Bill James, a baseball statistics guru, found that most baseball players experienced peak performance between the ages of 26 and 28, after which time they began a slippery-slope-style decline.
Rather than dwell on the bleakness of my future, I choose to live out my unfulfilled sports glory through my children, and reminisce of the past. Today, it is in this spirit of nostalgia that I write about an experience that I had when my mom came to visit us in Japan while Mia was in the hospital in Matsuyama.
One day in late January or early February, Mom and I dropped by the Ehime Prefectural Information Center (EPIC) in Matsuyama to renew the agreement on my rental bike. While we were there, a very helpful woman named Noriko Omori gave us some advice on places to visit, as well as some simple maps of surrounding Matsuyama. Stef and I wanted to treat Mom to a nice dinner, so we inquired about all-you-can-eat yakiniku restaurants, and she pointed to the unfamiliar side of the map and explained that there was a good one right by the movie theater on the far edge of town. She suggested that we first peruse the fine fabrics of the textile museum, after which we could enjoy the tantalizing taste of thinly shaved meat, meticulously marinated in a savory sauce and grilled right before our eyes at our table--perhaps after a soothing soak in the luxurious hot spring.
"Who talks like that?" I asked.
"Someone who's employed by the chamber of commerce," Mom quipped.
We decided we’d at least give the meat place a shot.
At night, when it was already slightly past our usual dinner time, we jaunted over to the train station to catch a city train to the unfamiliar neighborhood with the meat joint. We forgot to bring the stroller with us, and Kelsey stopped cooperating before we even got to the train station. On the train, the only way to keep her from shrieking was to hold her up so that she could hang like an Olympian on the hand rings until we got to our stop. I listened intently for the name of the stop that I thought we were supposed to take, and got off when I thought I recognized it.
It was about a five or ten minute walk from the station to the complex with the movie theater. Kelsey didn’t want to be held, but she wouldn’t hold our hands while she walked. She still hasn’t figured out that holding her own hand is not a solution. I walked alongside her like a sheepdog, making sure she didn’t stray into the street. Eventually it got to be too difficult, and I just picked her up and plopped her on my shoulders--much to her dismay. We walked around the back of a restaurant and through a parking lot toward the movie theater, keeping our eyes peeled for anything that looked like a meat place. One restaurant appeared to serve meat in some capacity, but most of the myriad restaurants in the complex offered some other specialty dish.
Omori-san hadn’t given us a name, since she didn’t know what the place was called. All we had to go on was the Japanese word for “all-you-can-eat”, or “tabehoudai”. I popped my head into a pachinko parlor to ask one of the peppy attendants if they knew where the restaurant was, and her pleasant demeanor turned serious. She called one of the other attendants over on her radio headset and they intently discussed the location of our mysterious restaurant. The girl wasn’t positive, but the guy she consulted was sure that we should head across the parking lot over to the place that had appeared to serve some kind of meat. We thanked the attendants and gave it a shot.
The restaurant appeared to be pretty classy, or, in other words, expensive. The menu outside the front door displayed a feast of a meal for the equivalent of about 30 or 40 dollars. Omori-san had pegged the tabehoudai price at about 12-15 dollars a person, and I probably could have eaten the 40-dollar feast by myself. I went in and asked the guy at the front desk if they offered tabehoudai, and he sadly replied that they didn’t. I asked if, by chance, he knew of one in the neighborhood. I was set on Mom getting to try yakiniku and on me getting my money’s worth.
The man, obviously impressed with my flawless Japanese, fired off the directions to the meat place. Just around some building, some nonsense words past the doohickey, a stoplight or two up the street, a left (or was it a right?), then kitty-corner (or past it--they sound the same) from a place. It was right there. I convinced myself that I understood his directions and set out with my increasingly impatient and hungry family in search for the mythical restaurant. I followed (what I understood of) his directions to the best of my ability, until we got to where I thought he had intended to send us. We realized that there was no way we would find it and decided to ask a third person for directions.
It was now nearly two hours after our normal dinner time, and we were all starving. I was walking the thin line between hunger and murder, and Kelsey was beyond unbearable. My final stop in the search for the meat shack was a restaurant-slash-coffee shop. Leaving the girls outside, I went in and asked the waitress if she knew of any yakiniku tabehoudai places in the neighborhood, and she said that she did, but that it was a bit of a walk. She hurried over to her boss, took off her apron and beckoned me to follow her. I expected her to just point us in the direction of the restaurant, but she was taking us there. An employee of a restaurant leaving her job to show us how to get to another restaurant. Would that ever happen anywhere else? Would the TGIFridays people walk you to the nearest Outback? Somehow, I doubt it.
We followed her back in the direction that we came from. We crossed the street, went around a few small buildings, walked through a parking lot, and jogged around one big building, until the restaurant was in sight. There it was, across the parking lot: the Holy Grail of Restaurants. The Big Cheese. The Hallowed House of Bounteous Beef. The same exact restaurant that sent me toward the coffee shop.
We thanked the lady for her help, and I burst into an uncontrollable fit of rage and tears. Or not. But at this point, I was ready to wither and crumble into nonexistence. Kelsey needed to eat. I needed to eat. We all needed to eat. We resigned ourselves to an okonomiyaki shop, which was a bit disappointing considering that the three or four places in which we had theretofore eaten were okonomiyaki shops. But it no longer mattered what we ate. I had failed in my quest to find the meat place.
We sat down at the restaurant and ordered our food, and they quickly brought out the ingredients for our okonomiyaki. Kelsey got a toy boat full of finger foods and noodles. When nobody came back to help cook our food, we realized that it was up to us to prepare it. While we had seen others make it, it was our first chance to cook okonomiyaki. And to burn okonomiyaki.
Burnt or not, it was extremely delicious. As miserable as we all were before we got there, we now felt pretty good about our dinner that night. We even indulged with some soft serve ice cream.
Exhausted, we carried Kelsey back to the train and went home for the night.
I have a whole life of physical decline ahead of me. It's time to focus on the areas that won't decline until I'm at least 30. Like wisdom. I discovered quite a few pearls that night:
- The Holy Grail of Restaurants, no matter where you are, doesn’t exist. Don’t be stubborn. You will not find it.
- Don't ask for directions in Japan. It doesn’t matter how little Japanese people actually know about something: they’ll go totally out of their way to help you, even if it actually ends up being more of a hindrance than a help.
- Dang it, even in my nostalgic, partially-confabulated peak season, I was still a jerk.
- You can never go wrong with okonomiyaki.
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