Christmas in Occupied Japan

Rick and his father, Mark, on the beach at Karatsu, Japan, September, 1951 Hello, boys and girls. Much as I love struggling with the problems of being human and attempting to write about those problems in a way that can make us all laugh, sometimes it’s good to take a break and bring in another voice, and another story. This week the guest columnist is my husband, Rick Tuel. A Christmas memory came back to him, and he decided to write it down. Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, and are taking care of yourselves as you navigate December, a month full of various kinds of social, financial, and familial landmines. But we’ll talk about those another time. Meanwhile, here’s Rick, telling his story of Christmas in Occupied Japan: This is how I remember it, 61 years later. I think it was December of 1951 when the first grade class of us Army brat kids was treated to a visit by Santa Claus. We were the children of the second wave of Army occupation forces in post-World War II Japan. My mom and I arrived one year earlier, joining my dad, who was stationed in Sasebo on the island of Kyushu. In October of 1950 we were moved to a new base in Kokura. After a year in Japan I was already starting to lose touch with many of my early mid-western notions and stateside memories. The Korean War had broken out four months earlier, but that didn’t concern us kids. That Christmas of 1951 we were just excited to learn that Santa Claus knew where we were. Our class was transported in a big Army bus to the airport on the base at Kokura. The airport was little more than a soaked, grassy field by the side of a dirt road. It was a cold, wet day, gray and cloudy, and we were all in our good shoes and school clothes for this special occasion. A squad of G.I.s had been transported with us on the bus, giant young soldiers they looked to us, in starched, pressed fatigues and spit-shined combat boots. We all got off the bus wondering where Santa Claus might be in this wet, empty field. Then what to our wondering eyes should appear But an olive drab whirlybird loaded with cheer! It dropped through the fog and set down with a squish Confirming the promise of each Christmas wish! It was a two-seater helicopter with a loudspeaker and clear Plexiglas bubble housing the pilot and Santa, both in helmets and flight gear. It circled the bus with Santa waving and shouting, “Ho ho ho! Mer-ry Christmas!” After one pass it set down in the middle of the soaked airfield and G.I.s began picking up kids and running us out to the helicopter-sleigh, held tightly in their arms. They ran us out one by one, their energy adding to our excitement. Santa rubbed our heads, gave us each a small wrapped present, wished us “Merry Christmas!” and sent us back to the bus. Our G.I.s dropped us off at the door of the bus as the driver checked us off with a head count. Shortly the whole class was back on the bus, and we were all excited and noisy, talking about Santa and the Christmas gifts we held in our hands. The formerly immaculate, spit-shined G.I.s were grinning and covered with mud. Santa’s heli-sleigh powered up and lifted off, with the Merry Christmases! and Ho ho hos! fading away into the moist gray fog.

When we opened our presents they turned out to be little hand-painted wooden Japanese figurines, about four inches tall, with clothespin heads, round bodies, and flat bottoms so they would stand up. They all had Japanese faces and black hair, and were all the same shape, but each one had a unique paint job, with different colored kimonos. You could play games with them, rolling them across the floor so they’d wobble this way and that, and sometimes they’d roll in such a way that they’d end up standing up. The bottoms were big enough to be marked with what in those days was an all-too-familiar logo: “Made in Occupied Japan.” I wish I hadn’t lost mine.

