Seasonal

Cherry petals on the windshield of a taxi stopped at the light on Meiji-dori. The driver doesn't notice. He's listening to a baseball game, Hanshin Tigers, and the petals are just weather to him, not poetry, not symbol. Litter, if anything. He will use the wipers. I watch this from the sidewalk holding a convenience store coffee that is too hot and too sweet and exactly what I need at seven in the morning in a suit I ironed badly. My mother would say the cherry blossoms mean everything. Transience, beauty, the floating world. She grew up in a house with a view of the Philosopher's Path and pressed petals into letters she sent to my father during the two years he worked in Osaka. My father would say they block the gutters. I'm somewhere between them. I see the petals and I think: it's spring, and I should call my mother, and the Tigers are probably losing again. The tree in question is by the Starbucks on the corner. It was planted in 1987 by the ward office as part of a beautification project. I know this because there's a plaque. The plaque is covered in petals too. Thirty-nine years of blooming. Roughly one week per year of this, the full performance, pink against the grey of the buildings and the particular grey of Tokyo sky in April which is not the grey of rain but the grey of a city that has so much going on overhead the sky gave up competing. I finish my coffee. The light changes. The taxi drives off with its cargo of petals and the sound of the ballgame getting quieter down the street. Tomorrow they'll be gone. The blossoms, I mean. Not the taxis. Not the baseball. Those are permanent. The petals are the temporary ones, which is the whole point, which my mother could have told you, which the driver knows and doesn't bother saying.