Understatement

My father watched westerns

He couldn’t get enough of them: those dusty
landscapes on the other side of the screen,
men on horses seeking justice or revenge.
All through my life if he was tired I would
find him in a dark room full of gunfire.
His movie titles included words like Lone
and Lonesome though mostly families
stuck together and young men learned
to risk their lives for whatever was noble
or right. I could not sit through them;
women were left behind in saloons
with hair and dresses as soft as pillows,
their possibilities perfumed by estrogen.
But it was the men my father was watching.
They had wide hats and leather boots,
masks made of betrayal. My father
remembered the dangerous people
he faced in courtrooms, his arguments
like bullets. His mind was full of places
that were not yet settled, places where
law was new. A man had a horse, a few
friends, some deep internal compass.
People relied on him; what he needed most
was courage. My father related to this.
He knew, after all, how the west was won.

~ Faith Shearin
from Moving the Piano

American Letter

"Our Banner in the Sky" by Frederic Edwin Church

It is a strange thing — to be an American.
Neither an old house it is with the air
Tasting of hung herbs and the sun returning
Year after year to the same door and the churn
Making the same sound in the cool of the kitchen
Mother to son's wife, and the place to sit
Marked in the dusk by the worn stone at the wellhead —
That — nor the eyes like each other's eyes and the skull
Shaped to the same fault and the hands' sameness.
Neither a place it is nor a blood name.
America is West and the wind blowing.
America is a great word and the snow,
A way, a white bird, the rain falling,
A shining thing in the mind and the gulls' call.
America is neither a land nor a people,
A word's shape it is, a wind's sweep —
America is alone: many together,
Many of one mouth, of one breath,
Dressed as one — and none brothers among them:
Only the taught speech and the aped tongue.
America is alone and the gulls calling.

An excerpt from An American Letter by Archibald MacLeish

Home

Our father owned a star,
and by its light

we lived in father’s house
and slept at night.
The tragedy of life,
like death and war,
were faces looking in
at our front door.
But finally all came in,
from near and far:
you can’t believe in locks
and own a star.

~ William Stafford from Another World Instead

Say Goodnight, Gracie

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,

Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.

What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic

Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.

He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write

And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic

Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.

She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered

He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation

Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills

Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's

               heart fluttered

And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,

               "But I still have some of the pills."

--Alice Notley

Nice shot!

Kinda...

Wouldn't it?

Mistake!

So I skipped 7th grade.  Looking back, although the intent by those who recommended my doing so was good, that was a mistake.  I was too young when I entered high school, my brain not sufficiently developed, nor my social skills and understanding of the world. 
I also lost my age cohort of friends with whom I  could have faced the new experience together.  That may have been the worst part of it.
I remember on Orientation Day, when we freshman were introduced to the school, met the faculty and staff, and shown the excellent facilities -- library, science labs, study halls, student lounge, gymnasium, outdoor amenities, swimming pool, cafeteria, school museum; oh, it was a great school, no doubt -- I was quite overwhelmed. 
At a pause to let stragglers catch up, our guide, one of the student counselors, just to pass the time, I'm sure, happened to ask me how I found the library.  Those were his exact words:  "How do you find the library?"  Maybe he said "did" but I heard "do."  So I told him.  That is, I gave him directions: walk back down the hall behind us, take the stairs to the left, turn right and it's at the very end.  I was baffled why he would ask me this since we had just been there, but thought it must be some kind of check to see if I had been paying attention or something.
But the look on that man's face.  The emotions that raced across it.  He thought I was being a smart ass.  No!  No!  I, a 12-year-old, just took the words at face value and answered him as accurately as I could.  But I had made an enemy and I had no idea that I had, any more than I had any idea what the ripple of laughter that followed my response meant.
There were a lot of episodes like that to come.  Many could have been avoided if I had just not skipped a grade and been a year more mature when I entered high school.
Oh -- what's the significance of the image I illustrate this post with?  None.  Other than sometimes I wish I could walk away from parts of my life and forget all about them.

Girl flyers

I ran across this comment on a message board discussing East Asian cultural and history matters:
"I just finished reading the book Under The Same Army Flag. It was printed in China in 2005. The book has over 50 short remembrances from Chinese soldiers who fought in Burma and India during World War II.  In the chapter titled "War Time" by Li Derun is the following:
'All Americans seemed to be open-minded with lively personalities, men and women alike. When we were with ground services at the airport, we often ran into American female pilots who flew small aircraft.  The small aircraft with only two seats were used to rescue injured soldiers, flying into the most dangerous and difficult locations where there often was no formal landing strip.
"Unlike Chinese women who tend to be shy and more reserved, American girls were outgoing, forthright, and each had a unique personality, and they were dedicated, hard workers too. When there was an injured soldier, they would spare no effort to rescue him regardless of his rank or nationality, always safely getting him to the hospital. Their job had no regular hours, and sometimes they had to fly back and forth round-the-clock.'
Although the author is a little vague about where and when he was writing about, it appears to have been the airfield in DinJan in either late 1944 or early 1945."

