You’d prefer to spend the day with your daughter, but that’s not possible, so you decide to go for a jog/hike up Yatsu Yama. (yama = mountain).

It’s a delightful May morning, and once you’re up on the mountain you realize there are smiling faces everywhere.

You feel a little kick in your step. You reach the top, glance right at the Suruga Bay, under a lovely blue sky, then glance left, at the snow-topped mountains, also under lovely blue. Another burst of energy. Down the other side you plunge. Then you see a girl sliding down a slope on cardboard, and you either have to stop and cry or gallop forward.

Suddenly you’re clicking along at a pace you thought you’d left behind years ago. And then you see all those folks, wandering around in the brush beside the trail. With plastic bags. Why, they’re picking wild strawberries! There are wild strawberries everywhere! Those guys are going to pick to their heart’s content and go home and make jam! Wild strawberry jam! . . . And what are you going to do?

Intown mountain run.

Ridge rush, heartburst, scarlet scream.

Stop for strawberries?!

(Ah-soh-ka! Yes, yes! Climb twice!)

You fly down the mountain. Don’t slacken your pace until you’re through your front door. You get a bag, hop on your bicycle, head back to Yatsu Yama. (Silly you, you should have put on long pants, but what the hell.) Two hours later, you’re stirring the pot. All those little seeds in all that lovely red, bubbling away. Absolutely marvelous. Then the jars are going into the refrigerator. You imagine your friends’ smiling faces. Wow! they say, licking the spoon, it doesn’t get any better than this! (that is, unless you pay for our flights to Okinawa for a morning of snorkling off Zamami Island).

Yep, sometimes you have to settle for absolutely marvelous . . . but you would have preferred to have spent the day with your daughter.