The Paris Paralympics are over, and the athletes are returning to their countries. Japan did well this year, winning 41 medals. The oldest Japanese winner was Ito Tomoya. He is 61, but he won the bronze medal in the 400-meter wheelchair race! He has an interesting story. When he bought a wheelchair for the first time, he ordered a racing wheelchair by mistake. Instead of returning it, however, he started racing! Another Japanese in the news is Oda Tokito. He is only 18, but he won the gold medal in the men’s singles in wheelchair tennis. He is the youngest player ever to win the gold in this sport. Oda was playing Alfie Hewett of the U.K., the world’s number 1 player, in the finals. I’m sure that Kunieda Shingo, the wheelchair tennis gold medalist of the Tokyo Paralympics, is proud of him.    (143 words)

In English, we have a saying, “The early bird gets the worm.” Birds like to eat worms, and the birds that start early get more worms than the latecomers. In other words, they are more successful. We call people who get up early in the morning early birds. I am an early bird. When I get up in the morning, I am completely awake, and my brain is sharp. My wife is the opposite. She is a night owl. She thinks much more clearly at night than in the morning. In the hot summer, I think it’s much better to be an early bird. I wake up early and enjoy the cool morning air when I walk the dog. (119 words)

My wife went shopping with my daughter the other night. She stopped by at my daughter’s house on the way back, but when she got home, she couldn’t find her smartphone. She went back to my daughter’s house, and she found it in the middle of the road. Unfortunately, it was broken. A car had probably run over it. She took it to the Apple store, but they couldn’t fix it. She had to buy a new one. Luckily, most of her data was backed up in the cloud. My daughter helped her download everything to her new phone. Then, last night, I saw her writing in her address book. She was backing up her data in the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper. (125 words)

Wheelchair rugby and blind football, soccer in American English, are two Paralympic sports that I really enjoy watching. I saw a blind football game between Japan and Colombia on Sunday night. It is amazing to see players dribble the ball between their feet even though they can’t see it. The goalkeepers are the only players who can see, but blind players can score against them. Colombia scored a point against Japan and went on to win 1-0. Wheelchair rugby is even more exciting because it is rough and fast-paced just like regular rugby. Players hit each other in their wheelchairs and sometimes knock each other over. This time the Japanese team played five games and won every game. They beat the U.S.A. in the finals and got their first gold medal! (131 words)

I met two boys, one Japanese and the other Korean, who had very long hair. The Japanese boy was in elementary school. Actually, I thought he was a girl when I first met him because of his hair. When he entered junior high school, he cut off his long hair and looked like the other boys. I met the Korean boy when he visited Fujimae Tidal Flat last December. He was a junior high school student, and his hair was even longer than the Japanese boy’s. I met him again when I went to Korea last week. This time, his hair was short like the other boys’. Why did these two boys grow their hair so long and then cut it short? They wanted to help other people who had lost their own hair, so they grew their hair long, cut it short, and made a hair donation. (148 words)