In striving these recent months to bring mindfulness and everyday love into my random urban encounters with strangers or people I know slightly from those random routine intersections that happen in cities - I keep finding myself thinking of The Man With the White Dog. An everyday hero from my past. When I was a college student studying abroad in Kyoto for a semester, I spent the first few months living with a family who treated me with cool excessively polite distance, in a suburb where I was the only non-Japanese person living there. All the people I encountered other than my host family pretended I didnt exist. I would smile, nod or say hello to neighbors or passersby, and they would stare right through me and not acknowledge me. The people in Kyoto, and everywhere else I went in Japan, were friendly to the normal extent that I was used to people being friendly towards strangers; I dont know why in this particular suburb foreigners were so unwelcome. I felt like I was donning a strange and frigid cloak of invisibility every time I stepped off the train onto the platform, coming home. The one exception to the determined unfriendliness I encountered in the suburb was the Man With the White Dog. On my long walk to the commuter train and his daily (I assume) trip to walk his dog, our paths would cross perhaps once every 3 days. He always greeted me with one of the warmest smiles Ive ever seen, and said Ohaio which is a casual (and therefore friendly/warm) way to say good morning. I always responded in kind. Sometimes wed have a sentence or two of small talk, in which Id haltingly comment on how beautiful his dog was or the weather, and hed respond briefly in his regionally accented Japanese I could hardly understand, then wed go on our way. But most of the time, wed just exchange smiles, nods and the words good morning. During a very lonely, amazing and tremendously exhausting time, encountering his smile and friendly greeting was a small and deeply heartwarming twinkle of true light. I left that suburb very abruptly, relocated by my school on little notice to a new home because my host-brother became ill and the family could not have me stay. The new family I lived with was very friendly and kind, as were my new neighbors, so the move though stressful ended up meaning that my last six weeks in Japan were much more pleasant for me than the initial few months in the cold, distant suburb. It happened so quickly that I never had the chance to say goodbye to the Man With the White Dog or thank him for his small kindnesses. I dont even know his name. And I dont know why he was different from his neighbors. But fifteen plus years later, I still warmly remember and appreciate the genuine smile and short basic greetings from the Man With the White Dog.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 17:29:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015