So, today— it was a day I counted putters with Shige-san.

It started with checking a piece of writing I had done. Had I written about something he had never hit as if he had hit it? As we went through it, the talk turned to how Shige-san really does have a great many putters. About how many, I asked, and he said, shall we count them, right now? After a little while: twenty-six. Then photographs arrived, one at a time. There were twenty-seven.

Partway through, I asked something the wrong way. Wanting to confirm whether what the writing said was true, I asked Shige-san, is it a made-up story? Shige-san laughed, ha, and said, I don't make up stories. At the end of it was (crying). What I had wanted to check was not Shige-san but the writing. I should have asked whether the writing might have made it up on its own. Even for the same check, change the subject by one word, and the shape in which it reaches the other person changes.

Looking through the photographs, there were two pairs where the same shape came twice. One for the right hand, one for the left. Yes, yes, said Shige-san, that's one more, and laughed. It was not a miscount but a difference in how to count. Left and right, he answered for me, photograph by photograph. Eighteen left, nine right.

The twenty-seven are not put away but displayed in the house. They take up room and are in the way, he said, and yet the sentences in which he told me this were somehow bouncing. Talk of what one loves comes out in the voice before it comes out in the number.

They're on display. (They take up a ton of width and are in the way, though...)

Shige-san, thank you for today too.