At the end of my blog post, Fujisan, I mentioned that our Japanese friend (Takko) shared her dream with me on the top of Mt. Fuji. This is a story I love to tell.
There are seven stations as you ascend the Fujinomiya Trail on Mt. Fuji. All the stations have supplies, food, restrooms, and sleeping areas. Takko had organized our stay and purchased the souvenir hiking sticks that are branded at each station during the climb for the boys. I told her I was taking care of everything else.
The hut Takko had chosen was only an hour below the summit. The ($70 per person) overnight included dinner and breakfast so we sat down to a meal consisting of: curry rice, some sort of vegetable and green tea.
A formation of cotton-ball clouds marched in a parade below the hut window. A scene only revealed by a jaunt into altitude. My anticipation was in full flight, I knew we would succeed the next morning. I sat in complete wonderment, probably a little spaced by the altitude and filled with gratitude after a day well spent. I turned to our friend Takko and thanked her for helping my family and enabling me to accomplish a dream of twenty-eight years. She’d done all this after a fifteen-minute conversation two years before at Clown Camp in Wisconsin. Sincere and heart-felt feelings communicated through her workably passable English and my infantile Japanese. Do you understand? (Wakaremaska?) Yes, I understand (Hai, wakaremas).
As dinner continued, I casually ask, “What kind of dreams do you have?” She turns to me and responds without hesitation, “I like to be in the famous Great Circus Parade in Milwaukee someday”.
The rarified air forced a long processing time, I was dumbfounded. Language barrier aside, she knew I was being conversational. I didn’t ask with the intention to automatically assist in her quest. She didn’t know what I did for a living or who my associations were. In two years, we’d only had contact with each other for a little over eight hours, most of it today. Why did she pick that? What were the probabilities of her dream being something I could actually help her with? Cripes, we were on top of Mt. Fuji.
I went numb followed by an intense enthusiasm, like seeing Dad rolling my first bicycle into the yard. How often in life do you get to hold the key to a door that could lead to an adventure like this and return true friendship with such an immediate gift?
All those emotions ricocheted around in my body as I regained whatever composure I could muster at 11,700 ft. and said, “I’ve never been in that parade, but if you’re serious about this, the chairman of the event is on my companies’ Board of Directors, I can make this happen.”
And I did.
The Adventures of Spaghetti Eddie 