Northern_Lights_2014

The Notebooks of Her World By Mattie Hoyle I had been in Japan for almost two weeks, visiting a friend, and was due to fly out the next evening. My friend’s roommate, Mel, had taken me out with some of her friends to visit Chinatown Kobe. It was while we waited for the train that would take us back to their neighborhood that I met “her.” She was a tiny thing, a little more than half of my 5’10” height, and her teeth glittered with metal caps. Her hair was short, dark, and obviously unstyled, and despite her older age, had almost no white or grey in it. This made it so even though her skin looked like sagging leather, it was difficult to judge exactly how old she was, especially since she wore loose grunge jeans and a red plaid lumberjack shirt with a light blue and black book bag. Her gruff Japanese appearance was at odds with her voice, which carried an almost Russian-like thick accent, as she broke into conversation. When the train arrived, we sat with her between us, as she talked about her family. She showed us pic- tures of her grandkids, and talked proudly about which child played which instruments. She loved music, and proceeded to pull out a notebook of handwritten lyrics to probably hundreds of American songs. Each song was carefully scrolled with the name of the song and artist; she had some of the most beautiful writing I had ever seen. It was the old script that people used to use; the kind of writing you only see from grandparents and older generations anymore. I gushed over how nice it was, and she told us that she had taught herself English. She even wrote the lyrics to all of those songs by ear; there were spots she must have revised because a word or two was crossed out and replaced with the correct wording. She’d flip through them, pointing out her favor- ites and singing a little bit of each one. Her thick accent and out of tune singing just added character to the songs from almost every era. She warbled out “I Will Survive” among the normally private and quiet passen- gers, but it wasn’t embarrassing because she wasn’t embarrassed. She would occasionally get frustrated with her accent, complaining about how she spoke with “broken English,” but her English wasn’t “broken.” It was low and thick, and after two weeks of most people avoiding the scary white girl, it nearly brought me to tears. The best part, however, was when she pulled out her last two notebooks. Holding one in my hands, I slowly flipped through the pages. Inside were short messages addressed to her, written in languages from around the world, all of them wishing her luck and good health. Some were on- ly a couple of lines, while others filled the page with drawings of where they came from. Some of them were very good, like an artistic rendition of the Eiffel Tower; others were just doodles by an amateur, little scribbles of whatever the person wanted to draw. As I continued flipping, I noticed that the entire notebook was full, 100 pages of people I’d probably never meet, but she had. She pulled out a second notebook, this one only half full, and as Mel wrote her entry for Australia, I looked back at the dates in the filled notebook. The first entry was from 2010. In a matter of less than three years, this little old lady had probably met more people from more places, and actually sat down and talked with them, than most people would in their entire lives. That thought alone was humbling. She had never even 37