SOUL OF THE STATION

Waiting at the new train station in the Big City to go home yesterday, saw on the opposite brand-new platform a wide-eyed little girl coming up on the escalator, she was all new too, about 4 years old, new to trains and stations, especially escalators, not been walking for all that long, legs still new, eyes still new, a fresh world it was everywhere, she soaking it up, not really walking but anyway holding on to her grandpa's hand there in the crowding rush of tall folks flowing around her, her hair tied in two bunches, one sprouting from each side of her head, she wearing a pink jacket covered in kittens, bouncing around every way she could because walking at just a plain old regular grandpa pace was simply not enough for all she contained, practically shimmering she was with the energy and excitement of having this vast place in her mind, her head turning, eyes looking everywhere at all this newness, skipping, bouncing, swaying, jumping, everything she could manage while holding a big hand and being good at the same time amid all the colors, lights and sounds, huge announcements there were, and thousands of folks hurrying here and there or standing in lines and waiting for trains that rumbled in her feet, other people buying food or papers or drinks from people and machines.

There she bounce-marched along at the heart of all that serious train-waiting business, done in mostly dark blues and browns, grays and blacks, with eyes to books and mags, racing sheets and games, phones and pods of all kinds but she, oh she was pink and all eyes, mostly in any direction but forward, though sometimes there too, grandpa was her guide so she was free to look and see, not to walk along but to skip along, hair bouncing, way more fun, taking everything into the whole new life of herself.

As far as I could see, she was the soul of that whole rush-hour station, and as I watched her brighten her way through the shadowy throng I couldn't help think how much hope there is after all, so long as there are children, who do for us former children what we no longer do for ourselves, and thus carry on the grand endeavor so many grownups seem to have left behind or given up on, bearing the true soul from all the way in the past all the way into the future: skipping, usually, among us busy, preoccupied shadows who should remember to skip now and then as well along our ways, however we can, for that is how we once were and still are, at the heart of ourselves-- that is the deep reality of it, as children are here to remind us, even as we wait for our train.

HAPPY HOLINESS

To celebrate the holiday season and the visiting grandies, we decorated the tree by the stone stairs with all sorts of ornamentations that made a bright celebration out the big window. Yesterday, the festive days being over, while I was out working in the garden Echo began to take the decorations down. She removed them to the extent she could reach and asked me to take down the rest before I came in for lunch.

So just before the grandies arrived to share our noonday meal, as I was taking down the long festoons of gold, red, blue and silver beads and twinkly strings of all sorts, I had to put them someplace safe for the moment, so I just looped the red fuzzy strings and the blue and green twinkly frillies around my neck; then there were the ornaments, which were too big and many to hold-- not into the pockets of course, or down on the stone steps, so I hung them on their loops from my shirt front and pocket buttons, and kept on looping the bright other strands over my shoulders, so by the time the grandies arrived and I headed up the stone stairs with gold, blue, silver and red garlands of sparkle and frilly twinkles high around my neck, over my head and down over my shoulders, loopy festoons of bright beads of all colors reaching to my knees, big round shiny ornaments in both hands and dangling from all the buttons of my shirt, I had come to embody the holiday spirit itself, and as I made my necessarily stately holiday way up the stone steps and into the house there wasn't an icicle of humbug anywhere, so as I opened the door it was impossible to hold back even one of the loud "HO-HO-HOs" that suddenly emerged from that ancient place we all know in the spirit. That's what holidays are for: to bring out the happy holiness in us, each and every one.

As it is in delighted children.

GOODNESS AND JOY
(From when the twins were born, 6 years ago this month)

Well, the newborn twins are with us for a while, and are they ever new. And since we know from experience that newborn newness is as temporary as a dewdrop we are making the most of it, short of keeping the little sleepies awake too long.

After each of the babies in my life has grown up, I've somehow managed to forget how tiny newborns are, a lapse absolutely corrected by the next newcomer. Throughout their ephemeral awakenings, how wrinkly and skinny and endearing they are, with their tiny actual legs and feet with genuine toes, hands and fingers that work, professional yawns as though they've been yawning all their lives, which in fact they have been.

Between yawns they lie there patiently, practicing all the many faces, smiling a full-bloom smile before they even have a sense of humor; then there's a look of heartbreaking disappointment, hopefully never to be used, but practiced nonetheless. And rage, and glee and other excitements: all rehearsals.

