The Tokyo-Montana Express (26 page)

I marvelled at the fact that it had taken
me so many years to listen to all the words of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Then I
heard my own voice singing softly in the Tokyo afternoon just beginning to
rain:

“
track
29.”

There’s very little humidity up here
in the wintery mountains of Montana. I remember somebody once told me that this
place is geologically classified as a high alpine desert, though I don’t think
in those terms because we have rivers filled with trout and there are beautiful
forests here.

I’m living in the mountains is the way I
look at it.

Anyway, we have a foot of snow on the
ground and the air is very dry. We’ve been getting our humidity in the house by
leaving a pan of water on the stove under a low heat. A few days ago I decided
that we needed a humidifier.

Why not?

Let’s breathe some air with a little
moisture in it. I’d never bought a humidifier before. It would be an interesting
experience. Yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Let him buy a humidifier
and find out what it’s about. I had no idea how they even worked.

I was a little excited by the prospect as
my wife and I drove into town through seemingly endless snow.

We parked the car and made our way
carefully across the icy sidewalk and into a hardware variety-type store, which
certainly had to be the dwelling place of a humidifier.

A young woman was holding a child in her
arms and there was a young man standing beside her who was also holding a child
in his arms.

One of the children was a year old and the
other one was a baby, just a few months old. Their parents were trying to make
up their minds to buy something that required very serious expressions on their
faces.

They were standing beside the cash register
where a clerk was patiently waiting for them to make up their minds. The clerk
was trying to help them out, so she also had a very serious expression on her
face.

Fortunately, my mind was already made up,
so I said to the clerk, “Excuse me, I’d like to buy a humidifier.”

“They’re over there,” she said, pointing at
something which had to be a humidifier, though I couldn’t be certain because I’d
never seen one before.

I walked over to where she had pointed and
looked down at a humidifier. I don’t know what I had expected but it wasn’t
really that exciting. It was a brown metal cabinet with a ventilated plastic
grill on top.

Encountering a humidifier for the first
time certainly did not rank as one of the great experiences of my life. I had
no idea how it worked.

“How does this thing work?” I asked the clerk.
She was standing about thirty feet away with the very serious young couple who
were still trying to make up their minds.

“What do you think?” the young mother said.

“I don’t know,” the young father said.

“It’s on sale,” the clerk said.

“Excuse me,” I said, walking back to the
clerk. “If you’re not too busy, could you show me how the humidifier works?”

I could see that the young couple still had
some more thinking to do. They weren’t going anyplace. They were rooted in
their tracks. The children were being very good, so they could think about what
they wanted to buy without being interrupted. The babies were aimlessly looking
around. They had no idea where they were at.

“You’re interested in buying a humidifier?”
the clerk said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, let’s go look at it,” she said and
started around the counter.

Just then the young mother turned to the
young father—they were both about twenty years old, just kids themselves—and
said, “That’s one thing we don’t have to get. A humidifier. We’ve got two of
them right here,” gesturing toward the babies and their diapers.

We all laughed.

And then the young people went back to
serious thinking about buying something that will always remain a mystery to me
because when I left the store with my humidifier, they were still standing at
the counter trying to make up their minds.

I read a beautiful and very sad poem
today by the Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa about the unfaithfulness of women
and how hard it is to sleep with them that first night after you know they have
been with another man that day. They always fall asleep and you lie there
beside them wide awake, feeling a tremendous loneliness created by the touch of
their sleeping body. They are warm with the sperm of another man inside of them
like a stove but you are very cold, so cold that you feel as if you had been hatched
from a penguin egg in Antarctica and died shortly afterwards becoming a thumbful
of frozen feathers on a continent where there is not a single post office and the
only mail delivery is the wind.

She turns over in her sleep, puts her arm
around you and her touch is the cold wind of Antarctica bringing you your mail
and blowing your heart into mirror-like shadows of darkness.

You of course will go on loving her, but it
will be a different kind of love. It will never be as it was before and you
will start tomorrow. As you lie there waiting for the dawn, you are sharing the
company of men since the beginning of time.

