faulty vision
From the monthly archives: December 2008
We’re home at last. The house is a mess. So it goes: I have a clean-up task to do for the beginning of the year, which should start it out just right.
Meanwhile, 2008 retrospectives seem to be the order of the day.
I had a son.
It’s possible I will never do anything so [...]
Today was our last day in Seattle for the winter holidays. Tomorrow morning we head back to California, just in time for the close of the year and the beginning of 2009. It’ll be sad to leave, as usual — I continue to feel like Seattle is home, though I have the same feeling about [...]
And since our last entry was about the past generations, here’s a palate-cleanser with the future one.
We picked up a scanner a few days ago at Fry’s during one of our traditional holiday Fry’s runs — hey, you have your traditions and we have ours — and I have been spending my evenings over the last few days going through our family’s old photo albums and scanning anything of interest. I [...]
We took advantage of the melting snow to go on one long-promised visit. Mrs. M. has been a member of the Seattle Mahikari Dojo for as long as I can remember, and when Sako and I were small used to spoil us hopelessly. Almost all of the ladies at the dojo did, for that matter, [...]
We’ve been spending the day scanning photographs from old picture albums before they get too degraded, part of my ongoing and desultory effort to record our family history before it’s lost.
We were scanning an album of photographs from 1972, the year my parents married — the year before I was born — and came [...]
“I love the kid so much,” I confessed awkwardly to my mother. We are Japanese. We do not talk about loving our children. “I have a hard time imagining if I have another kid I will be able to love it as much.”
“Mm,” said Mom. She was drying dishes; I was washing. “Babies are [...]
From Sako (Mobile)
Dec 25, 2008 11:34:54 AM
Callback Number: Sako (Mobile)
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I just dropped my boarding pass into the toilet…pre flush
***
Sako flew into town for Christmas, which makes this a full house for the holidays. Barring her boyfriend, John, we are all now gathered into the Hirata [...]
We didn’t do Christmas presents this year by agreement with my sister, which means that we didn’t come with anything for her or my mother, but that Sako came up with presents from REI for all of us. She’s bad at keeping her end of these kinds of deals, which is okay; it’s a typical [...]
Mom was whispering to Hobbes, who was listening with great interest.
“…to me if your mother gives you a hard time,” she was saying confidentially in Japanese. “I will tell you stories about her….”
“Mom.”
She stopped whispering and smiled innocently at me. Hobbes stared at her, no doubt studying the mechanics of perfidy from [...]
Part of our Christmas tradition since the Guy came on the scene has been that he cooks at least once or twice. There is something to be said for variety, and after all a family vacation should mean that even Mom gets a vacation from the stove and the clean-up, though she obsessively follows our [...]
My mother, bless her heart, is having a hard time adjusting to the conflict between grandmotherly doting and traditional Japanese strictness. Add to that her avowed policy of “Thou shalt not interfere,” an impossible motto at best given her innate inability to let something that needs correction simply go without a quiet word, and [...]
Food porn it ain’t, but one of the best things about coming home to Mom’s house is the Japanese cooking. And not your on-the-menu-so-gaijin-will-pay-for-it cooking, but real Japanese cooking, the authentic kind that gets served up in the house if you’re a pre-war Japanese person living on a rice farm in Nagano prefecture.
This [...]
It’s a beautiful thing, when you don’t have to travel through it.
The snow is lovely from inside the very warm venue of my mother’s house. The power isn’t out, which is a mercy for pretty much everyone in Seattle and Bellevue right now. While my mom has a pile of wood in the backyard [...]
This will not number among my favorable holiday travel memories of all time.
1:15 pm
“There’s a storm coming,” said Mom over the phone, sounding skeptical about the forecast as she always does when it does not suit her personal preferences. “They say there will be snow.”
“Snow,” I said. “In Seattle.”
“I do not [...]
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