Even when their kitten-cries pierce the air like arrows, carry upstairs and downstairs, penetrate thick walls and doors and bring instant silence to the most important adult conversation, they aren't really crying, they aren't in actual despair; like humor, that also requires personal experience of the highs and lows of the world out there, for which they're busy rehearsing. So as they weep and laugh it is our pleasure to feel it on their behalf.

And before they drift off to sleep, they watch for miracles with those bright brown eyes, as the faces of ancestors drift through their own by the minute, as clouds through a sky: there is their mother in the smile; now their father about the eyes, then the look of an uncle of mine, and then the young face of my mother, as they pass through all the faces they have come from, including me, I guess. It is startling to see one's own memories flow across those tiny others, who just got here. At no moment in our lives are we apart from eternity.

Hence the familiar ancient feeling one feels, on peeping in through the bedroom door to see them at last asleep: two tiny quiet bumps in the coverlet beside each other, two tiny lifesteps out into the world that we will do our best to ensure are continued on pathways of goodness and joy.

WALKING WITH A CHILD
From the PLM archives, February 2004

When you go for a walk with a child, as I do so often with Kaya when she comes to visit (it's a crime to keep new legs indoors all day in a house in the country, to say nothing of legs that have some mileage), you are reminded - in case you had forgotten - of all the yearning and learning and true adventure there is in every single minute of life.

Seeds, weeds, roads, where did the berries go, holding pods, who made this path, what is the frost, where are the deer, if there are rabbits why can't we see them and what kind of trees are those, when do the acorns fall and what is that, sensing wild beasts large and small out there unseen but living and moving - how stirring and inspiriting it all is in truth, with a nice little bit of trepidation - and if you are paying attention in any real way, and not merely serving as an accompanying corporeal presence (perhaps, heaven forbid, an authoritarian representative of some kind) you must drop everything you've got going on way up there in the heady heights and come down to where the adventure is, return for a time to the child you once were (perhaps sadly orphaned all these decades).

When you go for a walk with a child you'd best not be all tenterhooked with expectation and directed with direction, because with a child in the lead, or even in tow, you never know the turnings you'll take (children can turn on an atom at any level) or where your twofold path will lead. That's another gift children give, in recalling to you the true grace of realworld paths: that they can lead anywhere, a grace so easy to forget after years of advance on cut-to-the-chasedly optimized career etc. paths, with their cradle-to-grave governmental perspective.

That is the very same amnesia by which you may have forgotten that you too were once able to go wherever you pleased, a privilege you now realize, with a pang of some proportion, was a valuable privilege indeed: however could you have given that up, you might ask yourself, among the many other questions you haven't asked in a long while, perhaps even never before. And maybe as a result you'll hear the answers you've always carried inside, until before too long wherever you go it is as though you are walking with a child.

The way I try to walk when Kaya isn't here.

THE OLD TABULA RASA

In the evolution of knowledge, it's a fact that things keep on becoming unknown. I'm not referring here to elective rasafication of the tabula, as for example by creationists, or to the natural misplacement of knowledge, as embodied in where the hell I put my reading glasses, which is sort of a pro tem microrasafication. To get more rapidly to my point here, I'm talking about how each generation is born bearing the somehow surprising absence of such basic knowledge as seeds and how to use a rake.

When you're raising kids, you try to teach them moment-to-moment about all the things they need to understand or at least know about, from the toilet to the stars, so you never really get to comprehend the particulars of it all, just how much and in what detail they have to learn these things, and so you miss a few, especially the things you'd never even think of teaching anything about, such as will dad's favorite fountain pen write on toast, or how many times can you put a ball in a box and take it out again. These details too must be learned. (Bet you didn't know you'd learned somehow about fountain pens writing on toast.) Though it's been dismissed as an ignorant representation of the newborn mind, the old tabula is nonetheless surprisingly rasa in certain respects.

When Kasumi was born in on the island of Ibiza, the first thing I did when we took her home was carry her out into an old grove near our finca in Cala Boix, break off some wild rosemary leaves and hold them to her nose. She was only about three days old, but I still remember the look of awe that came into her eyes; no rasa there at all (three-day olds are experts at awe).

