Three again

I suppose summer vacation was over 11 days ago, when school started, but now August is almost over and Rocket Boy has gone back to St. Louis -- and it's really over. Except for the heat. It's not going to be blisteringly hot this week, but hotter than I like it -- close to 90 every day. Come on, fall. We're ready for you.

Rocket Boy left yesterday, quite late in the day. He decided to make the drive in three days, so as not to strain his leg too much, but even so he left much later than I thought he should have. I think it was 3 pm or so when he finally drove off the driveway, and about 15 minutes later he was back again, having forgotten his favorite pencil. His goal for the night was Oakley, Kansas, which is 271 miles from here, according to Google Maps, and I thought it should have taken him about 4 hours. With the time change, that meant he might arrive around 8:30 or so (Kansas time). But when we finally gave up waiting for him to call and called him, it was about 9:15 our time (10:15 Kansas time) and he had just checked into his Oakley hotel. Plus, he didn't stop for dinner, just ate things he'd packed at home. So I don't know why it took him so long. Maybe he took a lot of breaks at rest areas. He has to stop fairly often to rest his leg and walk around.

Before he left, he raced around getting some things done that he hadn't been able to do when we first got back to Boulder, on account of his leg. We're planning to replace the rotted wall and tile in the shower next month, and while RB hopes to be back for that work, we wanted to do as much to prepare as we could. One thing we're going to do is replace our vanity with a new, smaller one, because the old one has never really fit the space. We spent hours online (and in stores) looking at vanities. We finally chose this one from Lowe's, which had so many bad reviews I don't know what to think about it. But it was really cheap. And none of the more expensive ones sounded any better.

Rocket Boy said, let's try to make this work for a while, and if it disintegrates (one review said the porcelain sink was made of powdered sugar), maybe we can have one custom built.

In the meantime, it makes a nice snooze spot for Baby Kitty.

We're pursuing this now, even though we realized the wall was rotting quite some time ago (and taped up one tile that fell out), because of something that happened the first night we were back in Boulder. Rocket Boy was taking a sponge bath, lost his balance, and reached out to grab the grab bar in the shower -- which ripped out of the wall.

Nothing like a disaster to get your ass in gear.

I still have to finalize the choice of tile -- we looked at a lot of different ones and kind of settled on a style, but we haven't actually chosen the specific tile -- nor, of course, purchased it. So that's my job during September.

Friday night, Rocket Boy removed the hanging grab bar, and Saturday morning he and Teen A taped the tiles to the wall with duct tape. It looks like modern art.

I wasn't very involved with his last-minute projects, because Teen A brought home another cold from school, then Teen B got it, and Thursday night I realized I was getting it too. Friday I was miserable, Saturday I was miserable, today I'm miserable. The boys are still coughing badly, even though they're several days ahead of me. It's a nasty cold. (But not covid -- I tested.)

So now I get some time to myself, with Rocket Boy back in Missouri (he hopes to cross the border tonight) and the twins back in school. What I should do is apply for jobs, and maybe I will, since we don't know how we're going to pay for all the work we need to have done on the house this fall.

But for a little while at least I'll get to be home alone, with lots of peace and quiet. First I need to recover from this stupid cold, and then we'll see what happens.

Reading post: Citizen 13660

I have finished my ninth book for the 2022 Classics Challenge: Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo, published in 1946. I chose it to fulfill category #5: A classic by a BIPOC author (all of my authors are BIPOC, so it was just a matter of choosing one to fit in this slot). This book was actually published before my previous book (Yokohama, California), but since that book was accepted by a publisher in 1941 (but publication was delayed until 1949), I read it and wrote about it first. Then I picked up Citizen 13660, and finished it the same day. This book is about life in the internment camps, published immediately after the war, so it seemed appropriate to read it next.

One of seven children, Miné Okubo was born in Riverside, California, in 1912, so she was two years younger than my previous author, Toshio Mori. According to an article in Daily Art Magazine, in Japan her father was a scholar and her mother was a calligrapher with a degree from an art school, but after emigrating to America they became a gardener and a homemaker. Okubo earned a BA and an MFA from UC Berkeley, studied art in France and Italy on a fellowship, and then painted murals for the WPA from 1939 to 1942. And then, like all Americans of Japanese descent, she was pointlessly thrown into the camps, first Tanforan and then Topaz (in Utah), like Toshio Mori.

I don't think I knew about the camps when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and yet I feel as though I did know. There was some reason we felt sorry for Japanese Americans (according to my mother), for something that had happened to them during the war, but I don't think I was clear on what it was. Maybe she told me and it didn't sink in. I didn't really understand until we lived in Ridgecrest (2009-2013) and visited the Manzanar National Historic Site. So it's weird for me to read about Miné Okubo having to stay in a horse stall (the manure-covered floorboards having been hastily covered with linoleum) at the Tanforan racetrack. I remember Tanforan as a stop on the train when we took it to San Francisco to see the Christmas decorations.

Of course, I looked at the Caltrain website just now and there is no Tanforan station. San Bruno is the closest one. According to Wikipedia, the Tanforan racetrack was destroyed by fire in 1964 and a shopping center was built there in 1971. Maybe there never was a Tanforan station. I feel that my memory is faulty here. I don't know.

The most interesting thing about Citizen 13660 is that it is a graphic novel -- or graphic memoir, to be more exact. I like graphic novels/memoirs (Alison Bechdel's books are favorites), and I had no idea that they had been around so long. According to Wikipedia, the earliest one is thought to be from 1837, and there were some in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Citizen 13660 is still a very early example, and it stands out because it's not a comic book. It's a very serious, almost deadpan, illustrated memoir of Okubo's experience in the camps. I wonder if Art Spiegelman might have been inspired to write Maus after reading Okubo. Of course, Okubo's pictures are all of people (unlike the mice and cats in Spiegelman's work). She herself is in every picture, sometimes as the subject and sometimes as an observer.

Okubo is an artist, not a writer. This was her only book, but she had a long career as a professional artist. Still, the book is well-written, intelligent, very skillfully done. I like the line about the hogs:

The hogs ate everything we left, and ultimately we ate the hogs.

The pictures are deceptively simple, but they actually convey a lot. She explains that she started drawing these pictures when she was in the camps, so they are very accurate. She includes details that I haven't read about elsewhere.

