Everything's changing

kobe-harbor
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Early evening at Kobe's commercial port, and the wind is blowing cool down from the cloudless sky. I planted myself on a mooring post and started to sketch the harbor scene in front of me. This was not art for the sake of art; I was only doing it to train my eyes to see again. Sitting in one place for a long time teaches you to that you are not the only one in motion, that the world around you is actually subtlely evolving and shifting in aspect.

After about twenty minutes of painstaking visualization and sketching, an elderly lady in a white polka-dot purple blouse, somehow reminiscent of the Japanese farmland, approached and asked if I was drawing something. I looked into her sun-weathered face, no longer young and with wrinkles radiated outward from her puckered lips. She told me in a heavy kansai accent that she used to oil-paint when she was young. . . she used to love to paint. . . Now her son, who works in the harbor adminstration office, is too busy for such things, and so is she. She pointed to a broad white building, gleaming in the setting sunlight.
"I work there, at the Oriental Hotel, for 800 yen an hour. It's tough. I'm too busy to paint anymore. When we moved, we had to throw away all my painting supplies. . . "

The sky was turning from the color of faded jeans back to its original deep indigo hue.

"My husband's now retired, but he worked five years past the usual retirement age, and even now he still gets back in the truck to make deliveries a few times a week. It doesn't bring in much money, but we need it."

"I used to paint. I miss it." She's now back on topic. It's almost too dark to continue drawing.

"Let's meet again." She turned away as she finished her story. I imagine she must not have had anyone to listen to her all day, while she toiled for 800 yen an hour. She didn't care that I was a foreigner, that I spoke with an accent; she never made a single comment about that.

I looked down at my drawing. The scene in front of me was thoroughly transformed. The derricks were facing 180 degrees away, the lights were on and shadows were stretching over the contours I had already traced. Nothing matched.