cooked soba and donburi on the sumida riverbank with a master who spoke with the intonation of christoper walken. matthew does not like wasabi.
red chili, not so much. too much using makes korean
thought the class was supposed to end three hours before it did, wondered if we were in hanzel and gretel.
drank a moscow mule to ease the dread of upcoming trans-kamchatka flights.
lost matthew to the pull of the plane, somewhere south of yokohama. here's yuki, my neighbor in addis ababa last summer, with momoyo, his friend also volunteering with jica. momoyo introduced us to her japanese tradition woodworking school in zushi. googling that town alone fails.
woke up early on an unremarkable thursday in december to kahei yamada sensei, expert in double-blind dovetails, sharkskin sandpaper.
consider this culture an antidote for argumentum ad antiquitatem. a parallel universe, where dovetails are ant's heads, qwerty just a superscript.
laughed when matthew caught a splinter, and daisuke planed the blood from the workbench. so that's universal.
use no clamps in the edo sashimono tradition. unlike the west, the japanese pull planes and strike their cigarette matches inward.
suppose some translations get better with satsuma age.
dropped matthew at the bus, held out fourteen days with no email nor a news source.
worked my way back to eastern time, on the floor, in the quiet of familiar music.
12/21