On the other hand, I remember one day in spring a few years later when we lived in Kyoto and only Keech and I were home, when I said Hey Keech - who was then about three years old - let's go water the daffodils! We got a big glass of water and went out there and I let Keech do the watering; he held the glass up to the daffodil's mouth so it could drink. Way cuter and more endearing than knowledge. Imagination is a beautiful thing.

When decades later I became a grandfather I got Kaya started early learning about plants and seeds and gardening - she'd help me plant whatever I was planting while she was here - but I guess that somehow, due to seasonal scheduling and time crowding, Mitsuki and Miasa slipped by in that regard-- they haven't yet gotten to be here at planting time. Then yesterday afternoon I took the three of them out to help me pick some winter carrots-- partly for thinning, but mostly for the major WOW I knew it would be for them to firmly grasp those green stems near to the ground, pull hard and come up with a large bright orange root right out of the dirt! (We filled the carrot basket to overflowing but still it was Me, me, me, I want to pull up the next one! and for the first time in my life I was a grandfather seeking order among carrots.) Then we took the whole basketful of green and orange to the garden hose, where we washed the carrots off, and boy were they bright orange when I held a freshly washed bunch of them up in the air-- it was the roots of impressive.

This was of necessity followed by the eating of cold, crispy, orange-glowing baby carrots in the warm kitchen-- what can be mind-sweeter than new teeth crunching into a carrot just plucked from winter ground and washed with icy water? For some time the kitchen air was filled with carrot snaps and contemplation. The crunching trio wanted to eat all the carrots right there, but agreed to take some home for later.

The surprise I've been getting to all along came when Mitsuki asked me why I had buried all those carrots.

Flashback > from PLM November 2003

A LEAF

After Kaya left a few evenings ago, as I was emptying my pockets before going to bed I found a leaf that she had picked up on our afternoon walk that day, from among all the other leaves lying on the ground. I suppose she had picked it out because of its unusualness in being half crimson and half bright yellow, the colors divided right down the middle of the leaf, had picked it up and given it to me, I had looked at it, and remarked upon it, and thought and I suppose said, in the brief instant of attention young children allow for such things, how special it was that she had seen the very beauty in that particular leaf among all the others. Then I had put the leaf in my pocket and forgotten about it as we continued on our walk. When I found it in my pocket that night, I put it on the table beside my bed. Now for the days since, each time I go to bed at night and each time I rise in the morning the beauty of that leaf, at first so bright and attention-grabbing, has begun to fade a little bit as the red weakens toward brown and the yellow does too. Soon it will be the one color all the other leaves have become, so is grabbing my attention in a different way. It is a little record, there, of the life of all things, once in their greenness, thence to their fullest beauty, that falls in time to the beginning children give to us.

ON TREATING SMALL CHILDREN INFECTED WITH TICKLEBUGS

The Ticklebug is a mystery to both medicine and entomology. It is such a mystery, in fact, that I have never seen a single report on the creature [I can't even find a photo!]. For some reason it does not seem to be a matter of much scientific concern.

Yet every time my granddaughters visit they are immediately found to be carrying one or more Ticklebugs somewhere on their persons. Thank goodness I am a specialist in treating the condition. My children Kasumi and Keech were also frequently infected when younger, so over the years I have learned by experience how to treat this giggly curse of the young.

My ministrations relieve the symptoms about as well as can be expected, given the recurrent nature of the condition. The ultimate symptoms include loud squealing and spasmodic movement, in time leading to roiling motions on the floor in an attempt to avoid treatment, which must be thorough.

As to the methodology, I first look carefully into the patient's eyes, and about the face, for the slightest sign of laughter: a twitch at the corner of the mouth, perhaps-- a sure sign that a Ticklebug is hiding somewhere on the victim's body, already generating early indications of extreme gigglitis.

Under the chin or the arms, for example, are favorite Ticklebug hiding spots - on the side of the neck is a good spot too - so those and various other possible areas of infection, such as along the ribs, are also checked by palpation, though the diagnostician seldom gets that far before the victim is already in spasms on the floor, for the closer you get to the Ticklebug's place of concealment, the louder the laughter and the weaker the knees. Let these be your guide.

As well, there is usually more than one Ticklebug involved, so the victims should be checked several times a day, if you can catch them.