The prisoner's song.

I've had this song stuck in my head for days.  Aren't we all prisoners in one way or another?  Recorded in 1924.

My kind of kid

Mr. Lonely

Such a lovely song.  Thank you Mr.Vinton 

and your experience in the US Army that inspired you!

US Army, Germany, 1960

Sentimental and Sweet

One of my favorite songs from my favorite era.  

I have to refrain from

humming along a la Glenn Gould.

Opened April 11, 1940, London, just before the Battle of Britain.

A bit sad...

This ad is from the late 1930s.  The text is quite evocative:  "The piano is intensely personal, sensitive, responsive...the instrument to which musicians have ever turned for the deepest and most rewarding evocations of the spirit."
The ad also mentions four famous pianists:  Hoffmann, Horowitz, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff.  I wonder how many have even heard of them today.

Kids say the darndest things...

What is it about wearing his shirt that makes a guy go crazy?  Well, whatever makes you happy.  The guy mowing the lawn looks pretty happy, too.

Time flies

My kind of guy

Ditto!

Disagreeable people looking for an argument.  Who needs it?

Strike a pose!

 

When I was an undergraduate, I posed as a figure model for art classes, so I can empathize with this comic strip.  Funny thing is, if a 16-year-old boy had gone into a strip club he would have been thrown out, and the owner might have risked being arrested.  But an art class?  No problem!

Most of the models made it clear as they posed that they were indifferent about or bored by what they were doing, and ignored the...um, I almost said "audience," lol, but "aspiring artists" is the better term.  But I didn't.  I looked them over, gave a few a faint smile (mustn't break the pose!) and otherwise engaged with them in subtle ways.  When the class was over, other models would dash off as if relieved to be done with the odious task, but I would linger a bit and look over the sketches and paintings, express interest and chat a bit.  It was fun.

I guess

Overheard:  "You win some, you lose some, and taxes take the rest."

My solace

When the world is too much, when nothing makes sense, my solace is music.  I lose myself in it, forgetting everything else. There is nothing else.  How could there be anything else?



Stephen Foster's lovely "Beautiful Dreamer," the last song he ever wrote, composed a few days before his death, arranged for solo piano.

Future department head

A child's summer

Don't you remember how it was?

Hey

Hi, Wanda,
It was nice to see you again.  It's hard to believe we haven't seen each other since we were passing through MKAB.  That's a long time ago already.
I know I promised to keep in touch and let you know how things were going with me. I meant to, I really did.  But you know how it is.
I hate to think that we are moving on farther and farther into our own worlds and away from the friendship and shared experiences that we had and that we thought would always be important and tie us together.   But life moves on, doesn't it?  Your boat drifts on that current, mine on this one, and soon enough we can't hear each other, even if we shout, and then, finally, we can't even see each other any more.
But I will always remember you, wonder what you are doing at this moment that I think about you, and hope that you are happy and content.
Your friend,

Do I remember?  Do I?  Every day.  Every day I remember.

Pavane for a dead...civilization

Have we lost the battle?  Did we fight?

Once upon a time...

       

    Well, I think...

War

“We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand.”
    ~ Ernest K. Gann, Fate is the Hunter

I've been thinking of something Dickey Chapelle wrote in her autobiography. She was a war correspondent on Iwo Jima in 1945 and had just photographed a wounded marine:

The photograph she took.

“After I took his picture, while the chaplain administered the last rites as the corpsman began transfusing him, he came back to consciousness for a moment. His eyes rested on me. He said, “Hey, who you spyin’ for?”
“The folks back home, Marine.”
“The folks back home, huh? Well, fuck the folks back home!” he rasped. Then he closed his eyes. I didn’t see where his stretcher was carried.
After we had ceased loading for the day, his voice haunted me. What lay behind that raw reflex answer? What dear-John-I-know-you-understand letter? What other betrayal?
I remembered his wound. A piece of a giant mortar shell had sliced across his stomach. So I went down into the abdominal ward with my notebook in my hand. There were no names in it yet because I wasn’t willing to hold up moving stretchers while I spelled out names. But I had copied the dogtag numbers of each man as I made his picture. The nurses’ clipboard listed the serial numbers of the men being treated. The number I wanted wasn’t there. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken about the kind of wound he had, so I tried to find him in the other wards, the other decks, even those of the officers. I couldn’t find his number.
There was only one more set of papers aboard. This showed the dogtag numbers of the men who had died on deck. The number for which I was looking was near the top of the list.
So I think I was the last person to whom he was able to talk. And I had heard him die cursing what I thought he had died to defend.
It was my first and most terrible encounter with the barrier between men who fight, and those for whom the poets and the powers say they fight.”