Her descriptions of the camps reminded me, oddly, of the covid pandemic. Hold on, I can explain what I mean. She describes how everything was thrown together quickly and thus didn't work well. The sewer system in both camps, Tanforan and Topaz, was constantly failing and had to be redone. There were far more people than the camps were ready to accommodate. There was never enough of anything, food, supplies of all kinds. It made me think of the covid shutdown -- schools scrambling to go online, mask requirements when there weren't any masks available, all of that. Obviously the covid shutdown was necessary and the Japanese American internment camps were anything but, but both are examples of the government trying to do something really big really quickly, and having trouble.

Apparently there was some controversy when Columbia University Press published this book in 1946. Some people felt it was too soon after the war. Many Americans were not ready to admit that Japanese Americans should not have been put in the camps. But there was enough interest to have kept the book in print ever since.

Ultimately it was important evidence of what the camps were really like and may have helped achieve the formal apology to Japanese Americans from Congress in 1988.

I found Citizen 13660 fascinating and highly recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the internment camps.

Reading post: Yokohama, California -- and a few other things

I have finished my eighth book for the 2022 Classics Challenge: Yokohama, California by Toshio Mori, published in 1949. I chose it to fulfill category #7: A classic short story collection. This is my first book for the Challenge by a Japanese American, and it's possibly the first book ever by a Japanese American, depending on how you define Japanese American (more on this below). So now I begin my quest to see whether classic Japanese literature and early Japanese-American literature have anything to say to each other. Based on this book alone, I'm not sure they do.

Toshio Mori was born in Oakland, California, in 1910, to parents who had emigrated from Hiroshima, Japan. This makes them issei (born in Japan, emigrated to America) and him nisei (first generation born in America). I'm guessing his parents were not educated people, since many early immigrants were laborers seeking a better life, but I don't know that. They ran a Japanese bathhouse in Oakland and later, in San Leandro, a nursery, like many Japanese Americans at that time. Mori worked full-time in the nursery and eventually inherited it, but always wanted to write. He published his first story in a magazine in 1938 and completed a collection of short stories and had it accepted by Caxton Printers in Idaho in 1941 for publication in 1942 -- but then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the banishment of all people of Japanese descent to internment camps. His publisher cancelled the contract (they had been hoping to sell copies to those Japanese Americans who were now in the camps), and Mori and his family were shipped off to Topaz, in Utah. After the war Caxton finally brought the book out, with two new stories added (about Pearl Harbor and the camps).

So there was almost a Japanese-American book of fiction that didn't have anything to do with the camps, but not quite. And every book since has had something to say about those camps, which shaped the Japanese-American experience forever.

William Saroyan wrote a glowing introduction to the original version of the book, and updated it for the version that was published. The book quickly went out of print, but was rediscovered and reprinted in 1985 and again in 2015, both times by the University of Washington press. The copy I read included the introductions to the 1942/49, 1985, and 2015 editions, so that I had to wade through a lot of fluff before getting to the stories. I didn't find any of it terribly illuminating. I think the UW press should keep the Saroyan intro for historical reasons, scrap the other two, and get someone to write a useful, insightful introduction, something that really explains the book's place in literary history.

I think the problem with writing about Yokohama, California is that it isn't very good -- and yet it is. One issue is that Mori doesn't seem to have a very good grasp of English. Saroyan comes right out and says it: 

Of the thousands of unpublished writers in America there are probably no more than three who cannot write better English than Toshio Mori. His stories are full of grammatical errors.

And he's right. Based on my own experiences with nonnative-speaker writing, I assume Mori had an editor, because there are stretches with no obvious errors. But elsewhere there are a lot of clunky sentences, sentences that just don't feel like English, article errors, misplaced commas -- the works. I don't know how much education Mori had. I don't think he went to college. I'm assuming he finished high school, but I don't know that either. His family would have spoken Japanese in the home, and members of the Japanese community stuck together and mostly spoke Japanese, so it's understandable that his English would have been something less than native -- even though he was born in the U.S. 

In an essay on "Japanese-American Literature" included in New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage, ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling, Benzi Zhang argues that Mori's "funny English" was deliberate, not a mistake. He claims that Mori was attempting

...to find an immigrant language that reflects a critical self-consciousness of ethnic elements--linguistic and social--that may be directed to oppose the force of a canonizing cultural hegemony.

I just don't know about this. When Mori's characters speak, of course we would expect them not to speak with perfect grammar (although probably they are actually meant to be speaking Japanese much of the time, but never mind that). But should his omniscient narrator make article errors? I don't think I understand the logic behind that.

There's a lot I don't know about Mori, and I think Benzi Zhang knows a little more, because he has apparently read more of Mori's works than just Yokohama, California. I wonder whether Mori could read and write in Japanese. There were Japanese-language newspapers in California, so perhaps he could, or were those read only by the issei? His parents would have had to teach him, I think. There were after-school Japanese-language schools in some places, but I don't know if they would have existed when Mori was the right age for them (Post-note: he attended one from age 8 to about 16). Would he have had any knowledge of Japanese literature? I don't know.

Despite grammatical problems, the stories are interesting. Some more than others, I'll give you that. Some are very simple and unsophisticated, but others are more complex. I was trying to choose a favorite, and I realized that I didn't really like most of them, though I didn't hate them either. They just didn't grab me.

The last story (of 22) in the book, "Tomorrow and Today," might be my favorite. It is a brief, poignant portrait of a young unmarried woman, Hatsuye, who is not at all attractive, perhaps ugly. The last sentence of the story is clearly important, but the English is so odd that I don't understand it. Here is the sentence:

While she is moving about day in and day out it is not whether she is brave and courageous or tragic and pathetic that is important about her life, but it is her day that is present and the day that is tomorrow which is her day and which will not be.

What does that mean? What "will not be" what?

I needed some help with this book, so I did some background reading. First, because it was easy to obtain, I turned to Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919), perhaps Mori's inspiration for his own book. The Boulder Public Library doesn't own that classic work, but the Louisville Public Library does, so it came to me from there. And I read it, though it was a slog. Does anyone read Sherwood Anderson anymore? Winesburg, Ohio is his most famous book, and according to Wikipedia,

...it is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industrial small-town life in the United States.

