10 years and change

Yesterday was July 12th, something that hadn't registered with me until my Mom called my cell phone while I was driving to work. "Are you driving?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Oh, sorry! Sorry!" she said, and kept talking.

Japanese is like that. There is a whole repertoire of polite Japanese phrases meant to show the conversant's inferiority, humility, or remorse for inconveniencing the other person that, taken literally, make you wonder if the Japanese aren't so much humble as they are just really really rude. One of my mother's favorites is waruikedo which, translated by context, means, "It's really, really awful/inconsiderate/rude of me to ask this of you, but I'm going to ask you anyway." It took me years to register the prevalence of this phrase in common conversation, and when I did, it began to bother me to the extent that one day I finally called my mother on it.

"If it's really so bad, why do you ask?"

My mother, who always gave the appearance of listening even if she was ignoring you, cocked her head to one side and admitted it was a good question. Then she made me clean my room anyway, which just went to prove that even if she actually did feel bad about asking me, she wasn't going to make a little quibble like remorse stop her.

At any rate, as I say, Mom called me on the way to work to remind me that it was July 12. "Papa died 10 years ago, so you should put out a picture of him and think good thoughts of him today."

So here I am. Good thoughts.

Happy anniversary, Dad.

I spent the entire entry last year at this time going through Dad stories. Today, you get only one. Not because there aren't more, but because it's the day after, and it doesn't do to get all maudlin on a Tuesday. Mondays are different. Mondays are meant for tears and drama and the tugging of heartstrings. Tuesdays are meant for junk food and forcing IT to get you a replacement for the bulimic geriatric work computer you currently have by pouring diet coke in its fan vents.

One of Dad's favorite stories was about his time serving in the U.S. Military in Korea, where he trained unarmed combat and "built bowling alleys." He even had a medal for the bowling alleys, something which in retrospect I'm dubious about, but as a child seemed logical. I can certainly understand him not wanting to tell his children he'd received a medal for killing people -- whatever our family's military history, he had strong prejudices against it in practice, if not in theory -- and it would have seemed perfectly logical to him to tell us it was for something utterly innocuous. I suppose we should be grateful he didn't claim it was for bowling, since he'd proven to us on at least one occasion that he was the least likely person to be awarded by the U.S. Armed Services for that particular skill.

Whether it was true or not, I have no means of verifying; the medal is long disappeared into the junk drawers of our family house, mingled with the bits and pieces of Mom's jewelry that didn't survive her daughters' enthusiastic make-believe sessions. Idiotic though it seems, the claim still holds the ring of verity to me. Given the option of sending Dad out to combat and having him build bowling alleys, I'm pretty sure that his commanding officer made the right choice.

He had two stories that he enjoyed retelling, over and over again. The first one was the tale of the jello, which I recapped last year. The other was the legend of the hot dog. "They sent us to Japan for leave," the story began. "I was there with some friends, they were American, they had never been in Japan. Oh, it was so funny!"

Like ALF, Dad always cracked himself up more than anybody else. No matter how many times he told the story, it never grew old to him. "They wanted hot dogs," he chortled, "so I took them to a hot dog stand, and one of them, he saw the wasabi and he asked me what it was, so I told him it was mustard. And he asked me, 'is it hot?' And I said, 'No no, not so hot at all. Very mild. Delicious. You should try it. Put a lot on.' So he put so much on, you couldn't see the sausage anymore, and he bit into it, and he froze, and he turned red, and then he turned white, and he started to cry. I laughed so hard-- and then I ran away as fast as I could. Not so fast, though," he added, for the sake of verity in storytelling. "I was laughing too hard."

Japanese humor. A subtle, delicate thing. Like the soft, fragile petals of a cherry blossom floating in a keg of Budweiser.