When I got home, I showed everyone the award I had won. I was so proud of myself. My first award in anything. Grandma even put it in a special frame to hang up with the other pictures in the basement. Now I had my own place on that wall. I was starting my own history.
"Grandpa, do you think I should be a musician when I grow up?" I asked him while we hung up the award. He stopped what he was doing, and gave me a serious look.
"Junior, you shouldn't ask me. I want you to make up your own mind what you want to be. You can be whatever you want."
"But I don't know if I should be a musician or what," I explained.
"Well, you're going to have to be something, right?" he said, adjusting the frame.
"But I don't know what."
"Then you'll have to figure it out for yourself, Junior. I don't want you to say you couldn't do something because your old man wouldn't let you. Do you understand?"
"I guess so," I replied, wondering what he was talking about.
"You know what?" he said, putting his arm around me. "I am very proud of you."
The doorbell rang, and I ran to get it. It was the mailman. He had a special delivery package addressed to me. It was from my mother. I stared at the foreign package for a long time, not daring to open it. I carefully cut off the stamps and put them in a box with my stamp collection. These stamps were especially beautiful. They were blue and white, and the picture was of a woman in flowing robes, flying through the skies. It reminded me of Zephyr.
After dinner I finally opened the package. It was wrapped in layers and layers of colored paper, and unfolded like an exotic flower. In the middle of the bundle was a pencil box unlike any pencil box I had ever seen before. It was filled with colorful pencils and erasers. There were separate compartments for the pencils, a compartment for my eraser, and a retractable slot for my ruler. It had two layers, and would pop up if I pressed a button on the side. There was a hidden compartment on the bottom where I could keep my money, and it even had a built-in pencil sharpener. "Cool," I said to myself as I carefully examined it. I opened the card from my mother, and read it slowly. I hadn't heard from her in such a long long time. She had such pretty handwriting. It said:
Dear Junichi: You must be getting very big now. I hope you always listen to Grandpa and Grandma. I know it will be your birthday soon, and then you will be ten years old. I wanted to send you this present now so it wouldn't be late. Remember to be a good boy. Happy Birthday! Love, Mom.
I read the card over and over again, then put it away in my special drawer where I only put important things. There was an old picture of my father when he was in the war, the certificate stating I crossed the international dateline, my mother's letters, and the bullet I found in the paint room. For me, these things summed up my entire life. They were my personal history. They meant the world to me.
I took the pencil case to school the next day to show my friends.
"Wow! That's neat," said Louie as he opened up all the different compartments, playing with the ruler.
"Let me see! Let me see!" said Robbie, as he pushed Louie out of the way. I wouldn't let Robbie touch it since I knew he'd break it. Larry offered me twenty clear marbles for it, and Randy want to taste the scented eraser. None of us had seen a scented eraser before.
I put the pencil box on my desk, and stared at it all day. I imagined launching rockets from it's various pencil slots. I pretended it was a futuristic underground city filled with secret rooms and tunnels. I tried to picture my mother going to a Japanese department store and picking it out for me. I imagined her wrapping it up, then taking it to the post office. I imagined it sitting on a boat as it crossed the ocean, and I felt a sadness in my heart. I missed my mother so much. She didn't even know I had won a prize.
It had begun to snow. Winter had finally arrived, and the radiators in the classroom hissed and clanked as they fought off the cold. I watched the snowflakes as they hit the window pane and turned into little teardrops. The teardrops dripped down, forming a miniature river. As each little drop bumped into other drops, the river moved faster and faster, making its way across the window pane. I tried to guess which way the river would turn, but I couldn't.. Sometimes it would go to the right, sometimes left, sometimes all the way to the edge. Sometimes the river would stop for no reason. "Things just happen," Zephyr had said. I guess she was right. Watching the snowflakes made me feel less sad about being away from my mother. I felt less sad about not knowing my father. "Things just happen," I repeated to myself.
The bell rang, and I straightened up my desk, preparing to go home. Hey, where was my pencil case? It was just here a second ago. I looked through my bag, under the chair, on the floor, all over. Everyone had left by now, but I kept looking frantically around the room.
"Have you seen a pencil case anywhere?" I asked Mrs. Edwards who was cleaning off the blackboard. "It was just here, a second ago."
"I'm sorry Junior, I haven't," she replied. "Aren't you going to go before it starts to snow?"
"No, I have to find it!" I insisted. "It's got to be here somewhere." I scrambled around the room, on my hands and knees, looking under every desk. I went back to my locker and looked there too. As I expected, it wasn't there. It had been stolen. I knew I would never get it back.
I was shattered. Numb. I didn't know what else to do, so I plodded up the four floors to the band room. No one was there, and the lights were all turned out. I drug out Cleo, and played "A.A. Grundman Corporation, Bakersfield, CA." The windows suddenly flew opened, and snow swirled around the room. The snow kept swirling and swirling, filling the band room. Finally it stopped, and there was Zephyr, standing in the middle. She was wearing red mittens and ear muffs. I let out a sad kind of laugh.
"Snow is so much fun," she said, tossing the snow up with her hands. "It's so changeable, so fluffy!" She rolled up a snowball and threw it at me. "Hey, wake up there, cowboy!" she giggled.
"I feel terrible," I groaned, in no mood to play.
"Oh, what happened?" she said, sitting down next to me.
"Someone stole my pencil case!" I blurted out, burying my face in my hands. "My mom gave it to me for my birthday. She sent it all the way from Japan." I started to cry.
"Oh, sweetie, don't cry," she said trying to cheer me up. "It's only a pencil case."
"No, it's my mother's pencil case. You don't understand."
"I think I do," she said, and rolled up another snowball. "Hey, do you think I can hit that thing over there?" she asked, pointing to a pipe across the room.
"No way, you're a girl."
The snowball hit the pipe, scattering into pieces. She was pretty good.
"You didn't think I could hit it did you?" she teased. "Why don't you try?"
"Okay. No problem." I padded a snowball in my hand and sent it flying. I missed completely. "Woops." I said.
"Ha!" she laughed. "So girls aren't so bad, are they?"
"Yeah, I guess so." I wondered who was going to clean up the room later.
"You really miss your mom, don't you?" she asked.
"Yeah, I guess so."
"And that pencil case was really important to you, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"Junior, don't you see? The case is only an object. It just shows how much you love your mom even though you aren't together."
"Yeah, I guess so." I still felt miserable.
"Now that the case is gone, you still love your mother don't you?"
"Of course," I said.
"Then the case isn't the most important thing," she said. "It's the way you feel about your mother that counts. They can take your pencil case away from you, but no one can take away how you feel about her. Don't you see?"
"Sort of," I said. Strange. I didn't feel so bad anymore. She was starting to make a lot of sense.
"Sometimes love can be far away and unseen, but sometimes that's the strongest kind of love," she threw some snow in my face and ran off laughing. "You should be happy. It's snowing!"
I tried to hit her with a snowball but I missed. I wasn't very good today.
"Hey," she said matter-of-factly. "That was a nice song you wrote up there in the mountains. But I never knew clouds sounded that way." We both laughed. "So why don't you try to write a song for your mother. I'll play it for her while she's sleeping."
"You will?"
"Did you forget who I am?" she asked? She pranced around the room singing a funny song, "I'm Zephyr the Westwardly Wind, teacher of birds and kings. Where ever I go, the wind will blow, I'm Zephyr the Westwardly Wind."
"Wow, you really do have a terrible voice," I told her.
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