Oh, come on. Am I missing something? The book consists of roughly 25 stories about some of the residents of a small town (pop. 1800) in Ohio in the 1890s. The stories are mostly about the people's thoughts and feelings, not about external things that happen to them, and because of that the book is considered modernist. But it's a little hard to take. Every single character is depressed and comes from a depressed family. Every single character is obsessed with sex and disappointed in life. There are no happy marriages. There are no happy people. Everyone wants to get away. After a while, every person starts to sound like every other person.

I think it's a book that was important for its time, but seems hopelessly outdated now that we have reliable birth control. Also, it's horribly sexist. But I guess that was the time.

Does this help me with Yokohama, California? Not really. Like Anderson's work, Mori's stories are portraits of people and their psyches. Not a lot happens. But unlike the zombies of Winesburg, a number of the people of Yokohama are happy, content. A few, such as Teruo in the story titled "Toshio Mori," could walk into Winesburg and feel at home. But most are more nuanced.

Another way in which Yokohama differs is that the people seem like individuals. Sherwood Anderson supposedly based the characters in Winesburg, Ohio on people he knew -- but they all sound like the same person, probably a version of himself. I assume that many of the characters in Yokohama, California are people Toshio Mori knew, and they sound like real people. If "Teruo" in the above-mentioned story is a portrait of the author, as the title of his story suggests, Mori did a better job than Anderson of distinguishing between himself and the other people he wrote about. Also, the women are human beings, unlike the women in Winesburg, who are mostly monsters, trying to eat men alive, or else merely stupid.

Of course, Sherwood Anderson was writing critically about Winesburg, Ohio and Mori was writing fairly positively about Yokohama, California.

In one of the stories in Yokohama, "Nodas in America," the character Papa Noda is talking about his seven children and how they are healthy and growing, and he says "Maybe one a Noguchi. Who knows?" His kids ask who Noguchi is, and Papa Noda says he is like Lincoln: "Lincoln or Noguchi--one man. The real man, I hope to grow in my family."

So I thought, who the heck is Noguchi? Wikipedia has a long list of people named Noguchi, but none of them sound anything like Abraham Lincoln. But in the process of looking them all up, I found a writer called Yone Noguchi who interested me. This Noguchi was born in Japan in 1875, but traveled to the U.S. in 1893, staying until 1904, first in the San Francisco Bay Area (including Oakland), then Chicago, and finally New York. Mori, born in 1910, couldn't have met Noguchi, but I suppose it's barely possible that his parents did.

Noguchi wrote his first novel in English while he was in New York (with help from an American editor called Leonie Gilmour, who he later married, divorced, and had a son with, the famous sculptor Isamu Noguchi). The novel was called An American Diary of a Japanese Girl, published in 1902, and when I saw that title I thought, oh, I have to read this. Fortunately the University of Wyoming was able to send me a copy, via Prospector. 

It's really a curiosity, such an odd little book. The premise is that a rich young Japanese woman, who calls herself Morning Glory in English, travels from Japan to America on a lark and spends several months there (she arrives in October 1900 and the book ends in March 1901, but she's still in the U.S. at that point). Most of the book takes place in California, where Noguchi spent 7 years, and many of Morning Glory's experiences are fictionalized accounts of Noguchi's. The book has no plot -- nothing very exciting happens. I had trouble staying awake through much of it. But at the same time, it's delightful. I really liked the character of Morning Glory, who takes great pleasure in almost everything but doesn't take anything very seriously (we may be kindred spirits).

Thinking about connections between Japanese and Japanese-American literature, apparently the book I Am a Cat, 1905-1906, which I wrote about in June, may have gotten some inspiration from An American Diary, which was published in Japanese in 1905 (it's really hard to imagine how it could have been translated -- how do you translate Japanese-flavored English into Japanese?).

I wanted to know more about Yone Noguchi, so I found a cheap copy of a biography of him on Amazon: Yone Noguchi: The Stream of Fate (Volume I: The Western Sea) by Edward Marx (who also edited the version of Noguchi's novel that I read). I've started reading it and it's interesting, though it includes a lot of extra information about Japanese history that is less interesting. But I'm working my way through it, slowly. (Post-Note: I finally finished it on Dec. 28th. What a strange book, and what a very odd person Noguchi was.)

Going back to An American Diary, the Introduction and Afterword plunged me into a controversy I didn't know existed: the definition of Asian-American (or in this case Japanese-American) literature. I guess I had assumed that Japanese-American literature was literature written by Americans of Japanese descent. But I hadn't thought about whether that only includes literature written by people who were born here, the nisei, sansei, etc. What about people who emigrate here from Japan, the issei generation? What about people who were born here, went back to Japan to be educated, and then returned to the US (there's a term for them as well but I've forgotten it)? And what about people like Noguchi, who spent 11 years in this country but then went back to Japan? Apparently some people think his books in English should "count" as Asian-American literature, while other people think they shouldn't, because he didn't stay, among other reasons. 

Since I've set out to read classics of Japanese-American literature, I really want to understand this question. So I ordered a few books about Asian-American literature from Prospector. Benzi Zhang, in the essay I mention above, defines immigrant literature as being concerned with

...not only the movement across the borders of a country but also the experience of traversing the boundaries and barriers of space, time, race, culture, language, history, and politics and the complexities and ambivalences associated with defining an (im)migrant identity between and beyond boundaries.

In other words, it isn't just literature by immigrants, it's literature about the immigrant experience. Later in the essay he claims that Noguchi and other writers like him are actually "Americanized Japanese" rather than "Japanese American," 

...because they did not express the concerns of Japanese Americans.

That seems like a rather circular definition. Noguchi was trying to succeed in white literary society, so he tried not to step on white people's toes. He mostly avoided the topic of racism and didn't write a lot about other Japanese in America, though he certainly interacted with them. Though he came to America to study, he worked off and on as a servant and often lived in boarding houses with other Japanese workers. As Edward Marx explains in Yone Noguchi, many Japanese came to America to study in the late 1800s -- Noguchi wasn't unusual in that sense. And some of them stayed, while others went back to Japan. Noguchi stayed for 11 years. 