Queen for a Day My beautiful cousin Nancy and I were talking the other day, having a nice canter down memory lane as we so often do, and we remembered the 1950s television show, “Queen for a Day.” We both watched this tear-jerker show, which some have called a forerunner to today’s reality shows. The idea was that a few women would be interviewed by host Jack Bailey, and the one who told the story that got the loudest applause as measured on the “Applause-o-meter” was crowned Queen for a day, crowned with a glittering tiara, wrapped in a sable-trimmed velvet robe, seated on a grand throne and given a dozen long-stemmed roses, as well as given many prizes, starting with whatever she had specifically requested – such as a new wheelchair for her disabled child. Yes, the stories were sob stories, and the winner was the one who made the studio audience of women cry the most and applaud the hardest. The other contestants were also given prizes for being on the show, so none of them went away empty-handed, which makes me feel better about the show all these years later. I suppose many people would now and did then consider the show maudlin and manipulative in the extreme, which it was, exploiting the grief and misery of women in order to sell advertising. But that is a grown up retrospective on my part. As children, Nancy and I both watched the show in wide-eyed wonder. Nancy watched it with her mom, Chick, who was my father’s baby sister. Chick had multiple sclerosis and by the time we were small children it had progressed to the point that she was in a wheelchair full time. Nancy had only part of a normal childhood. She had to be home after school and in the summer to take care of her mom and help her make dinner. Chick died when Nancy and I were 16. Multiple sclerosis, or MS, is a sneaky disease, and it goes at different rates for different people. Some people live with it for decades without much discernible effect. Some, like Chick, are quickly disabled and die within 15 or 20 years after diagnosis, when the nervous system finally fails to function enough to support life. What is it? Now we say it is an autoimmune disease, where the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system, and damages the myelin sheath which covers nerves, causing nerve impulses to slow down or stop. I have heard it compared to the fraying of the covering of an electrical cord, a metaphor that was more accessible back when electrical cords were covered with woven fabric. No one knows what causes it, although there are a lot of theories. There is no cure, although I’ve been hearing people talking about searching for a cure since I was a small child looking at my aunt in a wheelchair. People are doing research, looking for a cure, constantly. Nancy told me that she and her mother would sometimes play Queen for a Day. “It was probably on summer days. We’d do our work in the morning, and then we’d play.” Nancy would make a tiara out of cardboard and cover it with aluminum foil, and use a wooden kitchen spoon for her microphone. “Mom would roll up close to me in her wheelchair, and I’d ask her questions, and she’d make up stories. It was different every time. She’d maybe say, ‘We can’t afford to buy food for the kids,’ and say she had ten kids. She’d pour on the sob story. Then we’d do a drum roll and announce that Mom was Queen for a Day.” Nancy would crown her with the foil crown, wrap a blanket around her mom as her royal robe, and hand her the wooden spoon as a scepter instead of the dozen roses. Nancy would hand Chick a piece of paper upon which Nancy had written the prizes being awarded. “Then when we were done, we’d say, okay, let’s play cards now, or maybe it would be time to make dinner. “The last couple of years of Mom’s life, when she was bedridden, we reversed the roles. She’d be in bed and I’d roll in in the wheelchair. In those days I’d come lie on the bed next to her, and we’d talk, and nap together. Those were great bonding times.” So this week we’ve been telling each other, “You are Queen for a Day!” and we laugh. We live our own hard stories, as all the rest of you do, and we tell those stories to each other, and we applaud each other’s courage in the face of life’s random insults. We agree to meet for lunch, to go to Ivar’s for chowder, or to Gale’s in Capitola for Marion berry pie. And we laugh some more. Ah, it’s good to be the queen.

