Yesterday I walked home from class carrying my bo and a flowered cloth bag with the jacket part of my gi and the belt. I saw some school kids in navy blue heading my way, so I stepped aside, my back to a garden, to let them pass.

Only there was a flowing stream of them, chattering, laughing. Middle-schoolers maybe. Their faces bright and animated. On and on they came. There were teachers and chaperones. Every once in awhile a kid would look at me and say, Hi! Not always the ones closest to me, but kids from the middle of the stream. I said hi back. The kids were happy to be on an outing.

After the end of the parade, I walked on and came upon an unusual car parked on the corner.

Red, blue, white, yellow: the car was covered by a single layer of Legos. No apparent arrangement except to fit as many as close together as possible.

And on the dashboard, a single row of pre-shaped pieces: a flower, a human, another flower...

Someone glued them on, one after the other after the other, learning about blocks, not building a thing.

I feel like a kindergartener in an old, honorable school. (A kindergartner disguised as a woman in her 50s!) I'm the only kindergartner, so I'm thrown into the 5th grade curriculum doing simple equations when I don't know how to count yet.

I'm looking for the colored building blocks.

I can see the beauty and the bruising of the universe, and I'm looking for its smallest parts.

Today I'm going to Google. I'm going to learn to count, one to ten, in Japanese.