Remember what it was like to be a kid? Sitting in class, having fantastic adventures in your imagination far away, while your teachers were trying to teach you how to add fractions?

My friend recently shared a story that her 4-year old neice, Ariana, wrote (okay — so she dictated the story and her mom typed it up) and I felt I needed to pass it on. When I read it, I could really picture the kid sitting there, telling the story, and almost see the little creative steps and jumps in her mind — because unlike stories written by adults, there’s no forethought. Just stream-of-consciousness imagination.  I love it.

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I ducked down and walked slowly toward the freight train as it rolled to a stop. Concentrate, I thought, trying to mute the sound of the gravel under my feet. I stopped three feet in front of the railway car, and saw it was the one I wanted. It was basically half of a box platform for a bigger transport container (the same as transport trucks haul) and there was a five by six foot empty space behind the giant box. Perfect.

I took a quick look around and threw my guitar bag over the rim. I pushed myself up by my arms and toppled in head first, my shoe catching on a metal hinge that jutted out.

I loved the adrenaline rush that I always got when I climbed onto a train, and today was no different.

It was hour five and I hadn’t had much success. I had hopped on four trains in the hopes that they were going somewhere, but just as soon as we’d start moving, the string of cars would stop and roll backwards into a different waiting slot. Maybe I should have taken that as a bad omen.

To my surprise, the train I was on started moving, and picked up speed as it left the train yard, headed in the vague direction of Truro. Or Cape Breton. Quite possibly Montreal. I didn’t care — at least it was moving, and I was on it.

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For an hour and a half every Wednesday evening, I am a private English tutor.

My student, Tsubasa, is 26. She just came back from a year studying in New York and wanted to continue her English.

Today, we were talking about how it is difficult to pursue a goal that not many other people can appreciate, and again she baffles me with using metaphors in English better than most native speakers.

I would teach her for free, simply to hear the metaphors and similes that she makes up on the spot (However, I do not tell her this. I simply smile and take her money)

“When you try to do something different from everyone else – like maybe start a business or something – it’s kind of like trying to become a professional high jumper – you know, the kind where they use the the pole (pole vault). And a lot of people, they quit while they are still learning how to run and use the pole — before they get good at jumping — they never even get to actually jump high. If you just push a little bit further, you can try to jump – then you do more practice and you can jump higher. Eventually you are jumping so high, you go over the top bar… No quitting while learning how to run.”

It’s a good thought for the day.

I was 20, and had enrolled for my third year of university in Halifax. I didn’t want to go back to school. I felt I was spending a lot of money for an arbitrary piece of paper that I wasn’t sure I really needed. I also had a sneaking suspicion that after all the nights hanging out in bars with classmates, all the lounging around in study halls and great discussions of politics, world issues and women we thought were hot, that I was somehow insulated from “real learning,” although I had no idea what that meant at the time.

On the last day to withdraw from classes without financial penalty, I cracked. At 4:45, fifteen minutes before they closed, I ran to the financial office and “de-registered” for all my classes, and got a full refund.

Fuck it, I thought. I’m finished with classrooms. I want real, tangible experience. I’m going to hitchhike to Montreal (yes, there was a girl there…).

The next day I told my concerned parents I was a college dropout, and that I was getting a ride with a friend to Moncton (a two hour drive from Halifax) to clear my head and figure out what my long-term plans were. (My real destination, Montreal, was a 12-14 straight drive. At this point in my life, I didn’t feel like I could tell my parents about what I was really doing, as the whole “dropping out” thing seemed to affect them enough)

Although fate would have nothing of Montreal, while in northern New Brunswick, I got a ride from a truck driver who was heading all the way to just north of Toronto — an offer I couldn’t turn down (as an aside, I actually don’t believe in fate in day to day life — I feel that we are all 100% responsible for our own actions and circumstances, but the appeal of hitchhiking for me has always been that your trip is very dependent on the people that pick you up, hence I believe in a kind of hitchhiker “fate”).

(to be continued…)

For my friends who can read it, this is my speech from the Kumamoto Gakuen University speech contest I entered.   I somehow managed to walk away with the audience-voted Best Speech Award, the judge`s Best Grammar Award, and a few other trinkets…   (For the English translation, see the previous post)

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