Dickey Chapelle

Chapelle herself was killed in Viet Nam in 1965 while on patrol with marines during Operation Black Ferret.

A life

Happy days in Mukden.

One of the most remarkable people I've ever met taught me Japanese flower arranging and Japanese culture in general when I was a child, a Navy brat, living in Japan with my parents.
She had had a very up-and-down life, some of it quite tragic and horrific, but when I knew her as an old lady she was serene and optimistic about life.
Her parents were from Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan, apparently originally from Miyajima, where some of her ancestors had been priests at the well-known Shinto shrine there.  When Japan took over Manchuria in 1931, her father, a mining engineer, emigrated with his family to Mukden (奉天), now Shenyang (沈阳).  She was born there in 1935.

Typical Mukden Street scene in the 1930s. .

She recalls a happy childhood in a prosperous household, with frequent trips to the countryside for picnics and exploring.  Her mother played both the piano and violin and her father was a connoisseur of all  things French.  She had private tutors for music, French and English lessons, as well as for Japanese etiquette, language and history.  Her favorite novel was Natsume Soseki's Wagahai wa Neko de Aru. (吾輩は猫である). The winters were bitterly cold, but the streets and sidewalks were steam heated and people walked along them in summer yukatas quite comfortably.
This began to change when the war, which she was not aware was happening, began to go ill for Japan.  Her parents warned her to avoid Chinese, whom they told her were jealous of the superior Japanese and would steal their children to raise as their own.  One day, the Chinese household servants disappeared and she found her pet dog dead with a knitting needle jammed through its ear into its brain.
Food became scarce,  their once toasty-warm house, the floors of which were steam-heated like the sidewalks and streets, grew cold and she slept under thick futons in her parents' bedroom.  Her father never went anywhere unarmed, and Japanese soldiers with large rifles mounting fixed bayonets patrolled the streets and were stationed in front of her house.

Japanese soldiers outside a Mukden office.

One day she looked up in the sky at a strange droning sound and saw a bright silver plane circling the city.  The next day dozens of B-29s filled the sky and bombs fell like rain, leaving the city in flames.  That was the beginning of a nightmare.
Soon word came that the Chinese Communist 8th Route Army had infiltrated the city and every Japanese was at risk.  Her father decided to evacuate his family to Korea, but it was impossible to obtain transportation, and the family was still in Mukden when the war ended and Soviet troops marched into the city.  Her father was warned that his name was on a list of technical experts whom the Russians intended to arrest and use for their own ends.  His family would simply be left to fend for themselves, probably to be killed by the Chinese.

A Japanese machinegun squad defending Mukden.

Somehow, he got the family onto a freight train destined to go all the way to the port of Pusan in what is now South Korea.  The train cars were filled with other Japanese fleeing Manchuria.  For everyone, the goal was to try to get back to Japan. 
The trip south was uneventful until they entered Korea.  There, mobs of Koreans pelted the train with bricks and stones and whenever the train slowed down tried to climb aboard and attack the Japanese refugees.  When the train stopped to water and re-coal the engine, Japanese soldiers fought off mobs, firing into crowds of angry Koreans and bayoneting those  who pushed forward anyway.  The angry yells of the crowd, the bellowing of the soldiers, the gunshots and screams of those bayoneted were defeaning.  During the entire journey south, there was no food or water or relief facilities for the Japanese on board.
At one point while the train was moving, it slowed suddenly for some reason and crowds surged against the train and began pulling Japanese off the cars and beating them with clubs, some Koreans even climbed aboard and began throwing children and old people off the train cars to the mob, which killed them.  

Ship repatriating Japanese from Korea.

Her parents pushed her to the center of the car they were on and told her no matter what happened to stay in the center of the car.  Her father then went toward the door of the car to help beat back the Koreans but he was overwhelmed and pulled out of the car.  Her mother involuntarily rose up and stepped toward where he had been and fell into the grip of Korean hands and disappeared into the mob.
Suddenly the train picked up speed, leaving the mob behind.  She never saw her parents again, or knew what happened to them. 
When the train reached Pusan, Korean militia soldiers chased the Japanese refugees out of the cars and drove them out of the train station.  She found herself alone wandering strange streets, not knowing where she was or what she should do.  She was terribly hungry.  Finally she simply sat down where she was and gave up.
After a while, she heard the engine of a car coming and looked up to see what she would later learn was a Jeep.  In it were some strange-looking soldiers.  They drove past her, stopped, backed up, and one soldier got out of the Jeep and spoke to her in English.  She knew English!  She said she was hungry and wanted to go home.  When the soldiers, who were American GIs, figured out she was a Japanese refugee, they drove her to an embarkation point where Japanese were being loaded on ships and repatriated to Japan.  All she remembers of that is seeing what she called a circus flag -- so pretty! -- (the Stars and Stripes), being fed until she couldn't eat any more, including things she had never had before, like chocolate bars and buttered bread, using a shower for the first time, being dusted all over with some white powder (deloused with DDT), being given clean clothes, and feeling safe for the first time in a long time, with all those friendly American soldiers treating her like a princess and even asking her help interpreting.  She felt important and knew the GIs would not let any Chinese or Koreans even get near her.

