hidden fruit

Three p.m., September 12, 2009. Two feet of surf. The sun is making its way back across the horizon to its winter position smack in front of the window. 7/eleven is selling oden simmering stew bits. It’s fall.

It’s also only three months until the big move, which is hard to believe. Working out whether time is going incredibly fast or inordinately slow is a real problem: it’s like trying to find the value of everyday things in Bali, where people seem to pull prices out of a very confused hat, and just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, someone says, “Oh, that piece of fruit you just bought? I’ll sell you one for one-tenth the price.” Or “one-fifteith the price.” Or, “five thousand times the price.”

At the end of the day, you have five pieces of fruit. You’ve emptied your entire savings and pulled the museum-quality Nirvana t-shirt off your torso to purchase one of them; in another pocket is another piece that is not even microscopically different than the one responsible for your nakedness--and it was given to you free by a woman hawking massages from a hut the size of a paperback edition of Lord of the Rings. There’s really nothing to do but pop both of them in your mouth, and chew.

But, oh yes, I was talking about time. I’ve got a problem dealing with it, and artisans in the Japanese carpentry business once spent years of it, honing the skill of shaving incredibly thin and miraculously accurate slices of wood and weaving them into an intricate type of wickerwork called ajiro. We have an old shoki-dana kitchen piece that features it on the facade, and today I was caught by surprise when I poked my head into the tokonoma alcove, and there it was on the ceiling. It's made by machine these days, and I'm sure it takes much less time and effort.

The ceiling of the tokonama is a place that rarely sees the light of day or an appreciative eye. Unless a guest gets really drunk and topples over into the alcove yet stays awake long enough to stare skyward, no one outside the family will probably ever see this, unless I drag them over and point it out.