December 25, 2001
Hirata theory o' relativity
I slept until noon, and then got up to watch my mother clean the family altar in preparation for New Years.
How does the Hirata family celebrate Christmas? I'll tell you. We don't. That is, we used to, once upon a time; back in the days when my sister and I were young and liked getting brightly colored packages that either chirped or broke when shaken too hard. There was a time when we were actually Christian, to boot, which gave us an excuse to spend money we didn't have on presents we didn't really need. My family has always been pretty poor, so we usually made do with second-hand everything: second-hand clothes, second-hand toys, second-hand plants, second-hand pets. I tell you, you don't know what real hardship is until you've taken ownership of a guinea pig that was played with just a little too hard by the last owners.
Didn't matter. Not then. We didn't know any better. Presents were presents, and Christmas was Christmas, and everything was perfect. Every small, two-foot tree -- all my parents could afford -- was a giant. The handmade decorations had all the luster of store-bought ornaments. Santa had friends who worked at the mall, and once a year, he'd do his friends a favor and come to town so we could have pictures taken with him.
Back then, we used to chivy our parents out of bed at four in the morning so that we could dash downstairs and tear into presents. That was a long time ago. At some point, sleep got more interesting than the gifts we were going to get. Giving got more exciting than getting. And, to top insult off with injury, my mother started to sleep only three hours a night anyway, something she associates with old age but which I associate with a deep-rooted instinct for sadism. No child should be woken up at five a.m. because Mom has already made breakfast and is lonely for company at the breakfast table.
Plus, to be completely honest, Dad really made Christmas. To the very last year of his life, he was still a child about the holidays. No package was too fragile to shake, and no low-down, dirty trick was stupid enough to exploited in the interests of fooling gift recipients. He'd pack boxes in boxes in boxes, superglue ribbons onto wrapping paper and wrapping paper onto cardboard and cardboard onto boxes, and put jewelry in packaging removed from chisel sets. We celebrated Christmas even past our fling with Christianity because he couldn't stand the thought of missing it. When we grew old enough to think about college or graduation, he'd be the one to wake us up at the crack of dawn.
"Let's go see what we got," he'd chortle, and poke relentlessly through the covers until we groaned and mumbled and crawled downstairs in our pajamas. He'd joke, and laugh, and tear open wrapping paper, and tease Mom, and hurl things at us until resentment gave way to vague interest, and then enthusiasm. He had that effect on people. Friends who had bigger houses and deeper pockets would come to our house and celebrate the season, toasting our little tree and my parents' hospitality like it epitomized the holidays.
Christmas isn't the same without him. We've never celebrated it since.
I didn't mean to turn maudlin. Sorry.
Better start over.
I was watching my mother cleaning the family altar, in preparation for the New Year. New Years is a special occasion for the Japanese -- for Asians, really -- and it's surrounded by traditions and rituals, part of the whole cultural heritage thing.
"I don't have any presents this year," I said, apologetically, sitting on the tatami. "I figured, I lost my job, I should save a little. Plus, the holidays sort of jumped up on me. I almost forgot about them entirely."
"Me, too," my mother said in Japanese. "The winter has gone by so fast. Don't point your feet at the altar."
I curled my legs under me. "Sorry. -- I heard on NPR that it's sort of epidemic this year. That whole September 11th thing had everybody sort of trapped in time. We all lost September because we were concentrating on that date, and then we lost October because we were getting over concentrating on that date, and by the time time started moving again, it was already November, except in our minds it was October. There were interviews."
"I have a theory," Mom said, brightly. "I think it is because people generate so much pollution. The pollution, it expends energy, and it makes the earth speed up in order to get rid of the pollution, and so time goes faster."
"That makes perfect sense," I muttered.
My mother started to hum to herself. "You should tell your friends my theory," she said. "It will explain everything."
So I have.
My grandmother is in town, "town" being "Seattle," and came with my mother to pick me up at the airport. She is of Yoda's people, for those of you who've ever seen any of the Star Wars movies. For those of you who are deaf, blind, and have been in a prison camp somewhere outside of the solar system for the past four decades, Yoda is a little green alien sage who is very wise, very wrinkled, very cryptic, has bright eyes, no teeth, and strange hair.
With the exception of the skin pigmentation -- green is apparently a masculine trait for their kind -- my grandmother bears a striking resemblance to a certain old pointy-eared muppet.
There is a distinct language barrier between us, my grandmother and me. She speaks parochial Japanese, the kind spoken before the war, "The War" being -- to my generation, if not hers -- World War II. She speaks slowly and deliberately and gently; it's been a generation or two since she's raised her voice for any reason.
Me, I speak English. No, I speak American. I speak quickly and carelessly and loudly, when I feel like it. I've yet to actually articulate a single phrase all the way through; my tongue gets bored before I'm finished pronouncing one word, and usually skips on to the next, leaving it up to the listener to finish the word before or extrapolate some meaning in the overall sentence, based on context and body language. I speak Japanese, yes, but so do about a million three-year olds. The difference is, those three-year olds know what they're saying. Me, I'm making it up as I go along.
My grandmother'd been in town for several weeks now, and she and my mother hadn't yet exhausted all their topics of conversation. That's fortunate, because she's supposed to be in town for several more weeks.
Unfortunately, I arrived in Seattle just in time to reach that point in the conversational cycle that involved embarrassing stories about yours truly. We sat at the dinner table, and two of the three generations of my family began with: "Do you remember when Yuhri. . . ?"
"No," I said, hastily. "Would you like some more daikoroshi?"
"You were three years old, and . . . "
"Or maybe some genmai? Tea?"
". . . heard splish-splash sounds from the bathroom . . . "
"Oh, hey," I suggested desperately, "maybe I'd better start washing the dishes."
". . . in the toilet, and it was so cute. . ."
"Did you remember to offer some of this to the ancestors?"
". . . I still have a picture, somewhere. Let me think . . ."
My sister is supposed to arrive tonight. I can't wait for her to get here.