Protocol 7

A couple of days ago I received an e-mail from my mom informing me that she had to put her dog Apollo, a white standard poodle, to sleep on Thursday. Since then she’s been sorting through old photographs, gathering a visual overview of Apollo’s time here and I thought I’d add a few memories to that compendium, as a small farewell.

Apollo was a special dog, and when I say special I mean that in every sense, every definition, that the word encompasses (except perhaps the mathematical one). It was because of his very unique specialness that he wound up at our house; born blind and with weakened back legs, aficionados of purebred poodle pups didn’t really want anything to do with him. And so it was that a very fluffy and cute white puppy, burdened with the weighty name of Apollo, joined our family.

When he was still small, small enough for me to carry, I liked to take him to Franklin Street (downtown Chapel Hill) and the University of North Carolina campus because that’s what people with dogs do. He was happy enough in the campus parks, but as soon as his feet touched concrete he froze… wouldn’t move a muscle. And so began the hallmark peculiarities that made Apollo a particularly lovable variation on a theme. I’m not fond of poodles or the pretension that surrounds their very existence, but Apollo was different with his endearing wobbliness and propensity to run into things, even though his breath was usually pretty stinky.

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I’ve never been a fan of shopping, unless it’s for electronics or the occasional thrift store foray, so you can imagine how happy I am that the three pairs of pants I brought to Japan are falling apart. Falling apart is an understatement - the hems are gone and the fabric is wearing thin - I carry around scissors and safety pins just in case of further impromptu degradation. I usually enjoy flipping through racks of thrifty threads if I’m in the right mood, but I *hate* shopping for pants about as much as I hate pretzles and elbows. To say that I possess a megaton of hate would not be an exaggeration. And shopping for pants in Japan effectively doubles, if not triples, my pants-shopping hateration.

It’s always been difficult for me to find pants that fit properly, and in the past I’ve generally stuck to wearing men’s suit pants. Occasionally I will find the odd pair of jeans that happen to fit, but in a world that loves low-riders and skinny jeans, they are few and far between. In Japan, the task of locating pants that can sustain my trunk’s junk is nigh impossible, and I’m a size six back in the States. In a country that boasts size 00 (yes, that’s double zero), a girl who usually doesn’t have body issues suddenly begins to plan her upcoming crash-course diet of seaweed and tofu (and beer, natch). After two hours of fitting-room devastation I found one pair that fit, but made me look incomprehensibly short, like I had been squished in a fun-house mirror. The next size up was in the plus-size section. Needless to say, I’m still sporting the same threadbare leggings I was last year.

Golden Week has come and gone (and gone), underscored by the incessant rain dismally signaling a return to work after seven blissful days of vacation. This is the exact same thing I said last year, except with perhaps a little less rain. Golden Week is a springtime blessing, a weeklong national holiday (more accurately, several individual holidays in series) that’s even better in Hamamatsu owing to the three-day revelry known as the Hamamatsu Matsuri (festival). Last year we had a lot of fun as spectators, but this year passively watching wasn’t enough; we participated.

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