I was driving on a two-lane highway in Missouri at dusk. An old red pickup truck came toward me from the opposite direction at sixty-five miles an hour. As we passed, the driver flashed his high beams at me twice. In Japan, flashing your lights means "go ahead" at an intersection, or "thank you." Neither made sense at sixty-five miles an hour. I thought perhaps my lights were broken, or I had offended him. I took my foot off the gas and slowed down just in case. Half a mile later, I came around a curve. Two deer were standing on the gravel shoulder, and forty yards past them, a state trooper's black cruiser was parked behind a billboard with a radar gun pointed at the road. I passed the trooper at fifty-four in a fifty-five. When I stopped for gas in the next town, I asked the man at the pump next to mine why the red truck had warned me. We were going opposite ways. He did not know my face. Saving me two hundred dollars gave him nothing. The man at the pump looked at me and said, "Well, yeah. You always flash for a cop or a deer." Then he told me the part I still cannot get over. A few years ago, a town near there started giving tickets to drivers who flashed their lights to warn people about speed traps. One man refused to pay the fine and took the town to federal court. And a United States federal judge ruled that flashing your headlights to save a complete stranger from a speeding ticket is protected free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Think about this country for a second. Two strangers pass each other in the dark at sixty-five miles an hour. They have half a second together on this earth. They use that half a second to protect each other's wallets, and if the government tries to stop them, they bring out the Constitution.

In a little town in Pennsylvania, I went to a pancake breakfast at the fire station. Eight bucks, all you can eat. Folding tables set up right in front of the fire engine. The firemen were cooking. The big one, Ray, was flipping pancakes with a spatula the size of a ping-pong paddle and talking about the Steelers the entire time. I asked what the money was for. "Air packs." I thought that was a kind of pancake. I almost ordered one. "Breathing tanks, bud. What we wear going into a fire. About seventy-five hundred apiece." "The city doesn't buy them?" "We're a volunteer company." I asked if that meant they got paid a little less. "Means we don't get paid." Then he flipped the next pancake. Like he'd told me the weather. I looked around a little differently after that. The guy pouring coffee is a mailman. The lady at the cash box drives a school bus. The kid on dishes is a 17-year-old junior firefighter, and his mom was two tables over making sure he was actually doing dishes. About six out of ten firefighters in America are volunteers. I didn't know that. I don't think a lot of Americans know that. That night around 2 AM, the town siren went off. The kind you can hear across the whole valley. I got up and looked out the window, and a pickup went by fast with a little blue light flashing on the dash. Ray. In his own truck. The same guy who gave me extra butter that morning. I went back the next month and bought four plates. I can't eat four plates. I gave three to a family with little kids. The month after that, Ray handed me an apron. I'm on coffee now. Second Sunday of the month. Come hungry.

My neighbor Linda in Tennessee brought me a pound cake in a Pyrex dish back in March. That dish has not been empty since. It was a very good pound cake. I want that on the record. Where I'm from, you never send a container back empty. My grandmother was strict about it. You put something in, even if it's just a sheet of paper or a little box of matches. An empty dish going home basically says "we're done here." So I washed it and filled it with onigiri. Rice balls. Twelve of them, in rows. Walked them across the yard. Linda said, "Oh honey, you didn't have to do that." Four days later the dish came back with banana pudding in it. That's when I knew. She had the same grandmother. I sent teriyaki chicken. She sent chicken and dumplings. I sent tamagoyaki, the rolled egg thing, and she sent a casserole with crushed Ritz crackers on top that I still think about at night. By my count that dish has crossed the property line 23 times. I could be off by one. Neither of us has ever said a word about it. You don't. You fill it and walk it over. In August her husband Gary caught me in the driveway. "You know there's a word for that? The little something you put in the dish? Down here it's a surcie. Her mama did it. Her mama's mama did it." I told him we have a word too. O-utsuri. He stood there a minute. "Huh. Y'all too." Yesterday I flipped the dish over to wash the bottom. There's a strip of masking tape on it that says LINDA in Sharpie, so it finds its way home after church potlucks. Under LINDA, same Sharpie, it now says NOBU. It goes back tomorrow. Gyoza.