At what point do you get to be a "Japanese American"? In Noguchi's novel, Morning Glory is a rich Japanese woman who is presumably going to return to Japan (although she does discuss the possibility of marrying an American and staying). She interacts mostly with European Americans, but occasionally with Japanese Americans. I guess not enough to satisfy Benzi Zhang.

This is definitely something I will continue to think about.

So, what's my final word on Yokohama, California? I'm not sure. It's a minor work, not really very good, but I'm glad I read it. 

I want to know more about Toshio Mori. He published another book of short stories called The Chauvinist and Other Stories, in 1979 (I've requested it from Prospector), and a novel called The Woman from Hiroshima, in 1978, and then there's one more book called Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori, which was published after his death in 1980. None of these other works seem to have gotten much attention, and they may not be very good. But perhaps just to get back at Sherwood Anderson, whose work really wasn't very good (OK, in my opinion) but got plenty of attention, I'd like to give Toshio Mori a little more of my time.

**********

Post-note: I've now finished The Chauvinist and Other Stories and I have a few more things to say about Toshio Mori. First, this book has a wonderful introduction by Hisaye Yamamoto, a contemporary of Mori's (more or less -- she was 11 years younger) which gave me all the information I was looking for (and didn't find) in the multiple introductions to Yokohama, California. She also answers the question of Mori's language definitively: the man simply did not speak/write English very well. As she puts it

...let me make clear at the outset that I happen not to agree with the young ones on this one point of language. I think Toshio, just as I, was trying to use the very best English of which he was capable, and we have both run aground on occasion. Probably this was because we both spent the pre-kindergarten years speaking only Japanese, and, in such cases, Sprachgefuhl is hard to come by.

I had hoped that the stories in Chauvinist would be better than those in Yokohama, that Mori's writing would improve with (his) age, but that isn't the case. For one thing, most of the stories in Chauvinist were written in the 30s and 40s, but the few from the 50s aren't any better. But I did find some that I liked. My favorite from this collection is "Oakland, September 17," which is about three young Japanese-Americans (Nisei), two men and a woman, accidentally meeting in a cafe in Oakland and forming a connection which is then immediately broken. Somehow, Mori got that story exactly right, even though he almost never did again.

I don't think I'm going to pursue Mori further, probably won't read the novel he wrote about his mother.

Oh, well, I'll see. He does tend to grow on you. He must have been such a sweet man.

School begins

Whew. We got through the first day of school -- and the second, which was also stressful -- and the third, which had issues too. I was so tired by Friday afternoon! It's hard to get used to getting up early, after sleeping late all summer. It didn't help that my allergies are terrible right now, so I'm popping antihistamines. Saturday I wanted to sleep until noon, but the twins had haircuts at 10 and 10:30. Today I stayed in bed until 9, but tomorrow it's back to 7 am.

I'm debating how much to talk about the first few days of school. More than ever I feel as though I'm invading the twins' privacy by writing about them. They're in high school now. More and more their life is their story, not mine. I think I will stop posting photos of them, unless it's from the back. That will please them. And I'll try not to tell stories that are exclusively theirs, only those we share.

The biggest challenge this week from my standpoint was transportation. I had thought it would be really easy for them to get to school on the city bus, because the Skip runs (almost) right past our house. I used to take the Skip when I taught at CU and it worked well. 

There's an app that shows you where the buses are at any particular moment, so you'll know when one is coming (since they don't seem to follow the official schedule). I never used this app when I was teaching, but I used it this week. It mostly told us that there wasn't a Skip coming, that a Skip would never come, that a Skip would come only after it was too late to take it.

On Wednesday they were at the bus stop by 7:53 and a Skip finally came at 8:11. It takes about 10 minutes to get to their stop and then they have a 5-minute walk, and school started at 8:25 that day, so they might have been a little late, but it was OK. On Thursday I had to drive Teen A to school early so that he could exchange his Chromebook (long, irritating story that I won't bore you with), so Teen B took the bus alone. He was at the bus stop by 8:00 but a Skip was pulling out just as he arrived. Fortunately another one came at 8:15 or so, and school started at 8:35 that day, so he was OK. On Friday there was no sign of any Skip at any time when they might have caught it, so I drove them.

At least coming home is easy. Though on Thursday Teen A called me to say he'd just missed the bus and could I come pick him up. I said no, wait for the next one. Eventually he made it home.

The bus is free for the whole month of August, but starting in September we will have to figure out a way to pay for it. I'm not sure whether a bus pass or a MyRide account would be better. I might have to phone RTD Customer Service to discuss this.

***

We're still "getting ready" for school in a lot of ways. We've been shopping for school supplies all weekend, off and on. We've been to Target, Staples, and today I made a special trip to Office Depot to find new calculators for each of them.

Shopping for school supplies with Teen A is challenging because he doesn't like color. Pastels and girly colors like pink, purple, teal, etc., are right out, but he also doesn't like traditional boy colors like blue. Red is a little too strong, brown is ugly, and forget green because we always dressed him in green when he was little. That leaves black, gray, and white. He dresses almost exclusively in black and gray, and he wanted black and gray binders, notebooks, folders, etc. He compromised on white because there weren't any gray notebooks and I argued that three black notebooks would be too confusing when he is trying to pull the right one out of his backpack.

Teen B is a little more flexible. He'll accept blue, orange, sometimes red -- but he likes black and gray too. He ended up with a black binder and a navy binder, and a black notebook, a blue notebook, and a black notebook with gold polka dots on it. Also a plastic Spiderman case full of different-colored highlighters which Teen A ridiculed extensively.

When I think of the ecstasies I used to go into when choosing folder and notebook colors for my classes -- both when I was a grad student and when I was teaching -- oh, that perfect shade of eggplant goes so well with this lemon yellow, but look at this periwinkle blue with the forest green... Oh well. I'm not them, they're not me.

Tonight we assembled all the binders and notebooks (I put labels on everything so they'd remember which class each thing is for). We put ruled paper in the binders, and tabs (but didn't fill out the tabs because we don't know what they're supposed to say). We put the new pencils and pens and highlighters in the front pockets of their backpacks. 

They're all ready for Week 2, starting tomorrow.

