Exiting through a ticket wicket at a train station in Japan The tuning up of the violin, first one, then two, then more as a university string ensemble—baroque music, no less—begins to warm up. It’s 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon and the group is using downstairs rooms in our building. They’ll get better as the afternoon lengthens, but sometimes it’s a little screechy to my ears, especially when I want to take a nap. When solitude returns, I'll know its 6 p.m.
Beeping sounds, whirring sounds. A hospital is full of them as machinery feeds, measures, and records life. I never knew much about hospitals until this year, but its sounds are now as familiar as the quiet in and out of Bernie’s breathing beside me in the bed. Life can change momentously in a mere instant.
Putting my ticket into the wicket at the train station, I’m quite nonchalant. But when a bell begins to ring, I morph into one of Pavlov’s famed research assistants. My steps quicken as my legs are propelled into race mode just as the dogs’ salivary glands responded when Pavlov rang a bell. The doors of the train are soon to close and I must be on that train! Never mind that the next one comes in less than five minutes.
Do, mi, la, do. The tones of the xylophone ring out. I know an announcement is about to be made in a school or public building in Japan. It will conclude with the same four notes—do, la, mi, do—in descending order. Reading music in Japan requires a different skill than in America. Japanese do not read C, E, A, C. Prior to living here, I thought only Julie Andrews and the kids on The Sound of Music read music by “Do a dear, a female deer . . . .”
“Sensei, ohayo gozaimasu!” (Good morning, teacher.) The happy voices of children arriving downstairs at the preschool in the church building where we live remind me it’s 9 a.m. Now if they also could tell me what day of the week it is in their daily greetings!
"Nihyaku tasu hyaku ekuwaru san byaku." (200 + 100 = 300) The woman selling fruit and vegetables from the nearby garage sings out the prices of the bananas and tomatoes I’m buying today in a trademark singsong voice, the traditional identifier of a neighborhood vendor. I love it and am in awe of her computation skills that can carry the rhythm without a break even if my purchases are many and she must calculate into the thousands.
Mi mimimimimi. The sound of the semi (cicada), the harbinger of summer in Japan. With all the concrete in Tokyo, it’s amazing that there are any insects at all around us. Happily, there are several parks within walking distance of our apartment and the tree-loving semis have found them. Sometimes the rapturous joy that vibrates from membranes on their abdomen can be almost deafening. It’s as if they are clapping in praise of the summer. When both the tone and volume soften—as they will shortly—one knows that summer is poised to usher in fall.
And so it is that my days are filled with the sounds of life. While Jesus was advising his followers to contemplate his words carefully when he said, “He who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15), it occurs to me that much of life is missed when we walk through our days neither hearing nor seeing the “daily” that is around us. After all, who would choose to be deaf or blind? Not I. Yet I often fail to taste and appreciate life’s exquisite flavors as I rush through my days intent only upon the next “must do” on my schedule. “He who has ears, let him hear.”