Chick, Nancy's mom, with Sam and Charlie the cats ca. 1960

Anger and Ultimatums One of my favorite ways of blowing off steam or working off a case of mad is to pull weeds. Several times a week I go out in the yard, put on my gloves, grab a trowel and a pair of pruning shears, and go to town on the buttercups, Stinking Robert, blackberries, and dandelions. Pulling weeds make me feel better, and it makes the garden look better. Doing chores in the house can have the same effect. News of someone’s death, for example, has sent me into the bathroom to clean the tub and tub surround to within an inch of its life. The activity vents the energy released by the shock, and it is not an activity that requires a completely present and with-it brain, and I end up with a clean bath tub. Unfortunately, physical activity can have an opposite effect. Instead of letting the steam escape, it can remind me of old, unvented steam. I can be putting the bed back together, neatly arranging the piles of blankets, sheets, and pillows that are our bedding, and will start thinking of something that bugs me. Today it was exercise, or more accurately, people who push exercise. People sometimes have encouraged me to exercise. They mean well. I do not have any argument with people who are active. I admire and respect them, and wish I was more like them, truly. But. When somebody tells me I should get out and walk in order to lose weight and take some pressure off my bad knee, all I can think is, if you haven’t walked a mile on a knee with no cartilage left, and lived through the pain for several days afterward, you don’t know what you’re talking about, so shut up. See, this is the problem with doing some physical chore. Rather than calming emotions, activity can rev them up, and you might end up saying or doing something rash. When I turned 18 I came home from college to visit my parents, and my beautiful cousin Nancy was there to visit. One night during that fateful weekend Nancy and I took my father’s pickup for a drive. We went out to a movie. My parents were not at home. It was the first and only time I took a car without permission, but I figured it would be okay. It would have been all right, too, if that Jeep Gladiator (I want to give credit where credit is due) hadn’t opened up a hole in its engine and dropped all its oil on Highway 1 somewhere between Soquel and the Freedom Boulevard turnoff. That might not have been a total disaster if I’d known enough to turn the engine off as soon as the oil light came on, but I was young and ignorant and instead thought, oh, I’d better get home right away. The engine kept going almost a mile before it ground to an oil-free halt, with all its now hot and oil-free parts wedged tightly together. Yep. I learned a lot about the working of the internal combustion engine that night. A couple of weeks later when I was back at college and expecting to stay there for summer school, my father was working around the ranch. He got to thinking about how I’d ruined his truck – he was a farmer and I had ruined his truck! A few days later I got a call at college from my mother saying I was coming home and getting a job and learning the value of money. She told me my dad had been out working one day and got mad as hell – and who could blame him? See, he’d been doing some physical job and it served to focus and stoke his anger at me, and it came out as an ultimatum to me. I came home from college all right. My parents came and picked me up, and on the three-hour drive home we got into an argument – I think it was over whether students should get letter grades or pass-fail ratings, not that the subject matters. We were a little north of San Ardo on 101 when the fireworks started, and our relationship was all downhill after that. Within a couple of weeks I had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Alameda with my beautiful cousin Nancy. I got a job in San Francisco, met some kids who went to dances at places called the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore, started dressing in striped pants and smoking dope, and before you know it I was renting a room made out of a stairwell in an apartment building on the Panhandle, doing temp work in the financial district for money, going to those dances, and hanging out with the other hippies on Haight Street, and laughing at people’s ignorance when they called us beatniks. All because the truck broke and I didn’t know what to do, and my father lost his temper and handed me an ultimatum. Changed my whole life, and I couldn’t tell you even now if it was for better or worse. So watch out for those temper tantrums. Think real hard before you deliver an ultimatum. You never know what you’re unleashing, although it is nice if it turns out that you end up with a clean bathtub. That’s something. Note: That night my father came and towed the truck home, and he didn’t say a word, but when we got back to the house my mother greeted us and escorted us down to the hall to my room where she quietly let loose with the laughter she’d been holding in. It turns out that once back in the 30s my dad was changing the oil on the truck he had then, and he left the truck sitting with the oil drain plug out and went to do something else. Nancy's mother, Chick, needed to give a visiting boyfriend a ride home, and decided to drive him in my dad’s truck. So they hopped in and drove off, and within a very short time the engine ground to a halt. So I did to my father’s truck the same thing Nancy’s mother had done about twenty years before. My mother thought that was rich. It’s nice to remember now that my mom had some appreciation of life’s little ironies

