searching

I am frantically searching for an old address book. I had the phone number for a Japanese student from Gustavus we were the host family for many years ago. I have lost touch with her so have no email address. I don't know how to search for a phone number in Japan because the webpages for that are all in Japanese.

Maybe this is fruitless, but I want to tell her if she needs to leave Tokyo, she is welcome to come here. I feel like I need to do something and Regis says people are leaving Tokyo in droves. How long would it take to evacuate a city of six million people and where would they all go?

I find myself looking for things. Looking for crazy things. Not just this address and phone number but this morning, I was so determined to find an essay by Thomas Lynch about his cat Grimalkin, that I was almost late for work. I just would not stop. I may have given the book to someone to read (Bodies at Rest, Bodies in Motion...I think) and I had to stop myself from buying it again rather than searching like a mad woman for it.

Yesterday, I stopped at Kwik Trip. Two old goofy hillbillies followed me in and then the one really weird one muttered under his breath at me while giving me the stink eye about how I had parked by a yellow curb and what did I think, could anybody park by a yellow curb? What the hell. I glanced over my shoulder and all the curbs surrounding Kwik Trip are painted yellow, I assume so you don’t trip over them. Hell, HE was parked by a yellow curb. Goofy old bastard. He’s lucky I’m a docile school teacher and not someone likely to rip him a new one. Frankly, he scared the hell out of me so I didn’t even make eye contact.

Mean people scare me. I could make a list from the front pages of recent newspapers and I’m not talking criminals either. I’m talking garden variety mean sons-of-bitches who don’t seem to care about anybody but themselves.

As I was leaving a meeting this morning, I heard, then saw a cardinal in a tall tree. That is the first one I have heard this spring. When I got back to work, I had a message from Jane. She had heard a cardinal, too, and took it as a sign of hope and a sign from her mother who loved cardinals. I got goosebumps when I heard the message.

She said she stood up after hearing the cardinal and walked to the door. There was my package. Another hopeful sign.