The Long Highway Pt. 20D

Meeting all kinds of people. That's the sort of city this is.

Akemi and I went to a volley-ball game of all things, international match. Sitting in the stands, we were joined there by a mother and very young daughter, extremely cute and doted on, adorned with bright colored beads and things, little soft translucent toys, an orange one that looked like a pacifier. The mother was young and appeared to be from India, light-skinned, oval faced, bright and alert, dedicated to care of her daughter, recognizing that freedom would allow her to grow but watchful.

"I'm lucky!" I said to Akemi. To be beside the child, directly on my left (Akemi to my right). Child was delightful, mother too.

All kinds of people, some less fun to be around than that pair, some even irksome. Akemi and I were walking through the college- she was leaving; I was seeing her out- and we passed someone I knew.

"Hi, Pops!" he said before continuing on his way.

"'Pops,' he called me," I told Akemi. "What can I do? Maybe I should dye my hair."

"I was going to say something," Akemi said. She was joking.

I'm not that old, after all. Maybe the guy was joking.

I haven't yet reached fifty but see it approaching. Maybe the contrast with Akemi- how we appear together- makes my age stand out, draw comments.

I'd recently seen her cousin in a dance at an outdoor Japanese festival. I saw her from behind in the row of dancers all advancing forward. I wondered if she looked older now than when I had last seen her. She wore a blue robe.

I didn't have a view of her face. Would it show a hint of a new wrinkle? Would her skin look tighter than before, the luster not as pronounced?

Nobody stays young.

I had some business to attend at the collage bursar's office and walked there with a coworker accompanied by a friend of hers I didn't know, woman from the West Indies (speaking of diverse types).

In the office I explained my plight to a worker, middle-aged guy with a sort of buzz cut (greying crewcut grown out) in a short-sleeved white shirt who offered his help to spare me the line that had formed at the counter. He was in the open space, doing work of his own but willing to break off from it for a moment.

"I taught in the summer semester, Saturday classes- not only that- and was due three months back pay. There was a hold-up. I finally got most but I'm still owed- either forty or seventy. I don't remember."

"It's a hundred fifty. Just a minute." The guy was typing at his laptop, his fingers racing to dig out the information.

"Ah, you remember so many people," I said. I was astonished by how fast he found the answer I needed on the basis of just my name. Of course we weren't seeing each other for the first time. I'd worked at the college long enough.

In fact, he didn't produce the figure from memory and likely had little notion of the circumstances behind it. He'd run a speed check of his data base. Stocky, phlegmatic type, whom I liked.

It might take as long as a few weeks to make up the check and get it to me, he said. He handed me a dollar, apparently as a humorous gesture of good will.

As my colleague and her friend walked out through the building lobby, I commented, "A new bill." I showed it to them both and said to the friend, "You look like the woman in the picture." It was a suffragette, honored on the greenback.

She peered at the portrait, was clearly dubious.

"Only you look better," I added.

She blushed, or was it a frown?

On parting from the slim- willowy- dusky-skinned West Indian, who'd also gone to the business office on a mission, not completed, I said, "Bonne chance," on impulse using her language, like a secret weapon there all along, at the last moment acknowledging her different culture, celebrating it, I guess. She walked off and I continued with my colleague, who said to me outside the building, brisk city air buffeting us, "You speak French with a good accent. You pronounce a lot of languages well." She must have heard me speaking others, the smattering of a few that was all I knew.

"It's just today." My authentic-sounding French, I meant (the mere two words I'd ventured). "Sometimes it's"- I looked for an adjective- "execrable."

She said something to me in French, a full sentence, on the off chance I'd understand, as a friendly challenge, encouragement. But I got only the first word "Comment"- meaning "how," the rest a blur, individual words indistinguishable, all of them linked together in that single utterance, elided.

I tell her.

She says of my limitation, "That's because you live with that little East Asian thing." Meaning Akemi. She continues, "I'd like to see her in a cowboy hat and boots and a western shirt, with a guitar, singing."

She was imagining an Americanized version of Akemi. Did she really feel she should acclimate to that extent, to the point of slighting her own culture?

I thought of Akemi's cousin Aya at the Japanese festival, dancing in her blue robe, with others in rows advancing before spectators, the dance both stately and playful. I thought of how good she looked.

I thought of what my coworker's image of Akemi might be, how different from mine, her seeing her, us from the outside, and the thought turned me on about Akemi, the realization of how attractive she was. The objective view heightened my subjective one.