October 18th, 2003
Cold, quiet, gray that says a lot
I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about Kawasaki that feels right and makes me a little uneasy at the same time. Most of the metropolitan area doesn’t have enough trees in my opinion, but still I feel an odd hazy peace while sitting by the sliding glass door to the capsule-like balcony. The same city that just a few weeks ago soothed my heart with the organic bustle of families and laughing children, is now a drizzly shadow of that tableau.
It’s been misting, raining, off and on all afternoon. The sky is the sort of muddy grey that reminds me of so many watercolor paintings I destroyed as a child, the levels of back- and foreground running together from too much moisture and not enough waiting…the top of the scene washed out and pulpy, the bottom studded with pockets of dye that would later dry into ugly blots.
There is hardly a sound outside, save for the distant echoes of planes at Haneda, or an exceptionally large truck on some expressway shielded by drab buildings. A handful of scraggly evergreens rock weakly in the breeze from time to time, the only feeble sign of life. Quite a barren and depressing picture to be sure.
Still, it feels right. It’s a day that precedes a similar night, only with more rain, and that kind of time falls quite easily into one of the vast flagstones of memory in my heart, the wide steppes of so many autumn and winter nights spent as a child going out with my mother and her best friend’s family. Those dark, soaked parking lots outside the mall, the fog condensing on the inside of the car window, a strand of my friend’s long hair getting stuck on the glass just near the door lock, and how dirty I thought it was, spoiling the perfect pristine sterility that my mother kept for every belonging she had. I wanted to reach out and remove it, but I knew if I did it would just get pushed around, sticking to the wet glass, and then my clammy fingerprints would further ruin the clean window, not only now but in a few days after it dried and there was only an unwanted smudge left behind.
Don’t get me wrong, those nights were a lot more than just worrying about breaking the perfect, ordered menagerie of my mother’s Accord. They were about me wearing goose down filled cotton coats, and my friend in a pale blue and cream nylon vest, one of thousands so popular circa 1988. The sound of the windshield wipers moaning against the windshield, the forbidden excitement of being inside the mall just before closing. The oh-so-early Christmas decorations, mountains of pulled cotton, styrofoam, and spray snow.
Now several shades darker than twenty minutes ago, Belle and Sebastian are falling near the end of yet another amazing forty-eight minute backdrop to quiet, slightly heartbroken life, and I feel the gentle tug to go out and visit the local equivalent to those long-lost nights in commercial suburbia. Maybe we’ll go see a movie. Maybe we’ll have dinner at a table with candles and too much atmosphere. Maybe fifteen years from now I’ll be writing of someplace else on a cold October evening, and how it reminds me of Kawasaki.
