Rainwrite

I was sitting at my favorite dessert eatery in downtown Meguro, which by the way is a marvelous town. Oh gee I sound like an old fogey. What gives?! Anyway, so this place has nice couches, a view of the downtown bus stop, plays legit jazz, and has delicious chocolate croissants. It's amazing.. unless you can't eat chocolate, wheat, or hate jazz. Lucky me, I'm immune to that!

I brought along a copy of Loren Cunningham's The Book that Transforms Nations: The Power of the Bible to Change Any Country. [Personal note: Finished Foster's Celebration of Discipline today! Wasn't too disciplined in reading it though]. Choco Cro had a special milk cro, so I ordered that along with the usual.

The skies opened with rain and flashes of lightning accompanied by torrential rain. A familiar tune came on- a snazzy jazz version of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." And out the window I looked, catching a scene. Here's what spun out of my imagination.

The manager called out from the back room for him to go. Shin looked out warily at the clouds overhead. He'd hoped it wouldn't be his turn, and yet again, to meet the heavy rain.

A key turn into the ignition, flatbed secure, out from the garage and into the streets. At a red light he waited dazed, when a thunderclap awoke him and drops of rain began to peak on his windshield. He sighed to himself as the light turned green. Nearing the delivery site the streets came alive with crowds of businessmen and women hurriedly opening their umbrellas. A sea of shields for the skies. Those who came out for the day unprepared ran frantically for the crosswalks and were lost into the underground rail system.

And there he was at the corner of the pub that needed bottles for the day. He quickly idled the engine and looked up at the skies. The rain was in complete downpour, and he was dressed in a hopeful t-shirt, work apron, and shorts.

Shin got out and immediately rounded to the flatbed. He uncovered the loading cart and brought it to the basement of the pub. He loaded, stacked, moved, and reloaded the crates from the pub to the truck. Every movement was calculated, necessary, and accurate. He could not make any mistakes with all this glass about and heavy crates to lift. The rain would not be any excuse for any slip-ups with his manager. The work was done after a few more trips of the same. His shirt stuck to his skin as he dug in his back pocket for the key to the truck. Where was it? He found it at last and fumbled it into the driver-side door. "Back to the warehouse I guess.."

People watching is a pretty inventive thing, as long as you don't make it a creepy thing. Just the busy-ness of the day, writing this in my head from the vantage of the eatery was fairly enjoyable. I don't know this man's name, emotions or what he was going through, but this is how I saw it that day. Completely fictional, I'll say.

Hope you or anyone traveling along this blog enjoyed the story. I thought about making a space exclusively for me to write stories from people watching in Tokyo. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. It'll be a hobby to pass the time and a snapshot of the city life in Japan, for sure. Peace.