In the dark shadows of the bedroom, you see
another bed with a Roman soldier lying in it beside his wife who is sleeping
soundly. He is staring at the ceiling waiting for the dawn which will stretch slowly
across the sky like a defeated sword, bringing no comfort.

It is an old story.

In the dark shadows of his bed is an
Egyptian bed three thousand years before Christ where the woman is sleeping happily
and the man stares at the ceiling, and in the dark just beyond the Egyptian’s
bed are caves and animal skin beds.

The awake man or creature resembling man
stares at the ceiling of the cave. His woman or creature that resembles woman
snores happily unaware what he is thinking in whatever mental symbols mean
something to him.

I could kill her or just forget about
it. Try and live with it. Why did she do it? Now I will have to start loving
her in a completely different way. The old way is gone
.

For the first time in eight days the temperature
is over thirty degrees, so it’s a good time to examine games and what they’ve
had to do with my life and why I don’t play them any more.

I don’t read the funnies in the newspaper
any more either but that’s a different story and will be gone into at a later
time.

…much later.

Let’s get back to games:

When I was a child I liked games. They were
a good way to pass a rainy day. I played Parcheesi, Monopoly, Authors and Old
Maid. Monopoly was my favorite game and also checkers had their share of rainy
days.

As childhood slowly went away, so did the
games. They are forgotten or stored in an attic someplace. Perhaps in a house
that no one lives in any more on a street that’s hard to find where the house
numbers don’t quite make sense. The 2’s look like 7’s and the 5’s look like 1’s.

In my early twenties I played lots of chess
and in my early thirties I played a lot of dominoes. I stopped playing chess
when I was twenty-five and dominoes went when I was thirty-three. Why? I just
got tired of them and stopped. It’s that simple.

From time to time every few years, I’ve
played a little poker but not much because I don’t have any luck. I always
lose, so it’s really not any fun. Who likes to lose all the time and that’s
what I do when I play poker.

So this gets us up to last night and a game
of Scrabble in a house surrounded by snow in the deep Montana winter. The game
was not my idea.

I have never never played Scrabble and did
not have the slightest interest in it or knew what it was about except that it
was some kind of word game. You made up words with letters on little wooden
blocks.

I cannot think of anything more boring
because what are you going to do with the words after you’ve made them up? You
might as well try breathing into a vacuum cleaner for fun.

Anyway, a visiting friend bought the game
at a store in town and I knew that sooner or later the game would be played and
somehow I would be dragged into it. I hoped later but of course it turned out
to be sooner, and I found myself at a table with a board in front of me
demanding that words be made up and I had seven little wooden blocks with
letters on them to oblige the board.

I felt silly as the game started.

First of all, I’m not a very good speller
and it didn’t make much sense for me to play a game that depended on spelling
for victory.

The person who bought the game is of course
a very good speller, a speller of almost championship ability. I can see why he
liked and wanted to play the game, but I couldn’t see what there was ultimately
in it for me, except the annoyance of wasting my time losing.

There were four of us and the game started.

Right from the very beginning when I selected
my seven blocks of wood, I didn’t like the game and within a few moments dislike
turned to true hatred. L’ve never hated anything so fast in my life.

Among the first words played on the board
was the word quieten as in quieten down, which I found to be an absurd word.
Here in the West we use quiet down, not quieten down. I had never even heard
the word quieten before, so I made a big mistake by compulsively looking it up
in the dictionary, and there it was in all its glory: quieten, an English word,
a word used in England. I don’t know English English. I know American English.

That’s enough for me.

It serves the purposes of my life.

The next word played was ted. I’d never
even heard of the word ted before. I’d of course heard of teddy bear and the
name Ted, but not ted as a word. It was contributed by my friend who is a good
speller. Again impetuously I went to the dictionary like a pig to bacon and
God-damn it! there was the word ted.

If you want to find out what the word means
look it up yourself or if you already know what it means, that’s your problem,
but I’d like to hear you use it in conversation sometime: “Please ted the cow
shit or I have tedded the grass. What else do you want me to do?”