nine years

Nine years.

Miss you, Dad.

***

There are only a few days a year that we can spend any serious thought on dead ancestors, although with our family ancestor altar our ancestors are never really very far from our daily lives. On a daily basis, our ancestors get the pick of our dinners, served once a day on miniature plates with miniature serving utensils on a little tray. It's hard to ignore something you feed every day before you eat. On a more serious level though, we try not to expend too much thought on our ancestors as individuals. After the traditional 49 days of grieving, we try to move on. The more we think of the departed, the greater our attachment to his or her spirit, and the harder it is for that person to move on. This is considered selfishness on our part.

Some people are out there right now yelling, "Denial! This is denial! It's unhealthy!" To which I respond, "Of course it's denial. We're Japanese. In fact, we're not only Japanese, we're Japanese-American. It's a cultural tradition in both our houses."

For a few days out of the year however, it's safe for us to think about our ancestors as individuals -- fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, every relationship under the son -- because the spirit of the ancestor will be visiting anyway. One of these days is the anniversary of the ancestor's death. That day we serve a special meal to the ancestor altar, one the ancestor would have especially liked. We visit the grave if we can, to clean it or to pay respects. We put out pictures of the deceased and tell stories about him, usually stories that make us laugh because it's polite to show our dead ancestor that we have happy memories about him.

July 12th is the ninth anniversary of my dad's death. In terms of anniversaries, this isn't a substative one. There's more symbolism in five, or ten, or maybe even seven. Mom was in town, though, and so we did what we don't always get a chance to do, which is swap dad stories as a family.

***

Dad suffered from what you could most charitably call Professional Attention Deficit Disorder. He was a violin teacher, a martial arts sensei, a carpenter, and a piano tuner/rebuilder. At some point in his life he was hired by a professional baseball team, I think it was the Chicago Cubs, to teach their players how to focus. He was drafted into the U.S. Army, despite not being an American citizen, and served a tour of duty in Korea and Japan, during which he taught hand-to-hand combat and won a medal for constructing a bowling alley. He was a Shiatsu master and an architect. He loved baseball but hated watching it because it bored the crap out of him. He loved children. He disliked authority figures, especially when he was one.

One of my earliest memories is dreaming that he was bringing home my first piano. We were living in Seattle at the time, in a tiny house that flooded every time it rained. If you think about the two parts of that last sentence and put them together, you'll realize that this is comparable to living in an unsecured trailer in Kansas without tornado insurance. It was, however, all my parents could afford.

I must have been almost three years old at the time. That was the year I began studying piano. I started violin ate age two, but that hadn't worked out. Every parent begins with an unsmudged, shining belief in their firstborn's potential for greatness. Sadly, my parents had to abandon the thought of me as a violin prodigy rather early on. Violin was a failure partly because my parents were both violin teachers, but mostly because I was a supremely pig-headed child. Violin students were always in and out of my house, and I'd grown up assuming that everybody knew how to play the instrument. Having gotten hold of a little violin of my own, I sawed away at it enthusiastically and threw temper tantrums when I didn't sound anything like Heifetz. My parents would try to fix the way I held my bow, or the way I held my violin, and would be reduced to chasing me around the house while I sawed, screaming, running as fast as my fat little legs would carry me.

At some point, this became too painful for both my parents' patience and ears, and out of desperation they decided I should play piano instead. After all, my aunt was a piano teacher. More importantly, they didn't know much about how piano should be played, and in this respect, ignorance could only be bliss. In later years, they defiantly claimed that this was their plan all along, that they'd decided I should be a pianist from the day I was born. Remember what I said about denial?

What led up to my first memory is anybody's guess; none of the prelude to it has any real clarity. I must have fallen asleep at some point, because my grown-up brain tells me that reality couldn't possibly have happened the way my memory thinks it did. Even knowing that, every detail of the memory has the substantive quality of reality, complete with color, emotion, sound, and feel.

