A LESSON IN GETTING ALONG

Myers 104. Itsuo and Dave, roommates by college choice. It is 1958, the U.S. occupation of Japan terminated just over five years earlier, hardly longer ago than the war was long. Itsuo is from Kyoto; Dave from Delaware. I wondered about this fellow with the strange name, and he probably sensed immediately that I was the all-time king of the provincials.

So there we were, circling each other for the first weeks like wary cats. But remember those ridiculous little side-by-side desks Myers had? Well, there we sat, had to sit, elbow to elbow, studying and, I guess, slowly coming to like each other. I don’t suppose it’s unique among roommates.

After a time you get tired of the silly posing and attempts at space-control and relax into who you are. Who Itsuo was was a gentle fellow of quiet humor and great intelligence and sensitivity. His manner was inherently respectful and deferential. He was a gentleman. But he was not shy of polite firm-mindedness.

He would give you everything and more up to a line, a line he allowed to be drawn far closer to him than to you. But when the line was breached, he was unafraid to say so. So there we sat, he studying art and how to create it, I studying psychology and wondering how in the world to apply it.

Our study music, when we had it, was classical (a love we shared) or jazz (which I think he only tolerated) or Japanese (the melodies of which I am just now remembering with pleasure).

We had, I suppose, the usual philosophical discussions of roommates who by the small hours past midnight have become tired of learning but are stoked with the sugar of doughnuts and Cokes and turn the talk instead to unknowable things like where the universe ends.

But the night I’m most grateful for is the one in which we bridged the distance between his side of the desk and mine, and between his side of the Pacific and mine, and came slowly, through hesitant thoughts and long pauses between, to marvel over the simple fact that we were at last friends when once, not that many years before, our countries had been at deadly war.

Peace had been declared. There was another thing Itsuo and I shared: photography. We were in somewhat different places with it, I think. I was more interested in the art of it, he in the equipment.

I recognize now, with fascination, that in Itsuo I was seeing first-hand early hints of what ultimately would be the world-future of Japan. He was blessed with a generous family of means, and from his family regularly came packages of the latest piece of Japanese technology.

From that mysterious far-off land, from boxes of cookies and books packed in perfumy shavings of cedar, would come the latest camera and lenses, each one more advanced than the last. “Precise” is the remembered impression.

Against that wondrous onslaught the best I could do was snuff and smirk. What else could I do? The camera I was then using, the only one I could afford, was a scarred single-lens reflex with a couple of mismatched lenses from some bombed-out factory deep behind the Iron Curtain.

It was a Model T; Itsuo’s imports were already well on their way to being today’s Lexuses and Sonys. Sometimes his packages contained photography annuals that we devoured to the sacrifice of all things academic.

They were Japanese-produced but were often of American-photographer content. Elbow to elbow we studied them, passed them back and forth. The captions and the all important why and how of the pictures were in Japanese, so Itsuo translated.

We shared the American photography annuals, too. We just couldn’t see enough photographs. They confirmed the validity of this “art” that was pulling me toward it day by day.

They affirmed the intriguing new thing of “seeing.” They confirmed that in the spooling of hours, of lives, there were single moments that could stand for all. I came to know the names and the styles of photographers, came to revere them. I felt myself becoming “like” them. At least I shared the tool they used: the camera.

But no excitement topped the morning I spied something new on the bookstore shelf — a paperback, annual-sized — and pulled it off the shelf. The Family of Man.

For me, it was all there, come together in one place: the strength and beauty of photographs, the arrangement of them that made the sum even more powerful than any single image, the words that served as poetic keys, the exalted theme and purpose, the optimism, the underlying love for the world-wide state of being “human.”

I bought the Family of Man for $3.98, a big expense in that era of 10-cent ice-cream cones, and I still have it. I still have the annuals Itsuo left with me as well, and to look at them is to revisit not only some fine “old” days of photography but to remember some fine old days with a college roommate.

There’s one more thing to tell about Itsuo, other than that he died young and I don’t know how (but am afraid it was from his smoking) and that I am sad, now, that so much if not everything in his later life escaped me, for which I fault my fatalistic judgment that goodbyes are farewells and that the once-close worlds of college become separate again after graduation and can never be so bridgeable again.

I do know that after college, after some months in the art world of Paris, Itsuo married his college girlfriend, Margit, a Danish girl, very much contrary to his family’s conservative wishes, took her home to Japan, started a family, took his art and advertising skills to a job with Coca-Cola there.

And I do know that my parents one day received the painting Itsuo had been required to do for graduation, a successful moody view of a Mediterranean village, and that their relationship continued long past the time I had gone elsewhere as far as Itsuo was concerned. That painting is stored in my barn, but I think it’s time it came back inside.

But the other thing to tell is that at one point in my life, not many years after receiving a Christmas picture of a still-youthful Itsuo with the beginnings of his family, I was in divorce. I was living a life that even with its severe limitations was beyond my limited means. I was watching my financial world crumble with every passing day.

My accounts were on the very edge of red, and I could not see a solution. Then, one night, the phone rang. “Hi Dave. It’s Itsuo.” I hadn’t heard from or of him since his Christmas card. He was in town on business for the evening.

Could we meet for drinks? So we did, and of course I came eventually to explain my precarious circumstances. Itsuo listened quietly, and I feared disapprovingly, but when I was done, he pulled a $100 bill from his wallet and gave it to me without comment or judgment.

“I want you to have this.” It was just a simple act of generosity. I felt we had gone back to those good old days when we sat side by side at our desks in Myers Hall, sharing what we could. I wonder if I ever told him — I’m sure I did — but his $100 (a significant sum even in the 1970s) was the very cushion on which my finances began their slow recovery.

There was no mistaking it. I don’t know how it happened except to know that with his gift, Itsuo had given me far more than money. I was on my way back, and it was Itsuo who, very truly, made it possible. Years later, remembering Itsuo, I bestowed a similar gift on someone else also struggling. I thought he would have liked that.

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