as they loll about in one another's arms like pups at play. Trains move in and out of their station at their regular, Japanese clip, and the couple (for surely they are two) -- he, dark-haired, she, a blonde, his male to her female watch them go sadly and expectantly, for soon such a car will subtract one and leave the other behind.

They continue to hug and hang off of each other, but the tone shifts, the levity gone, their former play replaced by a desperate embrace that reminds one of mourners at a funeral wondering what will come next. She slowly rubs the back of his skull in soft little circles, as if his stomach is painful and she holds the cure. In their t-shirt and shorts they could be any young lovers going for a carefree day out in a city not their own, but their restless intimacy speaks of a sooner parting.

When the train for the airport finally arrvies, she holds him tight and kisses him deep. The doors open. She steps inside, staying close to him still. He starts to move away from the doors and the tracks, but she grins and waves him forward for one final kiss. For a long moment his face is between the railway line and her lips that are waiting. He crosses the gap. Kisses. Leans back. She smiles. I suddenly realize that they will see each other soon. There are no tears. There are no faces with the shock of one who's been slapped. Perhaps she is going back before him, or they will meet in ten days in another far land. Things seem better, somehow, as if a child that has fallen down somewhere has suddenly stood up.

The doors close, and she blows him the kiss of cliches and the truth. He watches the train leave in a rapid-fire rush, and I watch him watch. He is smiling slightly. He walks slowly away in the mid-summer heat.

I feel guilty and alone, knowing that I will write about this moment, and that whatever they are feeling will not be conveyed. I don't know their names, so that lessens any loss of pride that I feel by this breach of their privacy.

Even standing still, my shirt is scorched with sweat. I think that this entry will somehow ennoble their spirits, allowing them to represent all those who go, and all those who will stay. Absurd, grandiose thoughts.

He walks away, and I wait for my train.

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

When the players who take the pitch at the World Cup final in South Africa on Saturday nigtht are not wearing the flag of your particular country stitched onto the corner of their jerseys, a certain dispassionate interest, bordering on indifference, naturally takes root. This is not necessarily altogether a negative development. Since one's national pride is no longer (or had never been) at stake, one can develop a deeper appreciation or disillusionment with the game itself. One can be a North American and love soccer, or hate soccer, but surely that vast middle section of Canada and America (absenting Mexico) exists whereupon one can not work up a lather about a sport seen by so few and adored by even fewer. Thus watching the game at length during the World Cup tends to make one see why most of the planet pines for its holy structure, but such understanding inevitably leads to a disarray in one's sporting heart. Yes, the low-score creates a level of anticipation akin to a child at the circus waiting for the clowns to finally come out of their miniature car. Certainly, the no-time-outs maximizes the playing time and necessitates the absence of commercials -- no minor miracle in this advanced advertising age!

But what can one raised on hockey and baseball do with everything else about the game? Nothing specifically monotonous endgenders such lethargy. After all, one cannot play the sport for two years as I did from the tender ages of seven to eight without gaining a certain respect for the game's sense of space and time. As a halfback, I was a terrible player, as all children are, but I was the worst of the worst; I hung past the centreline and stared at the grass and thought about the oranges we would all eat at halftime. Sweet and juicy! Such was my limit of love for the game.

However, a game is a game, and all children love games, and all children grow into adults who remember that love, no matter how strongly they deny its primitive pull. So with Canada content to sharpen its blades while waiting for the winter hockey season to start, I can look forward to Spain taking the soccer world by storm, by hook, by crook. The stakes are suddenly high for me, as of late. An office pool randomly gave me Spain as my savior. More than ten dollars awaits. Has money tainted this beautiful game?

Only if I lose.

AN AMBULANCE IN MOTION

An ambulance in motion is always a sight. Alarm bells within our souls suddenly start ringing when we hear that siren play its morbid, insistent tune. Rules are permitted to be slashed for the benefit of a life that is suspected of negligence. Traffic signals become an option for the able-bodied only, while ambulance drivers soar indifferently through colours lazily changing. Something thrilling to watch, this blatant disregard for a sacrosanct line we often don't cross. Red light, stop. Green light, go. Orange light, perhaps. Ambulance in front of all -- irrelevant. While we sit and stew and watch it go by in a blast of mortality.

And yet don't we sometimes blame the patient inside for altering the course of our own meager day? Perhaps they are to blame for their own special ill. The extra sandwich that trigged the chest to start leaking its pain. The trip down the stairs due to a distracted moment of afterglow bliss. A knife to the stomach or blow to the head can be forgiven, but our own futile natures?

An amublance at rest puts such thoughts to the side. Doors fling open. Gurneys are hastily pushed out, the people on top swaying this way and that. ('Gurney' Such an ugly, clunky word for a necessary conduit. One cannot find grace with such syntax. The very name itself implies a stodgy, ugly means of mobility. With words come emotion, and here we all fail.) A paramedic pumps one, two, three, one, two, three, while an oxygen mask lazily slips off of the mouth of a man too old to care. (Or so we would like to believe. More reassuring, is it not, to think that these last breaths of his are ones that mean naught? Until we are the ones lying inert and in pain. Watching others watching us die our little deaths. Oh, then we shall wonder how callous and cruel this species can be!)

