People and places

The sands of time slowly pass by us and the world changes. Sometimes my heart yearns for places I knew intimately as a child but they are sadly no longer there. There are places my Mother knew and her Mother before her and now are lost in the continual building of glass and steel. We don't live long enough to see the stars change position in the skies and the maelstrom of the galaxy. But perhaps that is a kindness and I am not cursed with immortality. Imagine if I was? My love could spend all her life with me, but I would go on forever after her passing. It is the best plan of nature that the old gives way for the new and everything has its time and allotted span. Old buildings disappear and new ones replace them and we marvel at the feats of engineering and rejoice that we are living in a modern world, a world of wonders. One hundred years ago hanayashiki meant Flower park and this one in the image at Asakusa was perhaps the best in all of Tokyo. It was a beautiful, peaceful relaxing place where you could appreciate the beauty of nature in all her splendor with animals in a miniature zoo and a tea house and all kinds of entertainments to make the outing a wonderful and memorial one. Over the years the successive generations saw it change and it had its moments of fame. Then in the 1950's, my Momma's birth decade saw it become the amusement park that it is today. In fact the meaning of the word hanayashiki now means amusement park. This park opened in 1853, the same year that Commodore Perry and his black ships arrived. We have changed so much since then and so has the park. Some things can be preserved, some things find themselves becoming museum exhibits and everything else changes. You change, I change and most of the places that we know change. Perhaps over time our memories of those people and places change too? I still miss some people and some places.

Hitomi has been occupying my chair and my desk for so long that perhaps somebody placed glue on the seat as a joke. From the two of us, I am the one to know computers and I am the one that deals with online banking and email and even my work and article writing and power-point presentations and FTP. She is the one to enjoy a book or rehearse lines for a play. She sits by the window in her favorite chair and I sit at my desk on the computer. It has always been this way if we are together at home but not doing things together. Some time ago I asked her what she would do if she gave up acting and all her other venue appearances? Although she laughed and said perhaps a small job as a waitress or working in a clothing store, it really wasn't something that she had considered.


She is now taking tuition from School of Education at Waseda University in Shinjuku and decided on computer science. She is amazing and I am quite proud of her really. I know soon I will be asking her how to solve all my computer problems even if she wears her funny geek glasses. She needs to study her lessons online and practice with her programming techniques and so I have been moved to the chair by the window and have my cat's attention and the television for company. I hear her making provision for a possible career fall back and I hear her clicking her mouse and tapping the keys rather than clicking her heels and tapping the boards.
I also hear the news and my cat calling for her meal.
I really prefer a desk top computer & mouse, not the laptop & fingerboard!