***

This was probably Rocket Boy's last weekend with us, and in some ways I'm ready for him to leave and in other ways I'm so sad! His boss wants him back in St. Louis for September, so he'll probably drive back August 27-28. He's a little worried about whether he's up to it -- and of course, I can't help him. I suggested he take three days to make the drive, instead of two, and he's considering it. That would mean about 290 miles a day instead of 440. I think he could do that.

I'm ready for him to leave because I want my house back -- I simply can't seem to keep it clean when he's here. What am I going to do when he's back permanently? I don't know. I'll figure it out then. Actually, what I think is that if I can make more progress with FlyLady, the house will get easier to keep clean, and then maybe it won't be such a problem. Right now, when I still have a million things to declutter and clean, I need to be able to focus and not have him telling me I'm doing it wrong, or whatever.

But I also don't want him to go! I'm worried about him, even though he takes good care of himself. Alone in St. Louis, he exercises regularly and cooks healthy food -- fish and lots of veggies. I haven't been able to look closely at his various wounds without gagging, but he carefully tends to them, washes them and rebandages them. So he'll be fine without me, but what if he needs to go to the emergency room? I worry about that all the time.

Also, I just enjoy his company. I like having him to talk to about things, bounce things off of. He's always willing to listen to me. We go for walks in the evenings. And he's braver than I am. I put off so many things due to anxiety. When I tell him I'm having trouble with something, he either volunteers to do it for me, or we do it together.

On the other hand, he can be very critical, of both me and the twins. He has rather fixed ideas about when dinner should be, what dinner should be, what someone shouldn't eat within two or three hours of dinner... I'm a little more low-key about all that, despite having grown up in a household where dinner was on the table at 6 pm sharp every evening -- or maybe because of that. 

I'm starting to feel sad about him leaving. I know I'll be OK within a day or two of his departure, but the week before he goes is always hard. Last night I had a series of sad dreams. By the time I woke up fully, I'd mostly forgotten them, just knew they were sad, but I do remember one. In the dream, I'd just finished school (probably grad school) and my apartment lease was expiring and my fellowship was ending. I didn't know where to go and I felt like the bottom was dropping out of my life. I've had that dream before.

I realized that I never did a "welcome to August" post, and now here it is August 21st. That's OK. August didn't need a theme -- it's always "end of summer" and "back to school" and "run around frantically" month. Two weeks from now I'll do a "welcome to September" post and that will be enough.

Quiet days back home

I almost feel as though I shouldn't write a post today -- not much to say -- but I will, just to stay on schedule. Staying on schedule is starting to feel more important because we are three days away from the first day of school, ack! 

I seem to be the only person who cares about this very much. It drives me crazy how blase the twins are. They don't care what their schedules will be. I keep checking Infinite Campus to see if the schedules have been posted yet, but do they? No. When I asked them why they didn't seem to care, Teen A argued that their schedules don't matter. They will be in a bunch of classes with teachers they don't know. Who cares about that? "But we can look the teachers up on the high school website," I argued back. "And anyway, you don't know which classes you'll be in -- you put down various choices, but you don't know if you'll get them."

They don't care. It's so weird.

Another thing they care very little about is how they're going to get to and from school. I've told them I'm not driving them -- they have to take the bus. We live a three-minute walk from a bus stop, and the bus is free for all of August. They have about a seven-minute walk from the bus to the high school, but it's flat, or maybe slightly downhill. Not a big deal. On Monday, they had to go to the school to get their pictures taken and their ID cards made, so I said we'd take the bus, to practice. They paid a little bit of attention, and MAYBE they'll remember what stop to get off at. Rocket Boy still can't walk very well, so he drove himself and then drove us all back, which meant that we didn't get to practice taking the bus back. Teen A actually asked me, the next day, what stop to get off at on the way home, and I told him. But that's it. End of interest.

I'm worried about how much time it's going to take to ride the bus, because there's major construction on Broadway. I punched the times into the Trip Planner on the RTD website, and it indicates that if they catch the 8:10 bus, they can get to school by 8:30 (school starts at 8:35), but I am dubious. I don't think the Trip Planner is taking the construction into account. I want to practice on Tuesday morning. Probably no one will want to practice with me. They simply don't care.

They aren't used to dealing with public transportation. For the last three years, they've taken a school bus, but I don't think they're eligible for a school bus to the high school. I signed them up for it just in case, but haven't heard anything.

Only I am worried. They are not worried. They are just trying to spend as much time as possible playing stupid computer games before the spectre of classes and homework becomes reality.

If I were about to start high school I would be thinking about classes and teachers -- and what I was going to wear on the first day, and my wardrobe in general, and which cute boys were going to be in my classes. I would also be talking about this ad nauseam with my friends.

I guess boys are different, or at least my boys.

***

It's been kind of a funny week. I came down with Teen A's cold, which he had already passed to Teen B when we were still in St. Louis. Rocket Boy, weirdly enough, has never gotten it. I don't know how he did that, since he normally catches everything and gets it worse than any of us. I wonder if maybe it was some St. Louis bug that he's already had but the rest of us didn't have any immunity to. 

Anyway, I felt lousy for several days. Still not quite back to normal. Even after I got rid of the congestion (nasal cleanses and cold medicine helped), I still felt sweaty and shaky and weak and tired. The housework got out of hand very quickly. At one point I needed to put away the kids' laundry. I stood up in their room and reached into the laundry basket. I pulled out one shirt and hung it up. And then I was too tired to do any more. That's notable, for me. I can't remember ever feeling that tired before (I probably have been, just can't remember due to continuing covid brain). (I don't think this was covid again, but I actually don't know, because we didn't test.) I spent a lot of time sitting in the blue chair in the living room, reading or playing solitaire on my phone, watching hummingbirds at the feeder.

So the house is kind of a shambles. But fortunately the FlyLady won't mind. She always says, "I don't want you to catch up, I just want you to jump in where you are." So I'm trying to do that. But it felt weird not to do the dishes every night. I did them a couple of nights, but sometimes I just couldn't do anything. Rocket Boy did some, and some didn't get done.

