Well, it’s another rainy day here in northern Kyushu. Saturday was the only day in the last week and a half that was actually nice and sunny. Yesterday, rain. Today, rain. Forecast for tomorrow, rain. Not great weather when one needs to get laundry done. (And, no, I don’t have a clothes dryer. They aren’t common like in the States and other countries.)
Yesterday, I got a call from a good friend of mine. She knew the weather was going to be bad today and asked if I could take her around to the ¥100 shops to look for pieces and parts for handmade jewelry. (This girl has more talent in the tip of her pinkie than so many people around me put together! I’ll have to write a post about all the things she can do one of these days…)
So, we drove around to several ¥100 shops (or Dollar stores) and she found what she needed. Seems she’s going to be teaching a class about making resin jewelry and needed supplies.
Once that was done, we decided to go and get a bite to eat. We did the usual, “Where are we going to go?” She and I tend to go to the same four or five places, which doesn’t bother either of us in the least, but today, she said she wanted to eat steak and had heard about a rather good place nearby called Western.
One step inside Western was like taking a step back in time. There were empty beer bottles on the window sills. There were American flags hanging here and there… wagon wheels were used to divide sections of the restaurant. Framed photographs of cowboys and Old West towns were hanging on the walls. The only odd thing about the place was that the utensils we were given were chopsticks, which my friend and I giggled about.
And the background music was mostly, of course, country and western music. 🙂
We ordered lunch specials and waited for our food. As we chatted about this and that, I realized I recognized the melodies of every song. My friend asked what the titles were and I told her I didn’t know.
“That’s unusual for you. Plus, you’ve been humming along to almost every song!”
Then it struck me. They were all familiar because my dad had known them! 🙂
I told her that so often he would hum or sing around the house, whether he was cleaning his desk (or more like rearranging the piles on his desk 🙂 ), chopping firewood out in the yard, checking on the veggies in the garden, or organizing receipts for the month. And it was a very, very wide variety of music, everything from jazz standards to country & western to barber shop quartet songs to traditional hymns to music I listened to on the radio!!
As the music in the restaurant changed to the next song, my friend and I looked at one another as we both recognized the song… “Tennessee Waltz”.
“I’m sure he used to sing this one… right?” she asked.
I nodded and started to get teary-eyed. (I still miss him something terrible…)
She smiled and said, “You’re so lucky to have had such a strong relationship with your dad.”
I nodded again… because I completely agree with her. Memories of him are ones I would not trade for anything in the world! 🙂
The Life of a Boiled Egg 