Tsukuba Monogatari: 29th post
So much for my credibility. I had told Randy, “It doesn’t snow in Tsukuba – we just get frost on the ground some mornings.” I woke up this morning and everything was white. My car was completely camouflaged under three inches of soft, powdery snow.
My first thought was, “They can’t expect me to go to work under these conditions.” Was it safe to drive? Then I decided I was being a wimpy Californian, so I got out the windshield scraper I’d brought back from the States, unburied my car windows, and finally realized why they call that thing in your car a “defroster” (when all they do is de-fog your windows in what passes as “cold” weather in the San Francisco Bay Area). Then I drove carefully to work. I was hoping I’d arrive at the same time as one or two of my trainees so I could pitch a few snowballs, but I was a bit early and there were no targets in sight.
Snow to a Californian is like heady wine. I was buzzing. Tsukuba was transformed. I wanted to call everyone up and say, “It’s snowing!” (I did call Jennifer, who also lives in Tsukuba and did not need to be informed. But she had called her mother in the U.S. – and god knows what time it was there!) I imagined a huge snowball war between B1 and B2. This was no wimpy melts-as-soon-as-it-hits-the-ground snow; this was the real stuff – powdery, thick, and STILL COMING DOWN.
Meanwhile, David was telephoning kuruma-no-Yoshida-san. “Yoshida-san,” David said, “the weather is bad today.” “Soo desu ne,” Yoshida-san agreed. “The roads are dangerous,” David continued. “Why are you calling?” asked Yoshida-san. “I wrecked the car,” David admitted.
In fact, only the front end was wrecked – so you might say David “semi-ed” the car (as opposed to “totaling” it). I began to get alarmed when, at 9 am, there was still no sign of David, Randy, or Jennifer. I called David’s wife and found out that David was apologizing to the police and Jennifer was picking Randy up. I then gallantly offered to stand in for David (he had a one-on-one with The Company President) should he not make it in time. I figured skidding into a bus was enough shaking up for one morning without having to meet with The President, too.
As it turned out, David arrived at work in time for the meeting, but accepted my company for moral support. The President was ten minutes late. He walked in, apologized for being late, took one look at me and said, “I thought you were gone.” I laughed, and explained my longevity. The rests of the meeting went swimmingly. We clocked in at 25:03:45.
Around 2:00, an announcement was made over the public address system that the snow was expected to continue into the night, and all employees were advised to leave work at 3:00 and get home safely before dark. About 1.5 seconds later, the phone rang. It was a fellow who’d been nominated for training this quarter, who I was supposed to interview at 3:00. He was calling to cancel the appointment. Must’ve really been looking forward to the interview.
“Why don’t we all go over to someone’s place and have a meeting,” Jennifer said. I was just about to offer my place when Randy piped up, “Somewhere warm.” “Oh,” I said. “How about Jennifer’s?” (Jennifer has the best heater.) “I’ll cook,” I said, confident that, as it was Randy’s first day at The Company, Koizumi-san could not possibly have gotten to him yet with horror stories about my pasta. Now Randy will have stories of his own to circulate, for instance, about that loaf of cornbread that slipped out of my hands, went sailing through the air, and took a nose-dive onto the kotatsu. It landed in a crumpled heap, looking a bit like the front end of David’s car. Let’s keep “Cooking: visual quality” off that performance appraisal form!
“Paulownia in the snow, Tsukuba.” Courtesy of autan. Licensed under cc by NC-ND 2.0.
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