There are dangers to living so close to a hospital. One constantly is greeted by the sad, lonely faces of people who once were so merry. Legs in casts welcome my days. Lips wrapped around cigarettes blow puffs in my face. Early morning runs bring mortality near, like a poisonous snake coiled ready to strike. And the sight of ambulances so often skirting our rules makes traffic itself seem tenuous and silly. Manmade order that masks disorder itself.

THEN ALL WOULD BE MUSIC

Surely silence has layers as nuanced as noise. The still in the room when a door has been opened speaks softly of loneliness and time long left out. Pauses in talks talk stronger than shouts. More can be learned from leftover air in an unopened vault. One would not think such examples could possibly compete with the shot of a gun or the snap of a finger. Abrupt, invasive sounds that stick like a pin into the skin of our lives. Our thoughts meander like wandering muses until something startles us out of ourselves and into another mode of apprehension. This shock strikes strong, but silence! Surely the sound of nothing at all can compare with the clangiest of clunks.

Were sound to be have been a manmade invention, would we have known it to hear it? A baby in the womb, shifting on its side and sleeping the sleep that only the unborn inhabit, could not wish such sounds to awaken his slumber. Ignorance of all things auditory may have been our original state. Only later, after birth, did we hear what we heard, but it may not have been in our celestial design for good or for long.

Perhaps man was not meant to hear. If the ear had developed in a different direction, sound itself would never be missed. Certainly the whisper of lovers, the tremble of fighters, the panic of the lost and the shrieks of the bereaved make our lives vital and taut, but have you ever turned off the sound of a TV and saw what was missed? Very little. Everything is clear. Nothing is absent except the extraneous. Hockey with sound is brutal and jarring; hockey in silence contains a tingle of grace. One could almost imagine that the deaf are the ultimate inheritors of God's true intent, and all of the rest of us are merely dead weight, hearing it all and listening to zilch.

To listen! Perhaps that is the point of the glut on our heads, the wings on the sides of our faces that stick out to the air like birds in a nest. Were we to wait for the rain to land in the puddle. Should we pause to tune in to the tempo of a tree's last branch as it bends and then sways and then falls to the earth. Could we but dwell in the laugh of a child's first chuckle. If such suspension were possible, then all would be music.

READING TOLSTOY ON THE TRAIN

One of the dirty little secrets hiding within the secret hearts of even the most dedicated of readers resides in the room designated as 'Unread Books'. Oh, the shame! To reach a certain age, to have lived a life centred around the printed word that leaps off of the page and onto our eyes and into our brains, and yet never to have sampled Remembrance Of Things Past! Or The Tempest! Or most of, the best of, Tolstoy!

Having delved deeper and deeper into Norman Mailer after an absence of a good many years, I was struck by his admiration of Tolstoy, with Harlot's Ghost, Mailer's masterwork, being deemed 'a modern day War and Peace' by one generous critic. (What the ungenerous critics proclaimed is better left silent.) Off to the bookstore I went, and out of the bookstore came me, arms stuffed with cheap editions of Anna Karenina and War and Peace and Moby Dick. (Not Tolstoy, no, but another honourable inhabitant of that 'Unread Book' domicile.)

Living in Japan often means spending the great majority of one's days standing on trains. You can either think, listen, or read. I prefer to read. One can read a lot on trains, if you get on early enough, when it's relatively isolated and empty, or in the middle of the day, when the rest of the Japanese world remains shuddered in office silence.

How odd! To be a Canadian, reading a Russian book from the 19th century, translated into English, while riding to work in Japan! And everything still somehow comes through. Across the centuries leap notions of logic and love, religion and sacrifice, that seem as modern, if not more modern, than the very relationships that prop us up at the beginning of this 21st century. Outside the second most successful economy in the world buzzes and hummes, and inside a metal tube I speed along, reading words that were written by a Russian gentlemen on pen and paper more than a hundred-odd years ago.

And how odd this is, no? I'm still amazed, if not grateful, for the mysterious nature of the written word, how one man's thoughts -- those ephemeral, intangible nothings that float about our brains! -- can somehow be rendered in little symbols that stab into my heart from across a distant time and space. Who declares telepathy mere fancy? And to have these letters than transmorphed into other letters from another language that signify something different -- but the same! -- so that the effect intended is the effect produced. I don't get it. But it somehow gets me, repeatedly.

More weeks of trainriding lie ahead, the tracks spreading out north, south, east, west, circling and enveloping and criss-crossing Tokyo and Yokohama like a wave of water that hems me in. If I can keep bringing onboard these metal contraptions my daily limit of words and paper, bound together, thoughts encapsulated and shot acr0ss time, I will remain happily trapped.