I'm sitting at the window in a giant room, waiting for my first piano. Inside the house it's cold and damp. Outside, it's foggy and grey. It's early in the morning, which accounts for the dark; it's Seattle, which accounts for the haze. I'm wearing flannel pajamas and, in the mysteriously bohemian way of toddlers, one sock. Most of the street is covered over by patches of fog, but in the distance, I can see my dad trudging up the street with a baby grand piano strapped to his back. I squirm very excitedly in the window seat, and squash my face and hands up against the window to watch better. As a three year old, of course it doesn't occur to me that a piano is far more likely to carry my father than the other way around, but even 26 years later, there's still that inviolable feeling of conviction in the reality of that memory.

Every child thinks her father is superhuman, no matter how old she gets.

***

My sister, in her late middle school and high school days, was a bit of a delinquent. She was suspended more than once, and the collection of notes sent home from school would have wallpapered the inside of our house once over. Mom, frustrated beyond belief, went through her entire arsenal: guilt, grief, rage, punishment. None of them took.

Dad, who was himself a bit of a delinquent in his day, had a different solution. He bought her a bow. The kind you shoot people with. Complete with very pointy arrows.

"He used to come up to my room and giggle when Mom couldn't hear. He'd tell me all these stories about the stuff he did when he was a kid. Did you know he once punched out his teacher?"

"You got a bow. That wasn't fair."

"He told me he understood, because he was a really bad kid when he was growing up. I think he wanted me to feel like he was on my side. Kept telling me not to worry, because he used to be so much worse."

"Did it work?"

"No. I got all competitive."

***

For a good portion of his life in the States, Dad was the highest dan -- black belt level -- of Ki-Aikido in North America. Kashiwaya Sensei used to be one of his students in those days; he'd come over and eat Mom's noodles and drink beer with Dad, and romp (he was a good romper) with Dad and Masako and me in the backyard.

On the down side, this meant that we had dinner at around 4 pm so that Dad could eat and get to the Aikido Dojo in time to teach classes. This meant he'd be gone for hours and hours, sometimes returning after we'd gone to bed.

On the other hand, from time to time he'd take us with him, and then we'd have the childish delight of playing at the Dojo. There were wall to wall tatami mats in a massive warehouse the size of ... a warehouse. There were cherry trees outside that shed bark in our hair when we climbed them, along with other, more squirmy things that irritated Mom to no end. There was a Gaye's Bakery next door, which smelled outrageously good and probably contributed to my lifelong obsession with bread.

We learned at an early age how to roll properly, how to walk toes-knees, toes-knees, how to bow properly, how to sit seiza style, how to warm up for an Aikido class, and how to head in one direction so that nothing and nobody could stop you.

The last might not have been a good thing to teach any adolescent. My sister learned it even better than I did. The one thing we didn't learn was Aikido; Masako and I were a cellist and pianist, respectively, and the one thing about Aikido is that it can be tough on the wrists.

The high point of them all was when they did Aikido demonstrations at the Cherry Blossom Festival, or at schools and universities around Washington. Dad and his students would take portable mats with them, and Masako and I would run around helping them piece the mats together into a broad, unbroken sea of padding. The demonstration was nearly nonstop talking. Dad would talk, while bodies would hurtle through the air around him, flying this way and that. At one point, one person would have him around the throat, and two more would have each of his arms. He'd make some joke, the audience would laugh, and while they were laughing he'd twitch a little and bang bang bang! Three bodies would hit the dirt and roll, neatly, out of the way.

I never got involved in the arguments that started out, "My daddy can beat up your daddy." Then again, after my class went to one of my dad's Aikido demonstration , everybody knew that their daddies could start something with my daddy, but my daddy would be the one still standing at the end.

And so would my Mom.

***

"So many people with bad English in the army," my dad told us one day in Japanese. He regularly mocked the English of others, happily deluded himself with convictions of his own language skills. "There were people from everywhere, all drafted. They had such terrible accents. One day, I was sitting in a jeep with an American and we heard over the radio, 'Jello, jello, one. Jello jello one."

"What?"

"Jello jello one. Jello jello one. The person on the radio had such bad English! He was trying to say 'jello, jello, one.'" Dad laughed joyously at the recollection. My sister and I exchanged glances.

"Do you mean 'zero'?"

"That's what I said. 'jello jello one.'"

"Ze-ro," I enunciated carefully. "Ze-ro ze-ro one."

