Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 22:03:16 EST From: the departure of the foreigner Subject: [WRITERS] FILLER: a meaning that once unfolded... Is it really surprising? This may be a bit confused, since today was a bit of a roller coaster for my emotions. But before we go into that, let me back up. On Sunday, after the Japanese Association of Greater Boston had their New Year Party (which turned out to be mostly two and a half hours of raffling off prizes...there is something incredibly wrong with a large room -- 500? people, someone estimated -- sitting and watching someone pull ticket stub after ticket stub out of an aquarium and read off the winning numbers)...anyway, Sunday evening my wife and I picked up a young Japanese woman at the airport. She is the daughter of a friend's sister, and has been accepted at Berklee School of Music for studies in jazz piano (forgive me if I have the name of the school wrong). She had flown in from Japan that day--her first trip to Boston! We had dinner together, then took her to a nearby hotel for the night. Monday was a difficult day. Along with the normal hoopla of the office, I taught a two-hour class in the afternoon as part of the MIT IAP...Independent Activity Period. It's the way that MIT "fills" the month of January for those students who stick around. A number of members of the MIT community teach an assortment of short courses. [huh? oh, the class was on Serious Creativity...some notions from Edward DeBono's book on how to spark ideas. Fun to try to teach.] In any case, Monday night we had dinner together again and talked a bit about her plans. She was scheduled to move into the dorms today and start the other settling-in activities of that school. (That's probably enough background.) At about 6:30 this morning, the phone rang. I answered it, and talked briefly to the young woman's mother. Then I listened to half the conversation...some bits... "Well when did she call?" "Where would she go?" and a few others alerted me. Sometime during the night, the young woman had called her parents in Japan and told them she didn't want to go to school. This conversation apparently ended with her hanging up on them. Then when they called back a little later, she had checked out of the hotel! So they called us, and asked if we had any idea where she might be... I called the hotel, and found that she had checked out early this morning. The desk clerk remembered her checking out, and the brand of cab that she got into. Then I...well, I blackmailed a dispatcher into checking whether he had any info. He started babbling about confidentiality, and I told him that by the time I got the police in to look at his books, it might be too late to help. He decided he could talk to me, looked through his dispatch records, and admitted that he hadn't had a call from the hotel, so she must have flagged the cab down in the street. At this point, Mitsuko and I took a gamble. We decided that the most likely place for her to be must be the airport, probably the same airline she had come in on. So we pulled ourselves together and hustled over there (it's only about ten minutes from our home). We found a sympathetic airline person (bless you again, Arlene!) who checked the passenger lists and found that the young woman had bought a ticket on a plane for Japan and was probably waiting upstairs at the gate for the flight, leaving in an hour. Then she thought about it and gave us a gate pass... We buzzed our way through security (I had my normal problems, resulting in taking off my belt buckle, pulling the wad of keys, coin purse, and...oops, my pocket knife!...out and handing it to someone, then getting dressed again when they get bored poking through my clothes) and there she was, sitting alone. Relief! We sat in the departure lounge and talked to her for the hour before her flight left. She said she really had to go home, not out of homesickness, but just to think. We suggested that we'd be happy to let her think at our home or... We talked a lot, but...she got on the plane and went home. So we went back and thanked Arlene. We cruised home and called the young woman's folks to let them know that we had found her, and when she would be arriving. Somewhere around this point, my energy drained. The adrenaline rush was over, and the bod said, "It's time to collapse." But I went ahead and took a shower, then dragged my way into work a bit later than usual (okay, an hour or so...) What I find--disappointing, maybe? at least a little discouraging--is the reaction of our friends and co-workers. Mitsuko has talked to several friends today in the Japanese community who were surprised that we had gone to the airport. I explained to some folks why I was a little bonkers today--and they said most people wouldn't have done it. One asked me why I was so tied up in the Japanese community. I reminded him that my wife is Japanese, and he said, "Yeah, but why are you doing all this other stuff?" I never even thought about not responding, about not trying to help those parents so far away from their child, or that child so far from home and family. I spent...maybe three hours...to help make sure that one young woman was safe and had thought about what she was doing. I'd happily spend that, and more, if need be, for my own self-image--I can't fix all the problems, but where I can offer some help, I will. I really thought of this as pretty minor, even if I did end up at work late and spent the day a bit groggy from reaction. I mean, that's a human being over there, and they are suffering, they are hurting, they have problems that I might be able to help with. Wouldn't you want someone to offer you a helping hand when you're having a rocky time? This shouldn't be surprising. Should it? tink (...by surprise as it went. Robert Frost)