Keeping up with the Joneses

It's the first day of winter here, and it's still snowing. Blizzards raged across my mountain top high school all day, dropping at least six inches of snow. I got to watch the progress in water breaks from my day of playing soft volleyball on a team with some of my students. They were, of course, phenomenal, and we very nearly won the tournament that had been organized for our end of semester sports day. A highlight had to be that one of the kids on my team was named "Genki," so when he made a particularly heinous serve/spike, I would delight in screaming "GENKI DESHO!" at the top of my lungs. It's a Japanese pun that basically equates to "it's good, I tell you!"

As I left the high school, the storm appeared to have dried up for the day, but it had done it's job as my deep footprints from my wandering about in the haka yesterday had completely vanished when I walked through today on the way to the BOE. The extra few inches on and around all of the tombstones is bringing them ever closer to being erased. The bottom, tiered portions of them have become amorphous blobs that are seamlessly flowing into the thick layer of snow on the ground around them, and their growing white afros are growing dangerously close to the snow on the ground. I imagine that when the two meet up, from above and below, the memorials will be gone entirely, leaving what was once a graveyard as an undulating mass of white.

By the time I had finished putting in an appearance at the BOE, the snow had started up once again, coming down in thick pellets like hail, looking almost like corn raining down in the green-yellow glow of the parking lot lights. A couple of these weird pellets piled up in my outstretched hand, and when I crunched them between thumb and forefinger, they felt like the world's smallest snowballs. And, of course, as I write this now, it is still snowing outside.

That ain't really the point of this, though. I try to make these things pertinent or theoretical or at least interesting in some vaguely literary way, but I'm throwing all that out into the snow tonight. In just under 24 hours, my father and my brother will be landing in Tokyo. Though on a conceptual level I've known that they would be visiting me here in Japan for quite some time now, I think the emotional impact of it is catching up to me pretty late in the game--as is often the case with me. I'm only now feeling the implications of all this: of them being in a country where they've got no hope of speaking the language. Of me getting to see them in just over a day when they land at Chitose near Sapporo and I get to be their obnoxious, Canadian welcoming party...

I'm kind of freaking out.

It's part awesome. They're going to be here, in my podunk, little, snowy town. They're going to have the chance to see how I live here. I'm going to have the opportunity to show them Japan. Together, we're going to see Hiroshima and Kyoto and Tokyo for the first time. And, what's more, we've never done anything remotely like this together, us guys, since way back when Craig and I were rugrats. The Jonezer Family Vacation. Keeping up with the Joneses. Something like that.

And it's part terrifying. I'm not sure what "ready" is supposed to feel like, but I'm pretty sure this ain't it. I've got a notion of what I'll do with them up here in Hokkaido, but once we get down to Honshu and Kansai, I haven't the foggiest beyond hotel reservations. I mean, I've got brochures and guidebooks, and you can't sneeze in Kyoto without having to apologize to something old and historic and uniquely Japanese, but I still feel like I should have some epic schedule of Japanimated fun drafted up.

Well, if nothing else, it will be an adventure. I suppose that if I can manage to keep them fed, alive, and rested, they'll be fine with whatever we get up to as they are both remarkably laid back people.

But...yeah. That's me tonight. Ecstatic and terrified. Blown away and concerned. Thanks for putting up with it. I promise to get back to something interesting soon.