Nine chickens, two rabbits, and us
I.
I’ll come right out and say it — I’m just not, for the most part, that fond of kids.
They’re cute, I can give you that, but as a rule I find them to be little shits who steal my siblings and friends away.
But then, there are those times that… well…
Like the other day. The breakfast crowd was slowing down, and at a table for five there sat a family of three: the mother at the head, her little boy to her right, her even littler girl to her left. She was leaned forward, both hands flat on the table, and smiling the way you do when you spin a tail of fairies, dragons, and sleep-bewitched royalty.
Only she wasn’t telling that type of story. She was just animatedly telling her little boy and girl that Daddy was getting the luggage from the hotel room upstairs and that he’d be down soon. The type of story worth giving that little extra bit of magic.
I quickly cleared their plates and walked away.
I passed by again a few moments later. I heard the boy shush his sister, for good reason: “Mom’s telling a story!”
Continuing on, I steadied the dishes in my hands.
II.
Written Japanese uses not just one alphabet, but three: kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
The first, kanji, is made up of Chinese characters — symbols that represent complete words and ideas.
The other two, hiragana and katakana, are both phonetic — with each character representing a speech sound. However, unlike in English, the sounds are complete syllables, rather than just consonants and vowels. So, for example, in hiragana か is ka, つ is tzu, and ま is ma.
And why two phonetic alphabets, you ask?
The Japanese reserve hiragana for the words that belong to them — i.e., for Japanese words. For foreign words, like those that come from English, katakana is the alphabet of choice.
ブレナン
Bu-re-na-n.
My name in katakana.
Japaense text will often make use of all three alphabets at once, at least if any foreign words are involved.
Which means that it would be nearly impossible for a foreigner to learn to read Japanese proficiently.
It also means that if you were to write a paragraph in Japanese and my name were to show up, we’d all know immediately what didn’t belong.
III.
“You see the ones that look like this? We don’t use them.”
Pascal showed us the end of the spoon he’d just grabbed off the table setting. Were it a pair of pants, I’d call it straight-legged. We compared it to the spoons we were supposed to use: they were more like bell-bottoms, flaired out and flattened at the end.
That was day one at the buffet, three weeks ago now. And every day since then I’ve found at least one, sometimes two or three, of the offending spoons. No matter how many times I pull them from the rotation and hand them over to staff dining (the grisly afterlife that awaits the cutlery and dishware that leaves the buffet), they just keep coming back.
So when two more showed up the other day, I just slipped them in my apron pocket. Took them home and put them in the kitchen drawer at my staff accommodation.
Of course they don’t match the rest of our cutlery at all. But at least where they are now, nobody notices a difference.
Or if they do, they sure as hell don’t care.
IV.
Is it stealing if you take something someone doesn’t want or value?
[Notebook entry dated November 30, 2018]
V.
It’s disappointing to tell people I’m going to write a book. I mean how are they supposed to react? I’m just one more guy trying to prove he’s not another meaningless lump of clay. I get it. The uh huh and the oh yeah? are totally understandable.
Then there’s telling my sister that I’m going to write a book.
“I’m so excited for you, Bren!” she says with Ashly-like enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re writing again. I mean, that’s always been your thing, you know? Ever since you were little!”
And I think: everybody deserves that somebody who’s read the first few chapters of their story.
VI.
Concept: two siblings who the more they know and understand one another, they further they are from grasping each other. A sister. A brother. The brother for whom the wind just stopped — and so did he. The sister who loves her brother more than anything, who has dreams and ambitions but who ever feels lacking.
She is older. He is younger. 31 and 28.
Their father left his religious faith when he was in his 20s. The kids know this, have heard it all their lives. He tells it, not proudly but often — so they know there’s something they’re supposed to take away from it. His marriage was unsuccessful, never able to accept her love or his. Always questioning. Inadvertently, he has communicated to his kids that his love for them must be questioned.
The brother’s wind stops at 22, right before his final semester. He is traveling home from university for Thanksgiving, but he never makes it. Stops in a nothing town and can’t start again.
For the reader, the brother’s windless world is a reality. For the other characters? Uncertain. The brother has always had a proclivity for metaphor.
The central conflict is: what happened? The sister feels she must know before she can move on with her life.
[excerpts from notebook entry dated December 3, 2018]
VII.
[setting: Lake Ohau, weekend campervan trip]
“Whatcha doing?”
“I’m boiling some water so I can do my dishes,” I said, trying to look busy. Maybe she’d go away.
“You shouldn’t boil the water,” she said sternly. “Then it’s too hot to put your hands in.” Hand on cocked hip above little kid legs, intensely curly hair going every which way, and the still and reflective lake her backdrop.
“We’ve got two rabbits at home,” her brother piped in.
I was surrounded.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” said his sister. Anya she’d said her name was. Earlier, when she’d interrupted me from my morning lakeside meditation.
“I miss our rabbits when we’re gone,” Anya said. “We’ve got nine chickens and two rabbits.”
“Hmm,” I commented. And where the hell were their parents?
“Nine chickens. Two rabbits. And us,” she clarified.
I nodded, lifting the lid to see if any bubbles had formed. Not a one.
“I like our rabbits,” added her brother, whose name was Isaac. Isaac had spent the morning tossing stones at my feet that were large and misshapen. Just daring me to get a couple of skips out of them on the lake.
Now Isaac paused for a moment and stared at me that way that kids do — like there’s something right behind your eyes that’s waaaay more interesting than you are.
“But I like myself best,” he said finally.
I laughed and shook my head. Squeezing a couple drops of dish soap into a plastic tub, I waited to see if he’d go on.
“I’m two million,” he said. Why two and not one, heaven knows. “Mom and Dad are two million, too.”
Then he turned to Anya. “You’re two hundred.”
To which Anya made a stink face.
Isaac turned back to me.
“And you’re two hundred, too.”
As I poured the steaming water over last night’s dirty dishes, I couldn’t help but smile. Maybe I was shy of first place by a factor of 10,000 — but at least I had company.
Things to look at…
In Place explores what it’s like to be in this place, Aotearoa New Zealand—and what it means to be in place more generally, to belong. For more posts, visit https://medium.com/in-place.
