Tatami mats

"Ah, Japan..."

It was one of the first letters you shared with me, when we were both still plugged into the KRL system. I have no idea what it was there between us that allowed for that first series of letters to continue there on company email. I have to think it was our time before the moon, the tasting of raspberry pops, the wandering through the berry thickets, that time shared working on your stories going round and round the J high track that did it, that allowed for those first peeks into your world, at first camera shutter fast, then longer, lenghtier glimpses into your thoroughly land locked, culture bound life.

In a lot of ways our worlds were both similar at the time, both dictated by the whims of family, activities and church. Both of us led fairly insular island like lives, sheltered away like those ancient Japanese before the arrival of Perry. We had our daily routines mapped out and programmed. Our lives were scheduled, our days planned, our psyches wrapped up tight. But maybe we weren't as tightly wrapped as we thought. After that sit before the rising moon we came apart like a kimono obi, unraveled the more we shared, and then, in the course of a conversation or two, realized that we both shared a love of all things Japanese, a love for the land, a common taste for the food. Somehow we took that mutual affection for a far away land as a chance to form yet another bridgehead and turned our separate but mutually insightful times in Japan into one of the nicest series of letters you ever shared with me.

Funny to think that those letters, the only ones that managed to survive the big purge of 9/27, has the ones that helped to hand me my head in a handbasket. Ah, the seemingly innocent things we retain, the swords that we lay down on that cut both ways!

But, no matter, that's all long gone and life is being lived in a new and better place. What mattered then and what matters now is that connection we both have to Japan. I think of my time there in the military and long for a return to that lovely land as a civilian, to see those wonderful people again without the stigma of US NAVY attached to my being. Somehow I always thought that Tokyo, even more than Oaxaca or Paris, as the city I would have loved to have expereinced with you overseas. Springtime, with cherry blossums falling from the trees. The mad hustling along the streets of the Rupongi district. The sun setting on the slopes of Fugi. The Buddha statues in Kamakura. Kabuki in Kyoto. It was there for awhile, and for a bit it wasn't hard to imagine it happening.

Japan was the game changer for me, a fundamental shift of my conciousness occured there when I was a lad and a big part of my heart lingers there to this day.

So, when I read the papers, skim the newslinks online, listen to NPR, all I hear is sorrow attached to those horrific tales of earthquak, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that Japan has suffered through this last week. I think of that beloved land and all I can feel is a deep and profound sadness.

But even more than that I am reminded that life is short, sweet, yea, even bittersweet. Through photographs, videos and first hand accounts I can see very plainly and graphically how all those things we hold dear can be wisked away in an instant. Now is the time to let those folks who matter to us how much we care, how important they are to us, how our lives have been made so much better, that life has been made oh that much sweeter for their being in it.

It is more than tatami mats, Sumo wrestlers, New Years nights in the Akihabra district, functional subways or moonlight on Tokyo Bay that we missed or wish we could experience again. It was a time and a place that struck a mutual chord in both of us, a land that was our common touchstone, a special place in our hearts and lives that has been hurt and has been bled out that makes this note, sent to you from a far, from a place far back in our personal space and time, important.

Life is short, M. Know that you matter to me, still. Nothing on earth can ever change that.

Be safe, happy, all that,

Your Wild Half Mexican Boy