I 'Heart' Librarians

when I was in Japan, I was sitting in the library one day, minding my own business and reading a book, when a middle-aged man comes up to me and introduces himself. 'I am one of the teachers here at Masuda High School' he said, and he explained in broken English that he teaches Ancient Japanese. I nod my head and smile at him and say something in Japanese that is to the effect of, 'Oh that is wonderful!' He smiles and hands me a paper, and says, 'You will read this aloud in class'. I look at the paper and it is completely in Japanese! And, not only Japanese, but Ancient Japanese! I shake my head and say in my elementary Japanese that I do not read Japanese and this is too difficult for me. He smiles back at me and says, 'It is ok! Use a dictionary. You can read'. and he bows, still smiling, turns and walks away before I can offer another protest. I was left forlorn, standing there with this tattered old piece of paper with its perfect elegant lines of the ancient script. I am sure that I looked quite a sight. I was trying to think of how I could best let him down since I am in a Japanese library and do not know where to even begin. I could ask the librarian, but she looked so busy and, since I am in a strange culture to my own, I did not know if she would consider it rude for me to interrupt her silence. I looked in her direction and she was looking at me....? I smile a little sheepishly and shrug my shoulders. The conversation was in Japanese so she knew exactly what was said. She looked at me, 'Do you speak ancient Japanese?!?' she asked surprised. Shaking my head, 'No. I do not understand it' I replied. I could see the wheels in her head turning as she was thinking...her eyes beginning to dart back and forth. She sat there at her unkempt desk, cluttered with books, and then stood up and began moving a tower of books away from a cabinet. Halfway down, she produced a key from her key ring and unlocked the old lock on the cabinet door. She reached in...way in....and pulled out a gloriously large book that was almost the size of a desktop computer tower. She gingerly blew on it to get the dust off, and then took her own hankercheif from her own pocket and dusted the book off so tenderly. She cleared a spot on her desk for the book and sat down in her chair, then pulled another stack of books up beside her chair and patted it while looking at me. The 2nd tower of books was apparently a seat for me, so I sat down very timidly...I am sitting on books....isn't that a sacrilege? But I sat down anyway. This kind librarian helped me to romanize the japanese characters, and then, with the help of the sacred dictionary of gargantuan proportions, she helped me to translate it into English. It was an old Japanese poem about how when it rains the drops hit the earth and make indentations in the soil and rise to form a puddle, and eventually the droplets come together and form a lake. We picked and poked our way through that poem and through the dictionary and labored over it all so much that I was quite tired by the end of the excursion. When we finally finished, and I had put the last dot over the last 'I' and placed the period at the very end, we both laughed from sheer exhaustion and she gathered me up in a giant hug! I had no idea that morning when I hopped on to the bus from Tsuwano to Masuda that I was going to have such an eventful day. But I love that life throws all kinds of adventures our way! Later that day, as I was in ancient Japanese class, the instructor called to me to read what I had been given. As I read it, his face beamed so loudly that I felt the room shiver through all the heat and the muffled breathing of my classmates. I finished and sat down in my seat. He loosed his tie from around his neck and, addressing the class, began to teach on the poem that I had just read. Apparently that was the lesson plan for that day.