THE GAME

The kid in the grade school uniform gets on the train in the mornings as part of the crowd and maneuvers expertly to be the first to stand beside the only guy in the car who will be getting off at the next stop, making the seat available. This is commuting 101, but somehow every day the kid beats all the experienced grownups.

At first I thought: that kid is on the ball for his age, he's figured out the Game already, he bests all the professional commuters who get on at the same station and who, despite the fact that they take the train every day, don't seem to be paying attention, never seem to become aware that this guy in the seat next to me always gets off at the next stop after they get on, so they could quickly have a seat all the way to BigCity.

The kid runs sometimes to beat others to the spot, or just gets to the station early so he can be at the head of the boarding line, but even then he runs to stand beside the seat to be certain to get it first as soon as it's vacated, and if for some reason he isn't first he slowly maneuvers until he is; he's small, and none of the big people notice him wedging his way in there. He's only eight or nine, but he's already an ace at the game, the big folks standing all the way while he gets the seat next to me and plays a video game, reads a comic book until it's time for him to get off and go to school.

At first I had to admire him for his skill at the game at his age, how that skill would stand him in good stead as he commuted through life, but the more I thought about it the darker it got. This is no way for a kid to live, these are not the things a kid should strive for and weave the fabric of his being from, no way for a kid to learn or to grow up, already getting good at the Game among all these dour faces.

But maybe it's me, maybe it's just because I never liked the Game. When I was a kid, I disliked just about every aspect of the Game, from uniforms and schedules, rules and rote manners, upward to suits and ties and getting ahead, rungs up the ladder to higher income before I outgo; making connections, getting in the right places, knowing the right people, making the right career moves and so on, keeping my true opinions to myself so that the "prizes" would be mine, but for some reason they never appealed to me, those prizes, any more than the whole endeavor did; so, beyond getting into and out of college for the sake of the knowledge - not the career path - I never played the Game, never got wrapped up in it at any stage. So I suppose that colors my thoughts.

This kid is trapped though. He is deep in the Game already, so deep in it and so good at it that as he grows into the Big Who of himself he'll be one of the best around, may never have an inkling that there is a profound and genuinely meaningful alternative, let alone find the ability to break away into a world where he can fully exist - he'll learn nothing of that from school or dogma, peers or society... He may well spend his life on such demeaning tasks as being first in one line or another, on weighing the worth of his life in mean scales...

In time, he will perhaps acquire a professional command of mediocrity, like so many of today's politicians. He may look back over his life and passively wonder what it is that's missing from that perfectly straight line he has traced with his being-- unless somehow he finds the power to take his own direction, follow his own lead, though that gets less likely every day he notches up a small, dark victory. Perhaps video games will be his doorway...

Later I came across this article in the Chicago Times that had this subtitle: "Defying the group is a noble, necessary American tradition." In it was this line: "Once upon a time, each American's objective was to become an individual."

OPERATION TORNADO

Yesterday in the clear, hot afternoon Echo and I had the Tornado Trio again, this time while their parents went to a nice French restaurant for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon doing their own relaxing thing. As per the plan laid out in Operation Tornado we took the kids and their gear upmountain to a secret forest waterfall a kilometer or so along the rough road (the kids loved that rocking and bouncing!) above the spring we go to sometimes to get our special mountain water.

Kaya had visited the falls before and liked it, so we figured it would be a good place for the three to burn off some of their pent-up house-energy. When we got to the spot, made our way down the path from the road to the 5-meter-high roaring falls under a close canopy of trees and got the kids into the shallow sandy part of the pool, the twins looked way up at the giant roaring cascade and, all unexpectedly to me, got scared and wanted out immediately.

So we went back down to the spring to fill the jugs with water, the kids helping for about 30 seconds because from the spring there issues a small meandering baby stream of foot-wide overflow, in which all three girls splashed and played happily with their bags of beach toys for an hour or so until all the toys had been used up one by one in all the various permutations and they had learned for example whether it is possible and what it takes to fill a big water bottle from a stream by the spoonful and then empty it into the stream by the ladleful, how long it takes to empty a big bottle of toy-shoveled water into a little stream, how to hold the bottle while doing so (emptying whole bottles of water right out, again and again, without an adult interfering even once!), how much water a plastic bag can hold, how to carry a plastic bag full of water and how to pour it into a small-necked bottle, what happens when you suddenly squeeze the bag, or poke a hole in it etc., wisdom-bits we all must acquire (whether we remember it or not) and somehow assemble along the way into what we come to call understanding, as way back when little Keech had to learn whether or not dad's favorite pen would write on toast (nothing like a buttery nib), or how many times you can put a ball into a box and take it out, thereby early on acquiring a hands-on grasp of what he now understands as infinity.