Sweet Autumn This morning I sat on the kitchen porch and stared at the trees. It was a perfect day - cloudless, sun shining, a slight breeze. A small airplane grumbled by overhead, followed by a jet lumbering in to land at SeaTac or Boeing Field. The song birds were chirping incessantly over in the blackberries, and a couple of blue jays were wrack-wracking at each other up the hill in what I think of as TK’s bird sanctuary. TK is our neighbor. He and his wife Marcy have turned the lot uphill from us into a spiritual garden that teems with birds, and hopeful cats. Occasionally a little yellow alder leaf broke loose from the trees and came tumbling and twirling down into the yard. Why does autumn feel like such a sweet season? It is, after all, the time when nature begins to put life to bed, resting so that it can break forth in glorious springtime profusion six months from now. This respite from growth comes just in time. I notice the morning glory has crawled up the fence and leapt up to grab hold of the lowest hanging fuchsia tendril. Dang. There’s a connection I’d better break before they get too entwined. So what is it about autumn? The sun is shining more from the south every day, in a golden slanting light that makes the color of everything more intense. The work that calls to me from the yard is slowing down, a little. I’m already deep in plans for how I’m going to re-arrange and expand the flower beds over the winter. I am contemplating the next steps in the ethnic cleansing of my yard, a cleansing which has as its object the removal of buttercups, stinking Robert, morning glory, and blackberries. I know I won’t obliterate them, but I can thin them out and push them back enough that they don’t smother the plants I do want to thrive. This program of weed control would be easier to implement if I didn’t enjoy the lacy leaves and pink blossoms of Stinking Robert, the cheerful yellow buttercup blossoms, the pale beauty of the morning glory flowers, and of course, blackberry pie. Soft-heartedness is a besetting sin for a gardener. With plants you have to set and keep firm boundaries, literally. Weeds are like house guests who move in and never leave, eating your food, dirtying the dishes and never washing up, grabbing the newspaper before you’ve had a chance to read it in the morning and leaving the sections scattered around the house inside-out and folded all which-ways. That’s a weed of a houseguest, and that is the presumptuous behavior of a weed in the garden. They suck up the hospitality you’ve provided for the plants you invited. I wonder if this winter will be warm enough that some of the annuals winter over, or if we’ll get an Arctic Blast that freezes the ground and turns the less hardy plants into something that looks like boiled spinach. The up side of such a freeze is that it knocks back the slug population. Yay. The apple tree is covered with fruit this year. I wonder if it heard me thinking I might cut it down and is striving to look busy. Soon Rick and I will have the enjoyment of watching squirrels running up the tree and picking apples, taking a few crunchy bites, and then chomping into the apple and carrying it down the trunk and staggering across the yard, carrying it to where ever they stash their apples in the woods. These are not large apples, and they don’t taste good to me, so I don’t begrudge the squirrels their fruit, and it is so much fun to watch them. I really have been thinking of taking that tree down because the fruit is not tasty, but, as Rick says, then we couldn’t watch the squirrels. It still feels like summer in some ways, but I can’t kid myself. Time to start making plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. You get into your 60s and it seems like you hardly have time to inhale in between winter holidays, the time is ripping by so quickly. For now it is enough to stay in the moment, in the gentle sunny autumn days, listening to the birds chirping and carping at each other – don’t those birds ever shut up? – and thinking how much I like autumn, and I don’t know why. There’s something sweet about autumn.

One Lucid Moment

The kitchen wall. Fresh paint, old familiar art, the 70s-era "Orient Express" lamp. Nothing to do with the post. Just wanted to show everyone that we painted the kitchen wall and the water heater closet door. The door is blue. I like blue. Thinking about politics ties me in knots, because as soon as I do I feel like I’m in a funhouse maze, trying to find my way through the dark alleys and dead ends, not mention trying to parse out what’s real in the illusions created by smoke and mirrors. So I try to step back, to take an overhead view of the maze so to speak, which isn’t much help. It’s still a maze, still all about confusion, illusion, and dead ends, and the smoke makes me sneeze. So I take another step back and ask, where is God (the label I use for the ultimate, rock bottom spark of the divine) in all this? How can I stand in the clear light of reality? I have my human opinions and beliefs – oh boy, do I – but if I can momentarily step back from being embroiled in the human struggle, I know that my call, my obligation, is to love everyone – even me – who is bungling around in the maze. It’s not a gooey softheaded love, either. It’s a clear-eyed love that sees all things human, from atrocity to agape. It hurts that so often human beings don’t seem to be able to have or even desire one lucid moment in which we all understand that we are in this together. We have our moments. The Danes smuggled the Jews out of Denmark before the Nazis arrived, for example. Yes, there are ordinary people who do extraordinary things, but so often members of the species homo sapiens seem bent on besting, hornswoggling, defeating, and screwing each other, literally and metaphorically. Even in a defining moment such as the 9/11 attacks. We understood then that we were all in it together, and we had the sympathy and support of many around the world, but there were people who rejoiced in the tragedy and said we got what was coming to us. Just to clarify: no country, no person, has a 9/11 attack “coming” to them. How long did our national unity last? A week or two at most. Then we went back to biting each other’s backs, and the people who truly hated the United States could sit back and relax and watch us destroy one another. When I talk to my sons and other people in their generation, I get a sense that many young adults are fed up with the horrible behavior of politicians and the condition of United States politics as it exists now, especially young adults who have traveled in other countries and have gained a longer perspective. They’re tired of people getting elected and using the opportunity not to work for the country and the people, but to collect the perks of power and sandbag their opposition, as if those things were the point. We have a whole young adult population saying, “Excuse me? Hello?” but the baby boomer politicians are too busy fighting each other to listen. I wish you young people well. I wish we were leaving you a country that knew how to do more than chase its own tail to the detriment of its people, and the rest of the world. As you grow into the leadership roles, see if you can figure out how to overcome the implacable inertia of The Way Things Are Done. Meanwhile, back at the maze: if you think God is on your side, you’re correct. God is also on the side of your competition, your enemies, and the billions of people of whom you never think, not to mention your friends and family members, including the ones who drive you nuts. God is looking at all of us with lucid, clear-eyed love as we struggle through our days and nights. If you don’t believe in God, fine. Let me put it this way: reality does not give a rip about your precious opinions. If you think your mighty intellect can alter in any way the immutable reality of existence, I wish you good luck. I’ll be going back down into the maze now, to continue struggling with my anger and my opinions, passions, and judgments, not to mention my confusions and illusions. I’ll continue to think that the people with whom I disagree politically must be mentally ill, deluded, or liars, and that I know what’s sane and right. I’m a human being who is being human. But I did enjoy that one lucid moment.

