Misheru

The title is a quote from my friend Julie. Spokavegas was… smaller than I remembered. More Republican. More WASP. It was lonelier too — almost all my old friends and a lot of my old profs are gone. I spent two days wandering around…was eaten by fleas at a motel…missed the professors I meant to see, and saw the professors I hadn’t meant to see. And, I couldn’t find the 22-year-old self that left the place. Until, that is, I went to Mukogawa, where I worked with Japanese college students in 1997. I found myself there, and also at my old apartment in the city, where I spent the last six months of school. I received a warm welcome at Mukogawa and Ben enjoyed playing soccer out in the grass there, and, in the end, I was glad I came. The order of the pictures is as follows: Gonzaga from the front, the side, and from Centennial trail; the next picture is the bridge behind Gonzaga. I jumped off that particular spot once with three other friends in a fit of energy one February while I was in school (it was very, very cold). The next is Ben and I on the big red wagon slide downtown, Ben on the Looff carousel (a historic carousel, also downtown) and then just Ben on the wagon, coming down, quite bravely, himself. The next one is Mukogawa, in the historic old officers’ quarters where we lived, and then of the apartment building where I lived while I finished school. The last one is Spokane downtown, at dusk.