From the notebook
Twenty-three years old. Sixteen hours without a cigarette.
I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is what Sundays look like at love, journalism — a dispatch from the notebook, unfiltered, from whatever year I happened to be living in. I’ve got 40+ years of these. I plan to share them for a long time.
I kept a journal through most of my year in Japan. 1997 into 1998. Teaching English for NOVA, living in Urawa, commuting twelve stations each way to Kumagaya.
Some entries are about the work. Some are about a girlfriend back in the States. Some are just — watching. A park. A Saturday. The wind.
This one is from July 18, 1998. I was 23. I’d been trying to quit smoking.
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July 18, 1998 · Kita Urawa Park
The heavy wind blew sand in the air and caused mild havoc for several of the picnickers. As beverages added new flavors to the earth’s surface and moms chased runaway napkins instead of children, one mommy and daughter walked through the park on an easy late Saturday stroll.
They had been shopping, you’d imagine, because the young girl — maybe six, judging by height — carried two department store bags slung in her right arm behind her neck. As if she was trying a new triceps weight exercise or scratching the back of her left shoulder.
Her mom, a seasoned veteran in such maneuvers, walked in the same manner with her orange leather purse in her right hand. Daughter had watched mom do this. Emulating her seemed second nature.
Many more folks crossed the same path. The wind died down. A young twenties man sat against a tree contemplating everything in the midst of his 16th hour without a cigarette.
— Darren Samuelsohn, Japan, 1998
love, journalism runs on passion. It always has. But if these dispatches mean something to you — if you want to keep the archive coming, keep the show going, keep the whole thing alive — there’s a paid tier. I’m not asking for a lot. Just enough to know this matters to more than just me.