Musings of the Nouveau Elderly

Me, holding my hammer. MY hammer. Don't touch it, dammit. “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas was writing of his dying father when he penned that poem in 1951, or so the story goes. You can find the complete text online or at the library or perhaps on your own bookshelf. Brief digression: Thomas speaks of wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men in the poem, and as I read it I substituted “women” for “men,” an old habit that I and many women have developed over the years in order to see how texts speak to our condition. As I grow older, and old, that first stanza has become something of an anthem. There is an expression: “growing old gracefully.” At some point I decided to grow old disgracefully, to “rage against the dying of the light.” When we are young we wish to live for a long time - forever, if possible. When we are young we cannot imagine what growing older really is. When I was young I had this idea that I would have an adventurous old age. That was before life happened, with the accidents and illnesses that pruned my body’s abilities and energies. Adventure can be hard on the human body. When we hit our 60s, my husband started to say we were “nouveau elderly,” edging into the so-called golden years. We did not plan for those illnesses and accidents to happen to us. These things were not part of my youthful imagination of what old age would be, but I have heard it said that aging is caused by accidents. Not entirely true, but I see the point. In the fantasy old age, we would continue to live the life of someone in their 20s or 30s, complete with an active sex life. The reality of growing older, and old, is quiet, watching the roses bloom and laughing at the antics of the crows and blue jays and squirrels that come for the orts I throw out in the yard. As for sex, well, here’s a rhyme I just made up: Sex Is complex. That’s the chorus. You’ll have to supply your own verses. Beyond that, I’m not going to discuss it here. Sorry if you were anticipating hot stuff, but I really do not wish to talk about it. So here we are, going slower, but still going. Old age is a new country, and it brings limitations both physical and financial. There is sometimes a feeling of being trapped, and it is against that trapped feeling that I sometimes rage. The best answer I can give to the question of growing old is to live as fully as I can. I thank God for every day, and for the illumination and sustenance of a faith that has grown deep and wide over years of practice. That is how I rage against the dying of the light. I see my children and their friends experience bitter disappointments and hard times of young adulthood as they navigate their 20s and 30s, and I feel for them, and I love them, and I pray for them. I have the perspective that their hard times are part of their ongoing education, a necessary mordant to bring out the bright colors of being alive. It’s hard to see that when you’re going through pain, but it’s easier to see in retrospect. There is a blessing in growing older, knowing that some things cannot be fixed or helped, and that is life. I’ve been sighing to myself for years that sometimes life bites, and all you can do is be bitten. We elders had to take our lumps, cry our tears, feel our rage, ride our highs and triumphs, and live on to see all of those things dwindle in the rear view mirror, and so shall you, my dears, so shall you. By the time you are my age you’ll understand deep in your heart that all things do pass, your troubles, your joys, your precious youth, your offspring’s childhood. If there is not so much ecstasy in the ocean of age, neither is there so much frantic despair, and there are deeps of contentment. Life is good, and it’s temporary. It’s not what we thought it would be, but we like being here. We’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Now hand me my cane. I have to tell those damn kids to get off the lawn.

