Care

I mistakenly picked up a 98 yen soup spoon without a price label.   The replacement the cashier found lacked a red decoration on the handle from my first choice.  It's ok, I said.  No really, it's ok, it's really ok.  I wasn't too attached to the red dot, anyway.  But after consultation with another cashier, they determined that it would be alright to use the price of the replacement but still give me my first choice in spoon.

Our dear personnel manager allowed me to interrupt to ask her a silly question about where I can find a certain gift for someone.  She spent several minutes looking at different websites, consulting with her office-mate and finally told me that it might take her a little bit to get the answer.  Would it be alright if she emailed me the web address later?  Of course.  And now I am home, and have two different links from her including her personalized text about what each can offer and further offering her help.

And today I had the first of three rehearsals for a 30 minute lobby performance of Christmas music for quartet, percussion, and trumpet.  It lasted 2 hours.  And tomorrow we will spend some time tuning and continuing to make sure that the arrangements work.  The pleasure of rehearsing.

In America, they might have asked me about the cost of the spoon and just not cared enough to check.  They might have just given me the other version when I said it was ok.  I wouldn't deign to expect that a personnel manager would spend her time with such thoroughness, nor would I expect a similar attitude of rehearsals for a Christmas lobby performance.  Likely we'd meet once before for a rushed hour and hope that Santa was watching over us, or at that least no one was listening too closely.  Today, so many little things done with care and consideration.  Sometimes slower than my cultural upbringing, but something very beautiful and satisfying.