Those precious moments

The days have seemed a little darker lately both literally and figuratively. This morning I woke before the sun even started to lighten the sky, and the sun's been sinking behind the mountains earlier at night.

For all those dark moments-- like an awful first class with the teacher who assured me there was a lesson plan after my self-intro and then made me wither in front of the class alone until the bell rang-- there's the occasional glorious smiling face.

Like today, after my elementary first and second grade lesson when the teachers announced I would be eating with the first-graders-- they cheered and jabbed the air with their fists like they'd won a prize.

The beaming smile on a first-grader's face as she wobbles her way over to me on a unicycle and catches my hands for balance... and her two friends follow, leaving me standing absolutely steady, a human hitching-post for unicyclists.

The 2nd and 3rd graders who were arguing over who would be on whose soccer team; at first I was considered a burden and no one wanted me (well, I was in pirate garb for Halloween and may have been seen as not wanting to get dirty), but then I showed off my mad soccer skills and the other team demanded another rock-paper-scissors match to try and win me to their side.

The teacher (whose soccer team beat mine... okay, so his goalie skills were far more awesome than mine, but it was my first time being a goalie) who saw me sitting, bored as hell, waiting for the last period to be over and my taxi to arrive. And promptly came over with two kendama (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendama if you aren't sure what a kendama is), one for me to keep and one for him to demonstrate his crazy skills. The dude can get the kendama ball to land on the spike. AND he can do it backwards (hold the ball and get the spike to land in the ball's hole). I've never seen anything like it.

The 'tea lady' -- who does so much more than make tea, including custodial work and incredibly creative nature-based arts and crafts projects-- who hauled in a box full of giant pine cones, gave me ideas about what to do with them, and made a copy of a map with the location of her secret giant pine tree grove so I could collect more.

The looks of terror on the 1-4th graders' faces as I growled and came after them with my pirate hook. Hey, it was a class on Halloween. How can I adequately show them what Halloween is without scaring them? ^^ I even got one first-grade girl to shriek and run away.

The adorable sea of kids wearing hand-made Halloween masks, all saying "Twick or tweat" and waiting for me to give them chocolate. Somewhere in the back is a girl with a mask of the pirate's signature skull and crossbones-- surrounded by pink hearts. Oh, Japan.

My taxi driver last week during our discussion of Tsushima's mountains. He looked over the ones surrounding us and, with a dismissive "Eeeeh," said they were "just onigiri." Just rice-ball mountains. The mountains here are shaped like Japan's triangular onigiri. And later I thought, you can't live just on rice balls. Sure, they'd be sufficient sustenence but aren't truly satisfying. One needs more. Even if it's just a milk tea or mikan ze-ri (tangerine jello). I suppose that's what the airline's for.