***

We celebrated our 20th anniversary on Wednesday night by going out to dinner at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse. The last time we had our anniversary dinner there, it didn't go well, so we've been going to Chautauqua instead. But I studied the online menus for both places and decided I'd rather do the Teahouse this year. Rocket Boy felt that it would be easier for him to walk from the car to the Teahouse (I could park very close by) than it would have been to walk from the car to Chautauqua (because sometimes you have to park very far away), so it was agreed.

We had Rainforest Iced Teas, and I had Indian Vegetable Korma with tofu and Rocket Boy had Korean Pan-Fried Noodles with shrimp. For dessert we both had something called St. James Cake, which was gluten free and very tasty. Our server wanted us to have appetizers, which I didn't want, and then didn't seem to want to serve us dessert (and then expected us to share one instead of having our own). But we persevered and eventually got what we wanted.

We spent the meal reminiscing about the hikes we used to take with my cousins, starting in 2002, about 6 weeks before our wedding, and ending in 2012. My eldest cousin's wife died recently, and she was on all those hikes and trips, so it was kind of in honor of her. It hadn't occurred to me until that night that we spent the first ten years of our marriage doing those hikes. The ten years since then have been less fun! 

But they've been good too. I think both of us feel very good about our 20 years together and the prospect of more -- who knows how many more. I hope it's lots more, but I'll take whatever we get.

***

I'm not sure what else we did this week. Rocket Boy took the twins to play mini golf yesterday and this afternoon we went bowling at the Coal Creek bowling alley in Lafayette. It wasn't very successful. Rocket Boy couldn't play, on account of the stitches in his neck area, and Teen A was kind of nasty to Teen B... We ate out, last night, at the only Chinese buffet we could find in the Denver metro area, something called King Buffet. It was OK, but very expensive, almost $100/person including beverages and tax. I guess it was actually $94, and then I added a $6 tip for the girl who brought our drinks and took away dirty plates. Eating out is crazily expensive, but this week I wasn't up to doing a lot of cooking. We had nacho cups on Monday AND Friday, and tacos on Tuesday. Wednesday, we were at the Teahouse and the twins stayed home and had Lunchables. Thursday night Rocket Boy made scrambled eggs. Tonight we got Subway. I'm going to try to do better this coming week.

Famous last words.

My book group meets tomorrow, so at least I don't have to make dinner then. Rocket Boy can figure something out with the twins. He got his second drain out on Thursday, so he should be feeling better, but his recovery is slow. He still has pain and he's still having trouble walking. Our evening walks consist of strolling down the street to the twins' old elementary school and sitting on the picnic benches there for a while, then strolling back. It's about 15 minutes total, and it wouldn't even be that except that we walk so slowly. This is not the level of exercise I should be getting, but since I was sick this week, it worked out well for me too.

I think walking together with my sweetheart and my rapidly growing offspring is a little more important than getting a diabetic's correct amount of exercise. I could be wrong. But that's what I'm doing.

Teen B and I both see the orthodontist this week, and they have haircuts on Saturday. Oh, and on Wednesday, school begins. High school. Oh my goodness.

It got better

I started writing this post the day before we left to drive back to Boulder and then things have been so crazy that I never got back to it. So I think I'll just go ahead and finish it now, as things never do calm down.

***

My last post about our trip to St. Louis was so gloomy, perhaps it's hard to believe that things got better. But things got better. Two things contributed to this.

1. Rocket Boy got better and became able to drive. Quite a bit of my misery on this trip had to do with having to be the driver. I don't like to drive his car (the brakes feel weird, the car is bigger than I'm comfortable with), and I don't like to drive in St. Louis. It makes me uncomfortable to sit in the passenger seat while he's driving, but anything's better than actually doing the driving.

2. The Post-Dispatch (St. Louis newspaper) published an article about where to get good "frozen treats" in the city. They mentioned about 15 different places, and we learned that there are actually LOTS more. I decided that we should go to a different place each of our last nights here. We ended up going to three different places, and one of them twice (one night we didn't go out because it was supposed to rain hard, which it did, but not until later, so we could have gone, but it's OK). I need to remember that going out for really good ice cream is a cure for a lot of problems.

On Monday we drove to scary north St. Louis and had gigantic ice cream sundaes at Crown Candy Kitchen, which has been in operation since 1913. We decided it would be more fun with only one twin, since they had been fighting so much, so we took Teen B along and left Teen A back at the apartment to have some alone time. It might have been better to switch them out, because Teen B walked into Crown Candy Kitchen and announced, rather too loudly, "It smells weird in here." If you'd been a soda fountain for over 100 years, you might smell weird too. Anyway, we all ordered gigantic sundaes loaded with whipped cream and pecans (mine was a "Newport" version of a Swiss Chocolate Sundae), and they were prepared and delivered quickly and they were SOOO good. When I took my first bite of mine, I thought -- hey, I'm happy. I liked everything about the place, not just the ice cream. I would definitely go back.

After eating (and buying some candy to go), we took a drive through north St. Louis because Rocket Boy wanted to see where Pruitt-Igoe had been. There's nothing left of the enormous housing project that became so controversial -- and had a major effect on race relations in St. Louis. I didn't really know what we were looking at, but the next day Rocket Boy picked up a video about it that he'd reserved at the library ("The Pruitt-Igoe Myth"), and we watched it, and I learned a lot. A lot about Pruitt-Igoe and a lot about St. Louis in general.

Tuesday, we decided to go to an ice cream store that hadn't been included in the newspaper article, but got good reviews online: Clementine's Naughty & Nice Creamery. Rocket Boy had been there once and kind of sniffed about it -- he hadn't been impressed -- but I wanted to go, so we went, taking Teen A with us. I forgot to take a picture, but my opinion of the place is as follows. The ice cream (I had "Blue Moon") is really really really good, but it's too expensive and ultimately probably not worth it. They didn't even have any prices posted, so when the total for our two cones and one float came to over $30, I was totally shocked.

But it has to be said (again), the ice cream was really really really good.

Wednesday night, as I said, we stayed home, and eventually St. Louis got about five more inches of rain to add to the massive amount we got the week before. 

Thursday, Rocket Boy actually went in to his office, and didn't get home until just past 7 pm, so our ice cream outing was postponed a little. We were all starving by then, so we decided to go to Fitz's (one of the newspaper's recommendations) for floats and dinner, not realizing that a Fitz float really can BE dinner. 