Speaking of infinity, it was exhausting for Echo and I just standing back and monitoring the whole freestyle affair cubed, so when the trio at last wore the stream out, on condition they cleaned up all their beach toys we took them back down the mountain (fun rough road again!) to a secret little beach we know of on this side of the lake, where they could frolic in the waves and sing their spontaneous water songs while we lay flat on our backs in some shade on the sand and just breathed. We grownups have to play too, after all.

THE GOLDEN KEY

What lessons babies are, so many lessons in all the things we've forgotten we knew, lessons we perhaps need badly by the time the babies come around, and perhaps even moreso when their babies come around, and we have at last the time and inclination to be instructed in these eternal arts, perhaps the biggest lesson being that babies smile and cry so easily, so freely, so fully; and as for happiness, give them a bright ball and a crust of bread and they are in heaven.

How have we undone this skill in ourselves? How is it that as we grow, we push heaven and its happiness further and further away from our every moment?

I look at the twins with all their easy smiles, their frequent giggles, their utter fun, their heartfelt, shortlived tears, their soul’s fascination with even a speck of paper on the floor, and I wonder how it came to be that former children cannot be so easily and genuinely joyfilled…

And now that Kaya and the twins have departed for their home up north, they leave a vast (and perversely welcome) silence in which to ponder these things, perhaps discover a tiny door I never saw before, beside it a golden key…

WALKING WITH A CHILD

When you go for a walk with a child, as I do so often with Kaya when she comes to visit (it's a crime to keep new legs indoors all day in a house in the country, to say nothing of legs that have some mileage), you are reminded - in case you had forgotten - of all the yearning and learning and true adventure there is in every single minute of life.

Seeds, weeds, roads, where did the berries go, holding pods, who made this path, what is the frost, where are the deer, if there are rabbits why can't we see them and what kind of trees are those, when do the acorns fall and what is that, sensing wild beasts large and small out there unseen but living and moving - how stirring and inspiriting it all is in truth, with a nice little bit of trepidation - and if you are paying attention in any real way, and not merely serving as an accompanying corporeal presence (perhaps, heaven forbid, an authoritarian representative of some kind) you must drop everything you've got going on way up there in the heady heights and come down to where the adventure is, return for a time to the child you once were (perhaps sadly orphaned all these decades).

When you go for a walk with a child you'd best not be all tenterhooked with expectation and directed with direction, because with a child in the lead, or even in tow, you never know the turnings you'll take (children can turn on an atom at any level) or where your twofold path will lead. That's another gift children give, in recalling to you the true grace of realworld paths: that they can lead anywhere, a grace so easy to forget after years of advance on cut-to-the-chasedly optimized career etc. paths, with their cradle-to-grave governmental perspective.

That is the very same amnesia by which you may have forgotten that you too were once able to go wherever you pleased, a privilege you now realize, with a pang of some proportion, was a valuable privilege indeed: however could you have given that up, you might ask yourself, among the many other questions you haven't asked in a long while, perhaps even never before. And maybe as a result you'll hear the answers you've always carried inside, until before too long wherever you go it is as though you are walking with a child.

The way I try to walk when Kaya isn't here.

IMAGINATION RAMBLE

The apparatchiks who are assigned to think of such things tend generally to think of imagination the same way they thought of ketchup as a vegetable: just another box to be ticked on the form, another quotidian quota to be filled, one more lesson to be learned on Wednesdays in fourth grade, another certificate on the way to graduation, when you can get on with your REAL life.

In other words, to the disimagined, imagination is not essential to living or to life, may even be detrimental if practiced in excess. We have Hollywood to do it for us. That's like saying if you pay us to breathe, you don't have to. Never before in history has imagination been so threatened in the young.

