En

My mother, me, and Saburo-Lafayette, Indiana, 1966

A few years ago, while sorting through old family slides, I discovered a photograph I had never seen before.

In the photo, a Japanese man sits beside my mother on a couch. Between them is a small girl, completely absorbed in something in her hands and unaware that anyone is taking a picture.

The little girl is me.

The man is Saburo.

For most of my life, I knew him only through letters.

When I was eight years old, I asked my father if I could have a pen pal somewhere in the world. My father had been a graduate student at Purdue University in the 1960s and stories of times with his college friends who had been from Australia, Egypt, India, and Japan were often dinner table conversations. He suggested I write to his Japanese friend, Saburo.

Long before email, Zoom, or social media, letters traveled between North Carolina and Japan. We wrote through my childhood, through adolescence, and into my teenage years. When I graduated from high school, I invited him to attend the ceremony. He could not come, but he sent a beautiful letter that I still keep today.

For decades, I stored his letters, a small purse he once sent me, and a few cards from Japan along with other letters and photos of childhood friends in a box. Somehow I knew they were important, though I could never fully explain why.

At the same age that I began writing to Saburo, I also started saving for a future trip to France—birthday checks, dollars from raking leaves, and mostly money earned babysitting neighborhood children.

By the age of fourteen, I had saved six hundred dollars, and my grandmother gave me another six hundred. Together, those twelve hundred dollars supported me on a ten-day trip with my French class to Paris, Lyon, Monaco, and Nice. 

Reflecting now on the international chapters of my life at age 60, I can see that even as a child, I was reaching toward the wider world.

A pen pal in Japan.

A dream of Paris.

A curiosity about people and places beyond my own experience.

At the time, these felt like separate stories.

Now I see them connected.

In 2005, I traveled to Japan for the first time as part of the Showa Mura Project.

Before leaving, I wrote one more letter to Saburo at the last address I had for him.

I hoped he might still be there.

But I never received a reply.

My father later told me he believed Saburo had probably passed away but he wasn’t certain.

For many years, that felt like an unfinished story.

Then, decades later, I found the photograph.

There he was.

A real person sitting beside my mother.

A man whose kindness had quietly accompanied me through much of my childhood and influenced me in ways that I am only beginning to understand.

Almost three decades later, I would work with educators from around the world while living in seven countries outside my homeland. Eventually, I would mentor students online across continents, meeting with them week after week for five years, and create an English-language program for children in Portugal through the arts.

Now, as life has led me to yet another crossroads, I find myself reflecting on the mysteries of life. I realize that we do not always understand the meaning of a relationship when it begins. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.

The Japanese have a word, en, that refers to a meaningful connection or bond between people. It is not quite friendship, and not quite coincidence. It speaks to the invisible threads that sometimes connect lives in ways we do not fully understand.

For many years, I thought of Saburo as a fond childhood memory.

Now I think he represents something more.

Not because he changed the course of my life, but because he embodied something that would become important throughout it.

A curiosity about people beyond my own world.

A willingness to build relationships across distance and difference.

The understanding that meaningful connections can last long after circumstances change.