proof that i have parents

missed the me-thinks/blood of the sun show last night because my middle dtr and her b-f stopped by. these days when i see her it's usually at the wreck room when i'm preoccupied with playing or shilling books or some such shite, so it was nice to have an opportunity to get caught up on everything that's going on in her life (and there's lots). plus james is going to lend me a telecaster.

anyway, she brought over a pic of my parents, yoshio and kimie, that she found at her big sister's house. my sweetie scanned and james (who works in the photo lab at target) color-corrected so now all three sisters will have copies. yaaay! this was taken on mom 'n' dad's wedding day in may 1955. it's kinda trippy that in this pic, my father is nearly 20 years younger than i am now. they live in new joisey now.

my dad's father, the third son of a mining engineer, wound up in hawaii after his father was killed in a demolition accident while trying to build a railroad tunnel through a mountain. in japanese custom, the first son inherited everything, and the second son was already in hawaii, so that's where my grandfather went. my grandmother was a "picture bride;" they met when she got off the boat in honolulu. he sold fords for awhile, had a flower shop, and wound up working for some japanese import company that let him have an office and no responsibilities into his 80s. she had been a schoolteacher in japan when she was 15 and taught japanese school in hawaii for many yrs. then she worked in a department store until she started getting forgetful and they "laid her off." she had alzheimer's back when they didn't know much about it. when she died, a couple thousand people came out to her funeral -- her old students.

the day after pearl harbor, the fbi came and locked up my grandfather, who was kind of a wheel in the local japanese community. my father spent the duration of his ww2 army service writing letters to the war department protesting my grandfather's incarceration. he went to language school at camp savage, minnesota, which is kind of funny, since he grew up bilingual and attended japanese school after regular school (as all the japanese kids in hawaii did back then). he was commissioned an officer in the signal corps, spent some time guarding italian prisoners-of-war, and did cryptography without a security clearance, breaking bullshit japanese naval codes. after japan surrendered, he was in tokyo and nagasaki with the u.s. strategic bombing survey, interviewing survivors of the firebombing in the former (where he saw edo, the neighborhood where his mother grew up, reduced to ash with nothing vertical but light poles) and the atomic bombing of the latter.

he'd studied engineering at the university of hawaii but after the war, he used his g.i. bill to get his master's in physics at harvard and his ph.d. at rochester university, then he went to work for the atomic energy commission at brookhaven national laboratory on long island. in the '50s, he was building mainframe computers with willie higinbotham, the guy who's credited with inventing the first video game. in the early '60s, he got interested in applied mathematics and started working on an arcane problem in math that he's devoted his life to ever since (even though the scientific community at large believes it was solved by two east germans in 1973).

he also got roped into administration and spent the next ten years as the chair of his department, which entailed doing lots of traveling and stuff like going in to the office at 3am to talk to the graveyard shift when they were having union problems. he taught at the university of illinois at champaign-urbana for one year when i was six and in hannover, germany, for two when i was in high school. (the rest of the family stayed on long island.) he took early retirement in the late '80s and has spent the years since then obsessing on the three things he cares most about: that arcane math problem, german opera, and stamp collecting.

my mom's father was a blacksmith who was already married and had four kids when he went to hawaii to seek his fortune (or so he thought) making parts for the trains that carried the sugar cane from the fields to the refinery. unfortunately, ww1 started not long after that and he was there by himself for seven years before he was able to bring his family over. after that, he and my grandmother had three more kids -- my mom and her two youngest brothers. she grew up on the mcbride sugar plantation on the big island of hawaii. in the '60s, they used her old neighborhood as the setting the julie andrews movie of james michener's hawaii. by that time, they were tearing down the houses as the occupants died off our moved out. before the war, my mother's family had moved to the island of kauai, and still later to the town of wahiawa on oahu.

when my sister 'n' i were little, she could still remember the names of every member of every family that lived there and the names of every kid in her class every year at school. one of my abiding regrets is that i never sat her down with a tape recorder to capture those stories while she could still remember 'em. her father was a well-respected man on the plantation. once one of the overseers rode up on a horse and was berating him for something. my grandfather brooked no bullshit, and when the white guy on the horse hauled off and struck him with his riding crop, my grandfather pulled the dude down off his horse and KICKED HIS ASS. the next day, the cat was at his front door with a basket of fruit to apologize. he was a real stoic cat; my grandmother was full of fun. she sent us the same letter every week for years and years. (none of my grandparents could really speak or write english.)

my mother was the "old maid" of her family at 27, working for the hawaii visitors' bureau in honolulu, when she and a girlfriend decided to travel around the world. at the last minute, her friend got cold feet, but she went ahead on and took a boat to san francisco, where her sister was; then a train to chicago, where her brother was; then to new york, where she ran out of money and wound up having to get a job to earn enough to pay for her passage to europe while sharing digs with some filipina gals up in harlem. (this was before the bad junk time in harlem, when it was still safe to stand on the elevated train platform at 125th and lexington at midnight.) she never made it to europe. instead, she met my old man at a party, found him "very charming," and wound up stuck on long island raising a couple of kids.

my mom educated herself out of the public library so she'd be able to converse with the people from work that my father brought home. i remember her watching the brit shows on pbs-tv when i was little, trying to sound her vowels the way the tv people did. she read voraciously about every subject you could imagine. she used to buy books that were nothing more than lists of books and leave them around the house for my sister and me to discover. it was really from her that i acquired any curiosity and love of learning that i possess. she's an avid letter-writer and stays in touch with various 'n' sundry relatives of her large and widely scattered family -- people of great ease and warmth whom i dig much.

they're where i come from, and i imagine that my sister 'n' i are the best and worst of them in the same way that our kids are the best and worst of us. (click on the pic to make it big.)