We lament the loss of the rainforests and the whales, bemoan the disappearance of the wild, but say nothing about the loss of imagination, which may be the greater loss, for it has made all the other losses possible; who could kill a thousand whales or cut down a rainforest but a person without imagination? The disimagined children of today will own the world tomorrow. To be without imagination is to be without intrinsic power, and powerlessness worships powerful things. The future begins right now.

Imagination is not greatly encouraged by human systems of organization because it is by nature free; it is beyond established control, inimical to chains, can't be enslaved, organized or taxed, depends upon no institution. It is the source of change, pure and simple, of new ideas. Imagining is anarchic; it is not at home in classrooms or file cabinets. And though wild, it is inherently benevolent. Imagination is the habitat of the spirit. Those who have been deprived of imagination will hunger for that freedom all their lives. What food it is and limitless, when you are the source!

Every consciously and responsibly caring parent and grandparent has seen the light that lights up in the eyes of still new children at the slightest spark of their own mind's imagining. One recent rainy day while Kaya (nearly 3 years old) was visiting us and looking imagination hungry, I took a tiny ceramic owl I have, the size of a pinky tip, put it in a tablespoon and called it the owl's magic airplane, and began to fly the magic airplane way up high in the big blue sky that was now above the kitchen table, and then all at once the magic airplane became the magic boat, floating the tiny owl perilously upon the vast and turbulent ocean a kitchen table can so swiftly become, and Kaya's eyes lit up like christmas trees at the spark that took fire in her mind.

The whole idea of imagining was perfectly at home in her, as native in her as the seeds of myth have always been in ourselves: she saw how it all worked, how to tell her own stories and it was ok, it was a part of her, that big doorway in her mind that she could open anytime to anywhere, and so she did and passed on through and back again, all that rainy day.

I will do everything I can to ensure that she never loses that spark, or the key to that door. And so we should with all our children. This fire of the spirit that is the imagination, that can so warm and quicken our lives and lead us to new places, should be praised and nurtured, made the key to every entire life so as to enrich us all, not taken away, homogenized and sold back to us as cookie-cutter commodities that stifle all imagining and leave us hungry and incomplete; else tomorrow will have no dream of its own.

A LEAF

After Kaya left a few evenings ago, as I was emptying my pockets before going to bed I found a leaf that she had picked up on our afternoon walk that day, from among all the other leaves lying on the ground. I suppose she had picked it out because of its unusualness in being half crimson and half bright yellow, the colors divided right down the middle of the leaf, had picked it up and given it to me, I had looked at it, and remarked upon it, and thought and I suppose said, in the brief instant of attention young children allow for such things, how special it was that she had seen the very beauty in that particular leaf among all the others. Then I had put the leaf in my pocket and forgotten about it as we continued on our walk. When I found it in my pocket that night, I put it on the table beside my bed. Now for the days since, each time I go to bed at night and each time I rise in the morning the beauty of that leaf, at first so bright and attention-grabbing, has begun to fade a little bit as the red weakens toward brown and the yellow does too. Soon it will be the one color all the other leaves have become, so is grabbing my attention in a different way. It is a little record, there, of the life of all things, once in their greenness, thence to their fullest beauty, that falls in time to the beginning children give to us.

GOODNESS AND JOY

Well, the newborn twins are with us for a while, and are they ever new. And since we know from experience that newborn newness is as temporary as a dewdrop we are making the most of it, short of keeping the little sleepies awake too long.

After each of the babies in my life has grown up, I've somehow managed to forget how tiny newborns are, a lapse absolutely corrected by the next newcomer. Throughout their ephemeral awakenings, how wrinkly and skinny and endearing they are, with their tiny actual legs and feet with genuine toes, hands and fingers that work, professional yawns as though they've been yawning all their lives, which in fact they have been.

Between yawns they lie there patiently, practicing all the many faces, smiling a full-bloom smile before they even have a sense of humor; then there's a look of heartbreaking disappointment, hopefully never to be used, but practiced nonetheless. And rage, and glee and other excitements: all rehearsals.

Even when their kitten-cries pierce the air like arrows, carry upstairs and downstairs, penetrate thick walls and doors and bring instant silence to the most important adult conversation, they aren't really crying, they aren't in actual despair; like humor, that also requires personal experience of the highs and lows of the world out there, for which they're busy rehearsing. So as they weep and laugh it is our pleasure to feel it on their behalf.