We all ordered food and beverages. The kids got bottomless root beer, Rocket Boy got a frozen root beer float, and I got, in addition to fish & chips, something called a Ghostbuster -- which you can see, melting onto its saucer in the photo.

When this was delivered to me, both the fish & chips (my favorite), and that absolutely amazing root beer float, I was so happy. It was similar to how I felt at the Crown Candy Kitchen, except in this case I didn't just have something sweet, I also had fish & chips. It wasn't that I wanted to eat it all -- though I did finish the float, I only ate one piece of fish and a few fries (the rest of the fish was my Friday lunch). But something about being able to order this marvelous food, all for me, and have them bring it to me, and I could have as much of it as I wanted, just made me feel so loved. I can't explain it, but it was an amazing feeling.

Friday was our last full day in St. Louis, so we made a long list of things we still needed/wanted to get done. I decided that I should give the miniatures museum another try, so around 11 am we drove over there and Teen B and I went to it (Rocket Boy and Teen A went off to do a bunch of errands). I was so glad we did -- though we were momentarily shocked to realize that masks were required and had to run back to the car to grab one for Teen B -- it's just an amazing museum. Two floors of dollhouses, dollhouses, dollhouses. It started to make me slightly nauseated after a while, perfect little room after perfect little room after perfect little room. Teen B actually liked it a lot too. We made a game out of trying to find all the dogs and cats in the various rooms of the houses.

The one thing Rocket Boy wanted to do before we left was ride the St. Louis trolley, which had just started running again on Thursday. It was free, and you could jump on or off at any of its six stops. So we drove to the History Museum, which is at one end of the trolley line, at about 5 pm, and caught it there. The trolley isn't air conditioned, and of course we were having another horribly hot and humid St. Louis day -- BUT it turned out that the trolley created its own nice breeze as it rumbled along, so it wasn't as hot as all that. Lots of other people rode the trolley too -- it was almost full. We rode to the end of the line and then the driver moved to the wheel at the other end of the trolley and drove us back -- the trolley doesn't turn around, it just goes forward and then backward.

For the twins' sake, I resisted singing "The Trolley Song" from "Meet Me in St. Louis" but it was hard. Rocket Boy said that when the trolley stopped running (due to financial reasons? mechanical reasons? can't remember) a year or so ago, the headline in the newspaper was "Clang Clang Clunk Went the Trolley."

The trolley goes through the Delmar Loop shopping district -- right by Fitz's Root Beer, in fact. We had been talking about where to go for that day's frozen treat. I felt we should have frozen custard, which is popular in St. Louis, and specifically a "concrete," which I think is similar to a Dairy Queen blizzard. But the place for frozen custard is Ted Drewes, which means standing outside in a line -- and it was just too hot and humid to stand outside in a line. Plus then you would have to stand around outside eating the frozen custard. It didn't seem appealing. As we went past Fitz's, Teen A said, "Why don't we just go back to Fitz's?" and amazingly, everyone agreed.

Rocket Boy and I didn't order food this time around, just gigantic floats. The twins actually did get food, but from the kiddie menu -- Teen A had mozzarella sticks and a salad, Teen B had a grilled cheese sandwich and a salad. All of us ate/drank every drop of our gigantic floats. It was heaven.

Saturday we packed the car and got on the road, much later than I had wanted us to, at about 11. Maybe 11:15. And even so, we "forgot" to take out the garbage, and it had french fries and a tub of cooked (and rejected, by Teen B) ramen in it. Every day since then I've thought about what must be happening to that garbage in Rocket Boy's hot apartment (we turned off the air conditioners just as we were leaving). I'm so glad I don't have to go back to that, but Rocket Boy does, in three weeks. I put "forgot" in quotes because we didn't forget -- nobody wanted to do it, because it's hard to take the garbage out, and we were wearing ourselves out carrying luggage up and down the stairs and packing the car, and nobody wanted to ALSO make a trip downstairs and down the street to the alley where the dumpsters are, carrying a smelly bag of trash.

I am so glad to be out of St. Louis.

The first day we only managed to drive to Junction City, Kansas, but at least we were out of Missouri. I was so happy to be out of Missouri, I could just taste it. Kansas is a long, boring state, but it has an important thing going for it: it's not Missouri! 

I wanted us to get an early start on Sunday, because heavy thunderstorms were predicted for the Denver/Boulder area by evening. But I couldn't get anyone moving. We got two rooms in the Best Western we stayed in Saturday night, two double queens, and Rocket Boy stayed with Teen A while I stayed with Teen B. This meant that everyone got their own queen bed to sleep in, and the beds were comfortable, so we should have been well rested and ready to go early. But Rocket Boy was (and is) still moving very slowly after his surgery, and Teen A was sick, and Teen B was coming down with it... and anyway, we didn't leave until 10:30 or so. Maybe 10:45.

I had asked Rocket Boy to get us out of St. Louis on Saturday, which he did, and then I drove from the outskirts of St. Louis to the outskirts of Kansas City. He drove us from Kansas City to Topeka and then I drove us to Junction City. But on Sunday it was all me, almost all day. I drove us from Junction City to Limon, Colorado, which is roughly 387 miles, and then he drove us the last 100 miles home. I drove as fast as I thought I could get away with, but it wasn't fast enough. We were on the outskirts of Denver when the storm hit, and it hit so hard that you couldn't see the road. It reminded me of the time I drove through a tornado in Minnesota with my mother. Rocket Boy pulled over, as did a lot of other cars, though we were horrified to see plenty of cars continuing on through the mess. Later, as we started driving again, we passed a whole bunch of cars that had taken shelter under an overpass. It was really a terrible storm.

We stopped at Great Scott's for dinner, and to have a break after all that. And then we went home, driving through another storm, but not as bad. We got home around 9 pm and the cats were very puzzled -- who are these people?

***

It is very good to be home. I feel so lucky to live here, in Boulder, and in a house, not an apartment on the second floor of an old house with the laundry in the basement and the trash down the street and shootings and sirens outside every night. The fact that our house is small suddenly seems unimportant. If we feel crowded, we can go outside. We take walks every evening, even if it's dark. I never went for a single walk in St. Louis.

So that's always a good thing about going away -- you love your home so much more when you come back.

