You Gotta Sing, or It Will Burn

So we’ve lived here in Tokyo for almost a year… hasn’t it been a year yet? Sometimes it feels like a lifetime. I guess I’m in a contrary mood, grumping about this inconvenience or that, although, to be sure, we don’t have it so bad. Food, shelter, chocolate; we have all the neccessities of life here. And now, to add to our luxuries, we have a toaster to boot. We did without a toaster for ten months and now we have one. A salvage item from another family relocating back to the States. And now, we no longer have to sing for our toast.

Up to this time, we toasted the bread slices in the little oven grill under the gas burners built into our tiny kitchen countertop… and if you didn’t sing while those bread slices were toasting, it was inevitable that during the hurly-burly of morning scamperings, you would forget the bread was in there and before you knew it, your breakfast was toast. Carbonized toast, that no amount of butter or jam could possibly save. The singing reminded you, and anyone else who had the misfortune to be listening, that you were attempting to make toast and you didn’t want to forget what you were dong.

Now, when we open up our pathetically small loaves of presliced-six-slices-to-a-bag-no-heel bread and pop one of those slices into our toaster, it actually reappears a decent shade of brown instead of black as volcanic soil. And we don’t have to put up with someone’s butchered version of a Broadway musical number… “I’m sing’in for my toast, Just sing’in for my toast, ‘Cause carbonized bread ain’t what I love the most…” There are worse ones, believe me. Although it was sort of nice hearing any kind of singing in the morning.

So convenient, those toasters. Now, I suppose I can more easily put up with the other inconveniences… no central heating, no car, no shoes in my size, biking in the rain and frequently intense wind, sleeping on the floor and, the most heart-breaking inconvenience of all… never being able to find decent cheese. Mmmm… cheese. I miss my cheese. Guess it’s getting late. Time to curl up on the floor in a little furry ball and go to sleep. Next year is the Year of the Rat. Maybe then we’ll get some decent cheese.

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