And before they drift off to sleep, they watch for miracles with those bright brown eyes, as the faces of ancestors drift through their own by the minute, as clouds through a sky: there is their mother in the smile; now their father about the eyes, then the look of an uncle of mine, and then the young face of my mother, as they pass through all the faces they have come from, including me, I guess. It is startling to see one's own memories flow across those tiny others, who just got here. At no moment in our lives are we apart from eternity.

Hence the familiar ancient feeling one feels, on peeping in through the bedroom door to see them at last asleep: two tiny quiet bumps in the coverlet beside each other, two tiny lifesteps out into the world that we will do our best to ensure are continued on pathways of goodness and joy.

AMERICAN ISSEI

I came to Japan from the old country over twenty years ago with no intention of being an immigrant; I was just a traveler who stopped. Like age, immigrancy was upon me before I knew it.

I am the first generation of my family to visit Japan, let alone live here. My wife, who is Japanese, is about the 900th generation of her family to live here. Our children therefore are second generation immigrants and about 901st generation natives, which makes them thoroughly indigenous nisei, and so extremely interesting in many respects. They are more Japanese than me, though less American, and less Japanese than my wife, though more American than her, and more international than either of us.

As for my own multiply grafted family tree, some of my great-great-grandparents were intentional immigrants from Ireland to their new country America, while other of my great-great-grandparents were scions of native Americans who had "immigrated" across the Aleutian chain from Asia 40,000 years and more ago, so maybe it was in my blood all the time to reconnect, and what I was really doing wasn't traveling, but continuing in my turn the journey my ancestors set out on, that has continued since before the dawn and will go on beyond the sunset. Such transcendent concepts were likely common knowledge 40,000 years ago, before there were visas.

Needless to say, I am the most American person in my Japanese family. I speak my mind, just like that, nakedly right out there in the open, shockingly point-blank in front of everybody. I prefer good bread to good rice, though that balance has changed a great deal since I first became an alien. Certain of my native words (and with them, native ways of thinking) are fading also, as my native country becomes more and more of an old country and the new exerts its influence on my being. My mental America is in fact becoming archaic, as I become more Japanese than I ever thought possible. Still, I speak best the language of the old country, and remember the old country with fondness when in Japan I sit out on my mind's back porch. But of course that old country no longer exists except on the mind's back porch, where all old countries are.

Whenever I visit the country that's America now, I feel perhaps more a foreigner than I do in Japan; I am surprisingly surprised to be treated as an American, as though that state were still and fully native to me. When I'm in America, I wear shoes very gingerly indoors; I can't take a bath with the soap in the water; people look me right in the eye as they talk to me; and everyone speaks English, which can be unsettling.

But being foreign really doesn't require another country; one can feel foreign just by changing neighborhoods, or growing old; my great grandmother, who was 16 when Lincoln was assassinated and who lived to hear of the atomic bomb, was about as foreign to the 1950s as possible. For her, Elvis was from a non-parallel universe, much the way golden-haired Japanese rappers on roller skates on tv are to me of the Elvis generation. I'm already a foreigner to teenagers of both my countries. I'm also more of a foreigner to who I used to be: I look at old photos of myself in the fully American days and remark how truly different was my ignorance then.

My children's Japanese school friends look upon me, I imagine, much as I used to look upon my immigrant friends' grandfathers back in New York when I was a kid: someone who looks and dresses and talks and acts--- well, foreign.

As to the biological bottom line of all this, the geneticists assure us that the differences between the 'races' are infinitessimal in genetic terms--- skin color, hair, eye shape etc. collectively comprising no more than an atom of a wisp of a drop in the global ocean of the human genome. At that level, the difference between me and the Japanese is about the same as the difference between me and I. Cultures too are thought to reside in that 'difference,' when in fact they are matters of time and place. To truly live in another country is to realize that prejudice is ignorance, and what a heavy and useless burden is enmity.

My grandchildren will be American sansei in Japan, unless one of my children or their children has children with someone of yet another nationality and so carries on that grand wandering that is native to the human family. Perhaps even, one day, my great-grandchildren will emigrate back to my old country, and find themselves a new continent there. Or they may stay here, and astound their friends by telling them that their great-grandfather was, believe it or not, of all things, an American.

First published in slightly different form in Kyoto Journal