Historic tale #1: ca. 1993

It was finals time at my high school.  I remember because my room had never been cleaner or my desk more organized – always the first steps to a studious bout (or the final steps of procrastination) – and I sat there with a pile of books and a pile of notes, a stressed out person hoping that cramming all of that English, history, math, science, and French would stick long enough to get me through the ensuing week.  I'm sure I was sighing up a storm, not that I remember doing that, but it seems like something I would have done, since I still do.  My mom had just come up the stairs in our house; my room was just at the top of the staircase.  She popped her head around to answer my distressed sounds. 

"What can I do to help?" she asked in an unusual show of compassion for my distress.

"I don't know!  Nothing!  I'm stressed out!" I'm sure I retorted in a tirade of teenage angst.  "I'm so tired from studying all this stuff!"

"Maybe I can make you some coffee," she offered.  

Or maybe I demanded, "Just make me some coffee!!"

But in either case, moments later she brought up a steaming cup of coffee which I took and drank – thankful for some understanding/pity/help from my mom, whom I felt so alienated from so often in those awkward teenage times.  She may have even brought me a second cup when she saw how serious I was in my studying.  

But my eyelids drooped – I was loosing to the sandman.  I'd had two cups of coffee and I didn't understand.

"What is this," I asked her on her next pass by my door, "Like, decaf or something?" It was like a rhetorical question with zero seriousness attached, my attempt to be joking and poking fun at my own inability to focus and stay awake.

"Yes, it is," she replied.

"are you SERIOUS?!  YOU GAVE ME DECAF WHEN I'M TRYING TO WAKE UP?!  SO I CAN STUDY AND NOT FAIL MY FINALS?!"  is my best guess at how I responded.

"Well," she said matter-of-factly, "It's the smell that wakes you up."

It's still better than $5 in a freshly laundered pair of jeans, or even change in the couch cushions...

I wrote this god-knows-when.  I think last time my mom was visiting, as I vaguely recall the moment and I picture her sitting at our dining table.  Saying, with some effort (and this below is what I just discovered in my drafts with no further explanation):

Booger-y.
BURRgury.

I love to find these forgotten treasures.

And, in case you were wondering, she was trying to say Bulgaria.

This is what a mother's nightmares are made of...

We were chatting via Skype, catching up on the news du jour and listening to my mom make all manner of ridiculous noises at the frijolito as he crawled about.  He is always happy to see her - amazing that he can recognize his baba-chan on an iphone screen!

She often calls at this time, which is Saturday morning in Japan just before her student arrives for her lesson.  It's never a long call but I know they both like it - these calls have certainly replaced her checking in on me, her kid!  

*ring, ring* me: "Hello?"  her: "Is he awake?"  me: "Not yet."  her: "Okay, call me when he gets up.  Bye."  *click and dial tone*

Maybe it's not that harsh and in a way I should be happy about this change but in either case I digress...

As we finished up this call, my mom suddenly jumps up from her seat and says, "I have to go put on coffee - my student likes it."  

This would seem fine except that once this student arrived while we were still online together and my mother introduced us over Skype.  And she is 5.

"What?  Isn't your student five?  You are giving a five-year-old coffee??!!"

"She likes it - she doesn't even take any milk or sugar.  Just black," my mom informs me, as if that makes it any better.  "Besides, I'm making decaf."

I launch in to my spiel about how caffeine isn't good for kids but in Japan who knows how much green tea or even coca cola this child consumes.  Maybe a weekly black coffee isn't the end of the world.  Though I did have a nightmare this morning where my mom was attempting to feed the frijolito copious amounts of cake telling me he likes it!  I woke up with a racing pulse, my screaming protestations still fresh in my head.

The Frijolito's 100th Day!

I grew up looking at this picture of me taken on 

my hundredth day, so I knew there was some significance to it and calculated when our baby's hundredth day would be.

Today I did a bit of hunting to find out what it all meant and discovered that on this day, people perform a weaning ceremony for their baby called Okuizome where they offer the baby a sumptuous (though strictly ceremonial) meal of foods like snapper, rice, pickled plum, clear soup and a stone (weird, I know, but it is Japan after all).  The baby doesn't actually eat any of it - he just gets these items touched to his lips while he probably thinks, "What is this and where the hell is my milk?!"

Anyway, the ritual meal and feeding is meant to wish the baby a life with abundance and without hunger. 

The reason I was compelled to do research was because when I had asked my mom about it, she seemed sketchy on the details.  Very sketchy.  Her inkling was that maybe it was to celebrate that the baby didn't die in 100 days so it will probably survive.  Weird, macabre, and totally Yoko.

The foods in the meal all have significance (like the snapper, tai, being associated with celebration or medetai, etc.) and the stone is supposed to represent strong teeth for the child.  As my mom didn't know about this Okuizome stuff, it follows that I did not have a stone ceremoniously touched to my mouth on the day pictured above, which could very well be the reason for my life-long dental issues and nothing to do with the fact that as a child I ate candy like it was its own essential food group.  

Though I know it's no substitute for proactive parenting (don't worry: I do plan to teach this kid about self-control and dental hygiene), don't think for a moment that I'll skip out on touching a stone to his mouth tonight.  If there was ever a perk to being half-Japanese, it's doing all these weird things with impunity.

It's almost sweet that she remembers what I looked like.

Tonight our friend Matt was over and my mom was enjoying some quality time with the little frijolito on her lap.  Matt asked her if she sees a resemblance to either John or me or if he looks like me when I was a newborn.

"Sometimes," she replied.  

"When he's pooping."

Occam of the future

Last night I was scraping off the label from a new metal spatchula when my mom says to me, "Where did you find the one sided laser?"

I looked at the razor in my hand and started laughing.

Someday when everything is digital this won't be funny much less understood. But until that day:

My mom recently bought a Kindle and has been enjoying using it to read books on this trip to the US.  She bought it not only because it's lighter than carrying around a bunch of books, but also because in Japan it is easier to find English language books for Kindle than in print.

The biggest problem turned out to be that she doesn't know which books to buy, so she asked John and me for some suggestions.  We looked up a Jonathan Franzen book on the Kindle store app and the search pulled up multiple versions of the same book.

One was more expensive than the other, which I thought was kind of weird for a digital medium. 

"Maybe that one is the hardback," my mom reasoned.

Hearty laughter ensued.