Dad scowled. "That's what I said. 'Jello'--" he paused and considered, then twisted his mouth. "--zeh-llo. Zeh-llo. See?" He beamed triumphantly at us, and at our looks of skepticism dismissed the entire subject hastily with, "Anyway, everybody had very bad English. It was impossible to understand them. It was so funny."

***

"I think there's some less expensive insurance available to spouses of veterans," I told my mom one summer, long after dad had died. She was having trouble finding medical insurance that she could afford, being self-employed and diabetic. "I'm sure I saw some stuff on TV. I could write to the Office of Veteran Affairs or something."

"No," Mom demured, dragging the word out doubtfully. "I don't think that is a good idea."

"It wouldn't be any trouble. I could just drop them a line and ask. I'm sure they have something."

Mom looked a little embarrassed. "I really don't think that is a good idea."

"Why not? I mean, Dad was in the military, right?"

"Yes," Mom granted after a moment, though she sounded more dubious still. "He was, but...."

"So, it won't hurt to ask."

There was a small silence. "I think he might have deserted," Mom admitted at last, blinking.

I paused to consider that. "He what?"

The expression of embarrassment deepened. "I think he might have deserted. He went home to visit family, and they sent him a letter to tell him to come back, but he put the letter away and I think he forgot about it. I found it one day, after we were married."

I opened my mouth to object -- how does one forget to go back to the army? -- but closed it again after a second for thought. It would have been extremely characteristic of Dad to do just that. He didn't have what you would call a good memory.

***

One day, Dad showed up at school and pulled us out of class. "Pssst," he hissed at me heavily outside of my classroom window. He already had my little sister in tow. "Psssst. Let's go."

I still have no idea if he'd actually bothered to get permission for my absence or not. I obligingly packed up my workbooks and crayons and trotted out of the class without a word to my teacher.

He drove us down to the local mall, looking full to bursting with excitement. "It's Mama's birthday. You have to help me pick her present," he explained as he barreled recklessly down the streets. He had a laissez-faire approach to driving. If traffic laws, cops, and other drivers left him alone, and all lanes were clear, everything would be fine. I clung futilely to straps and handles in the car. My sister, more phlegmatic, watched solemnly as he swerved with suicidal enthusiasm across and through lanes.

At the mall we found a jewelery shop, which had apparently already seen its share of my Dad at some point or another. He knew where the rings were and which ones he was interested in, and dragged us there with single-minded determination. The choice was down to a few rings. My sister studied one carefully and, under the jeweler's vaguely horrified eye, tasted it. Me, I felt like a grown-up and offered sound aesthetic advice such as, "Barbie wears pink," and, "I think diamonds are blue."

In the end, it was the blue one that won, a sapphire ring that was duly wrapped and paid for by credit card. Dad, having gone to all the trouble of breaking us out of school, then took us around to the candy store, a toy store, and the park. Ring in one pocket, candy in the other, we played hookey until it was time for us to go home. "Not a word to your mother," he warned.

Mom was duly surprised. Dad was duly smug. Joy and happiness all around.

He always was a romantic at heart. Sadly, he was a bit of an imbecile when it came to scheming. He'd forgotten that Mom paid the credit card bills. In fact, he'd forgotten that credit cards sent bills. One night a few weeks later, while Dad and Masako and I sat watching TV, we suddenly heard a series of small sputterings from the kitchen, where Mom was doing the household accounts and sending checks.

First it was, "What?"

And then it was, "What?!"

And finally, it was: "You paid what for WHAT?!"

The three of us looked at each other, and bolted for the stairs. Grown-up Dad might have been in body; when it came to Mom, he was an abject coward. There wasn't enough room on the bed for all three of us to hide under the covers. We held a vote. By a majority of one, he was sent down to face the music.

***

When the end finally came for Dad, it didn't come with a bang or a whisper, but with a smile. Death has been kind to our family. He died surrounded by friends and the people who loved him. His memorial was nearly standing-room only, and there were more children than adults, crowded on the stage with their violins to play a farewell piece, and while it was a beautiful memorial, it was a celebration as well. There was more laughter than there were tears, and in the years after that, more laughter still.

We may only have a few days a year to remember him the way he should be remembered, but we're grateful for those days we get. We're grateful for a wonderful father and teacher and mentor and friend. Most of all, we're grateful for the years we got to make those memories.

Wherever you are, Dad, take care. I love you.