Today my sister called with some sad news she'd gotten in a text from one of our cousins, about something that one of our other cousins had posted on Facebook. All the strange ways we communicate in the modern age. But at least we still communicate. I haven't processed this news yet -- it's still kind of blowing me away. 

Anyway, we're home.

Reading post: The Makioka Sisters

I have finished my seventh book for the 2022 Classics Challenge: The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki Junichiro, published between 1943 and 1948. I chose it to fulfill category #10: Classic that's been on your To-Be-Read list the longest. This is the book that inspired my entire list for this year's Challenge, and it is the last book I will be reading by a Japanese author, written originally in Japanese. My five remaining books will be by Japanese Americans, written in English.

I was kind of dreading this book (530 pages in very small type), and it took me a few weeks to read. But I ended up loving it.

Tanizaki is a major Japanese author, but I don't think I had read anything by him until I read Devils in Daylight to add some context to my reading of The Honjin Murders, my previous Challenge book. Devils was OK, but nothing special. It is very difficult to see how the writer of that book was able to produce (some 25 years later) The Makioka Sisters.

(I should note that there's a film of the book -- I just put a hold on it at the library and hope to watch it next week when we're home from St. Louis.)

Tanizaki was born in 1886 and published his first short story in 1910. According to Wikipedia, he began writing The Makioka Sisters in the early 1940s, as Japan was going into World War II and the old traditional life was clearly ending. It is divided into three "books," and the first 13 chapters of Book 1 (out of 29) were published in two installments in 1943. The Japanese government then decided that the story was inappropriate and cancelled it. In consequence, the entirety of Book 1 was not published until 1946, Book 2 in 1947, and Book 3 in 1948. I don't know whether Tanizaki had written the whole thing when he started publishing it. Occasionally there seem to be continuity lapses, but not many.

Although the Japanese title translates better as "Lightly Falling Snow," the English title is perfect, since this is the story of the four Makioka sisters of Osaka, from the fall of 1936 to the spring of 1941. When the book begins, Tsuruko, the eldest, is probably about 38, married to a man who has taken the Makioka name, since there were no sons to carry on the family name, and with six children. Sachiko, the second daughter and from whose perspective we view the world, is about 34, married to a man who has also taken the Makioka name, and with one daughter. Yukiko, the third daughter, is about 30, and still unmarried -- finding her a husband is one of the book's major plot points. And Taeko, the fourth daughter, is about 26, also unmarried because Yukiko must be married first, although Taeko has been involved with someone since she was 19. While Yukiko is more traditional (usually wears kimono, is shy and retiring), Taeko is a very modern young woman -- always wears Western clothes, works, smokes, and goes out with men rather than waiting for her family to find suitable suitors. The family's troubles with Taeko are the other major plot point.

The sisters go through the year, celebrating special days, going to the theater, suffering from minor ailments, entertaining guests. Suitors are found for Yukiko, thoroughly investigated, interacted with, and then rejected. Taeko causes problems in various ways. There is a flood. There are serious illnesses, occasionally resulting in death. There are conflicts between the younger sisters and Tsuruko and her husband Tatsuo, who as the eldest are considered the heads of the family. The book never "takes off," it never changes pace. Some sections are more dramatic than others, but no matter what is going on, there is always mention of what they have for dinner, how tired someone is and how they must take a nap, what people wore, how hot or cold it is. In other words, the book is about as close to "real life" as anything I've ever read, probably as close as it's possible to come in a novel.

Here is the last sentence of the book:

Yukiko's diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.

Have you ever read a 530-page novel that ended like that? But it's so typical of the book. No grand summing up, nothing like that. Just another minor illness. Clearly, the Makioka sisters' lives are just going to keep rolling along. It's April 1941, and their world is soon to be upended, but you know that whatever happens, they will keep on having dinner (even if they have almost no food), suffering minor illnesses (even if there are no drugs available to treat them), thinking about what they're going to wear (even if it's a choice of this rag or that one).

After 100 pages or so of the book, I was worried. How would I ever finish something so boring? But by the end I was in love. And then it's so hard to say goodbye. I wanted Tanizaki to have written a sequel. According to Wikipedia, the character of Sachiko is based on his third wife Matsuko, who apparently also had three sisters like the Makiokas. So that explains how Tanizaki was able to even conceive of such a book. I am myself the third of four sisters, and the Makiokas rang true to me -- their love for each other intertwining with their irritation, the way their views of each other change and develop through the years, their absorption with each other. There is no one I think about more than my sisters.

Terrible, world-altering events are taking place while the Makioka sisters live their lives, and they are mentioned in passing, but no one pays a lot of attention. Sachiko's next-door neighbors are Germans who return to Europe partway through the book, and later she receives letters from the wife, Hilda, indicating that life in Germany is starting to be difficult, but Hilda is sure (in February 1941) it will all work out well. When the book ends, in April, Pearl Harbor is seven and a half months away. It's so interesting that Tanizaki ended the story where he did. In March, a character called Mrs. Itani takes a ship to the United States, saying she will only stay six months or so. I found myself wondering whether she made it back in time, or whether she ended up in an internment camp.

As I mentioned above, my last five books for this year's Classics Challenge will be by Japanese Americans, and I believe they all -- or almost all -- focus on how Japanese Americans were treated because of the war, because of Pearl Harbor, the effects of the internment camps, etc. I"m so curious to make the transition to those books, to see what if any connections I can make between the two bodies of literature (Japanese and Japanese American).

Post-note: I finally finished watching the film of The Makioka Sisters today (8/19/22). It was kind of a fun accompaniment to the book. The book is much better -- the film adds a ridiculous attraction between Sachiko's husband and Yukiko, plus it naturally has to cut the story way back. It might make a better miniseries than a film. I read that it was seriously underfunded by the studio, and that shows. Anything that would have been hard/expensive to film, such as the flood, has been omitted. But the acting is pretty good, although it's always a little hard to tell with a subtitled film. There was one scene, a dinner with one of Yukiko's suitors, that I thought was excellent, very funny, but much of the rest of it seemed too abbreviated. Still, it was fun to see the four sisters -- I thought the actresses were well chosen for their parts -- and the kimonos they wear are just beautiful. I'm glad I watched it.