We will be parting company with our wonderful little Nissan March soon. Our mechanical friend goes to new owners at the end of the week and we will miss this great car, but it belongs to another world; a world we are leaving behind. It was the perfect vehicle for the new life we had begun to carve for ourselves in Japan, but it seems that in God's grand design our new lives here were only a brief, if not memorable, episode in the script Melba and I have been writing and rewriting for over thirty years. God has creative control over our screenplay and we don't have a problem with that.Once we get back from our weekend trip to Kyoto and Hiroshima Melba and I will be afoot once again in Yokosuka. We will have come full circle. It will not be long before we are down to living out of two suitcases at the Navy Lodge exactly as we did when we first got here. Most of our meager possessions are in packages strung like beads on a string on the mail route between Japan and Texas. The first of many boxes arrived only last Thursday.
God is good. Once the new year begins Melba will again resume her responsibilities with the Benavides schools whose Board of Trustees in an act of good judgment rehired, and my post-retirement employer was gracious enough to welcome me back to my former post. Life is good. We may recover the material vestiges of our old existence once we are back in our old stomping grounds, but family and friends will only see the outer shell of who we once were. I think the grey matter on the inside has been rewired and we will experience a second dose of culture shock on the first morning we step out under a South Texas sky.