The circus flag -- 48 stars.

She doesn't remember the ocean voyage to Japan other than that the ship was so crowded there was hardly any room to lie down.  She spent the entire trip on deck.
When she got to Japan she was interrogated  by Japanese officials, who determined her honseki (officially registered place of birth for establishing nationality purposes) and who her nearest relatives were.  They gave her their address and put her on a train filled with other refugees and repatriated Japanese soldiers.  The train was slow and stopped at every station, but eventually she arrived in the town where her relatives lived and walked about half an hour, asking for directions of people she met, until she found their house.  
Instead of a welcome, the garden gate was slammed in her face and she was told to go away.  They had no spare food to feed a stranger.  After awhile she again simply sat down, not knowing what else to do, and waited.  She waited all night.  In the morning, the gate opened and a man stepped out.  She stood up to speak to him, hopeful, and he threw a bucket of slops on her and told her to go away before he beat her with a club.
So she left.  She didn't know where to go or what do do.  She grew very hungry.  When she approached people asking for food, they shunned her. Some threw things at her.

Repatriated Japanese troops.  No GI bill for them.

Finally as she trudged down a narrow lane, she saw in the distance a familiar sight -- the circus flag, colorful with is blue and red and white, its stars and stripes.  She broke into a run until she reached the guard gate of a small American garrison.  She tried to run past the guard and into  the safety of the base but was scooped up by the guard.  In a rush she said in her schoolbook English that she was hungry and wanted to be with the American GIs and would interpret for them and please don't turn her away because nobody in the world wanted her.
And so began a new life for her.  The GIs took her in, basically adopting her, feeding her, clothing her and putting her to work for them, cleaning their barracks, shining shoes, running errands, interpreting for them.  She had her own little room and was safe and comfortable.  She learned idiomatic American English and grew fond of chewing gum and hot dogs.
Only one bad thing ever happened to her during what turned out to be a years'-long stay:  when out playing among some ruins one day, a Japanese man grabbed and raped her.  When she came crying back to her GI friends they went after him and "did for him" as one told her, but she was pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, about whom I will write later.
She never married, but raised her daughter by herself, with the help of her GI friends, and later, the families of occupation troops, including some of my relatives.  At some point, she gave birth to a son, fully Japanese, but I don't know any details, other than that he grew up to be a "salaryman," the Japanese term for an office worker.

Sailor and Japanese children at Kamakura.

Through her interpreting and translation activities for US forces, she became associated with Armed Forces Radio personnel and began working for the Far East Network, eventually having her own 15-minute show, explaining Japanese customs to American servicemen. It was syndicated throughout Japan and was even picked up by NHK, the Japanese government radio network.
At some point she moved to the Tokyo area, working for both FEN and the Stars & Stripes newspaper.  She was friends with some GIs who pranked the country with a fake report about a sea monster attacking Tokyo.  This incident was later turned into the movie Godzilla.
One of my grandfathers was in the Air Force, and at one point was based in the Tokyo area, the family living in the Washington Heights housing area, which was where the 1964 Olympic stadium facilities are now.    She became friends with them, teaching Japanese in private lessons, as well as Japanese culture such as flower arranging.  In return they helped her teach her daughter English.
As luck would have it, my other grandfather was in the Navy and was stationed for years in Japan and his family also met her and began a long-term friendship.  Eventually, my mother sponsored her daughter to attend school in the States.
In any case, I came to know this woman's remarkable story in bits and piece over the years.  She is still alive, alert and active, ready to teach you about classic Japanese culture, language and arts.  She loves American GIs still and thinks America is the greatest country in the world.
She actually visited the country once, around 1970, seeing Honolulu, San Francisco and New York.  She especially wanted to ride on a New York City subway.  She recalled reading detective stories about a "Subway Sam" when she was a little girl, but no one knows  of such a gumshoe; maybe she is remembering  stories written by a Japanese author in a Japanese magazine.
Her image of the country pretty much ends with her visits.  Mostly, when she envisions the country, she seems to see it as it was reflected by the young Americans she was friends with circa 1950.
I would have fallen in love with that America, too.