The Busy Lives of the Living Dead We recently returned from California, where we attended a reunion of people with whom Rick attended high school when his dad was stationed in Germany 50 years ago, and where we also spent some time with Rick’s dad and step-mom. My husband, Rick, is a dialysis patient, and when you have to be tethered to a machine at regular intervals in order to stay alive, you might not consider travel to be an option. He did not seriously consider trying it until he was challenged by his old friend, Hutch, who photoshopped Rick’s face onto a picture of a guy in a chicken suit, with the legend, “Head South Young Man! I am not a candy-ass wimpy chicken shit. Sonoma or bust. We can do this.” This is known as “guy humor,” at least in my mind. Rick does peritoneal dialysis (hereinafter referred to as “PD”). Rick plugs into a machine that performs the PD process several times every night while he tries to sleep. Once Rick rose to Hutch’s challenge, preparations began. He called an order in to the PD supplies manufacturer two months before the trip, ordering what we thought would be sufficient supplies to get us through the week and a half we would be in California. They would be delivered to Rick’s dad’s place in Sonoma. Then we sat here and worried for two months about whether the supplies would show up on time. They did. When it was time to leave we packed up the usual travel gear plus several boxes of dialysis stuff. We headed out with the trunk and the back seat of the car stuffed to groaning. Every time we stopped for the night, Rick had to set up his machine and all the tubing and bags that PD involves, then tear down the apparatus and pack it back into the car the next morning. When we pulled into the entrance to the parking lot of the hotel where the reunion was held in Morgan Hill, California, Nandi and Hutch, Rick’s high school band mates from his first group, The Balladiers (misspelled intentionally), were sitting on a bench outside the main door and they smiled and waved to us as we pulled in. After 50 years there were only about 20 people who showed up for the reunion. Still, a good time was had by all, and Rick’s only criticism was that he had to leave the party early each night so he could hook up to his machine. When that was over we headed back to Sonoma to spend quality time with Rick’s folks, who treated us royally and fed us superbly. Sounds pretty good, huh? Yep, everything went fine, until… Rick realized he was running out of cassettes. Cassette is the name given to a unit that attaches to the side of the dialysis machine. It holds various plastic tubes and you have to use a new one every night. Rick called the equipment manufacturer, where someone swore that Rick would get a box of cassettes, “by Wednesday at the latest.” Wednesday came, but the box of cassettes did not. Rick was down to his last cassette and we knew it was going to be at least two nights before we got home. He called his PD nurse in Seattle, who suggested he call dialysis units in the Sonoma area and see if any of them had a cassette they’d give him. So I got online and looked up dialysis units and on the fourth call Rick hit pay dirt. We got into my car and made the drive up to Santa Rosa, where the people at the dialysis unit gave him a bag of five cassettes. Which made us feel pretty good. We were set to get Rick home okay, we thought, until… He realized that he only had two nights’ worth of dialysate left, which meant we had to be home in two days. We packed the car Thursday morning, and at that point the box of cassettes that had been promised the day before arrived. This box would not fit in the car, so one of the last packing chores was stuffing thirty cassette units into nooks and crannies in the car. I moved things around in the back seat so there was a line of vision for the rear view mirror, and once more we hit the road. We made it to Eureka the first night, and we drove from Eureka back to Vashon the next day. That’s a long haul, friends. We have learned a little about traveling on dialysis – mainly that you need to take about twice as many supplies as you think you’ll need, so the rule for dialysis supplies is the same as the rule for money. Will we do it again? You betcha. Not soon, but we will do it again. For now it’s good to be home.

The Balladiers circa 1962, left to right, Rick, Hutch, Nandi

The Balladiers, 2012, left to right, Nandi, Rick, Hutch

Mark and Rick and the ukulele

Diane and hula class

Cousins, Michal, Nancy, and Charlotte, in Green Valley, Watsonville, California

Rick and Mary on the 4th of July at Maureen's in Morgan Hill, CA. Photo by Hutch