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For it’s 1, 2, 3…

Giants at Arlington, November 2010

It’s the bottom of the ninth.
My dad’s sitting at the best seat in town.
His black Eames Lounge chair: cushy.
An orange Giants T-shirt over
navy blue yukata: stretching.
KNBR announcers narrate: even and cool.

It’s the bottom of the ninth,
cusp of the first championship.
Foresight would only deflate.
The joy’s the anticipation.

Bottom of the ninth.
The pitch: a ball.
The pitch: a strike.

The beard.
The signs.

The pitch: sliiiider on the outside corner.
The tug. The cap.
The signs.

The pitch: a strike.
The signs.

The pitch: swing! And a miss.
The pitch: last out.

The win.
The mound.

My father, in heaven, is yelling out loud.

Baseball is stories remembering stories.
It’s the stories that bring you back.

It’s the stories that bring you back.
It’s the stories that bring you back.

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The clenched fist

So I’ve been running—no, jogging—for about five weeks now. It’s still hard for me to say that I’ve been running. It’s still incredibly hard for me to call myself a runner. Too much expectation of what a runner’s supposed to look like, and that’s just not my body type.

I never thought that I’d take up running as my cardio exercise, ever. With the quirky exception of soccer, which I love to play, running has had bad connotations for me for a very long time. The timed high school run around the practice fields, the lagging behind almost everyone else. Unattractively out of breath and sweaty in an unattractive big T-shirt and shorts. Running was all about pointing out how out of shape I was, particularly compared to (as it felt) almost everyone else.

Oh yes, and running was always about the aching feet, which I thought was just a natural part of running for everyone. And then I got some real running shoes, from a store that actually analyzes your feet, the shoes’ fit, and your stride. As a lifelong low-maintenance girl, the running-shoe fit is the closest thing I’ve come to an in-store makeover, for now. (What’s next: Sephora?)

I didn’t even want to run. Walking has always been more, ahem, my speed. However, having come through a difficult year with my mind mostly intact, it was time to take better care of the body. A couple of people very close to me have had great success with this program, so I thought I would give it a try.

Now, running by myself meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone timing me, or about competing with anyone else, or thinking about how quickly I lose my breath. So for the first two weeks or so, I walked most of the time, and listened to music, and walked a little faster for a minute or two, here and there. But I didn’t think that it counted as running. Then, ventolin inhaler nyc during the “run” portions of the program, I began to shuffle, faster than walking and almost to a fast race walk. I didn’t think that was running, either.

Maybe it wasn’t. I now realize that in running, there’s something important about the hands.

As I walked for the first few weeks, I’d kept my hands open, loose, mostly so I could move them along with the music coming from my Itouch. I played air piano for Stevie Wonder, or waved my hands around as I sang with ABBA, and even played air typewriter for the Prince lyrics. But the hands have always been loose: fingers open, keeping their options open. I’m not running, no sirree. Who’s running around here? Not me, not me. La, la, la.

But last week I began to close my hands into loose fists, thumbs inexplicably tucked under index fingers. And I realized what making a fist does to the arms: it activates the muscles in the forearms. Once the forearms commit, they activate the elbows. When the elbows swing forward, in counterpoint with your feet, they bring their own momentum. When your elbows and arms are swinging, your entire upper body commits to the run. Since your lower body’s pretty much moving already when you run, simply clenching your fists involves your entire body in the run. The grip isn’t violent. Your fists just have to be clenched, fingers closed enough for a fist-bump. Those of you reading this who are runners, you must know this already. But it’s huge news to me.

You have to clench your fists first: then the commitment will come.

I’m here, after a couple of crazy weeks. I’ve been worried about writing, worried about grading, worried about teaching, but mostly worried about showing up in the first place. I still don’t think I’m a runner. And yet, I suspect that I’ll be learning from what it is to run, for a long time.

Thanks for coming back and reading.

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An interlude

My mom’s visiting this week, and she brought more papers and objects from the archive, also known as her garage. And though I haven’t even finished writing about my dad’s manuscript, I’ve got a whole new set of documents to feed the book project. A letter from his chess-playing friend, along with a sheaf of computer chess score sheets. My dad’s old 5-year diary, from the early-to-mid 1950s. The diary itself will take a while: each whole day compressed into about an inch of space. Each page has five years of the same day. In some ways it reminds me of a Twitter feed, a Facebook status update. Perhaps the technology of documenting our days isn’t so different.

There are difficult documents in this batch: a copy of my dad’s death certificate, which means that I can now request his military records. A copy of the first and last Father’s Day poem that I wrote for my dad; he died in June. Hard. And harder still: the poem’s folded inside a copy of the eulogy that my uncle delivered at the funeral. A small gift from the eulogy: according to my uncle, my dad was conscious enough to read my poem before he died.

These are papers that I haven’t seen in years, if at all.

I’ve been thinking about my family archives: all those garages, all those places where we’ve kept paper traces of our lives. I’ve got my own archive growing a life of its own in my basement. “Nimuras,” my grandfather once mused, with some disgust, “are notorious pack rats.” What if we took that pack-rat tendency into historical ventolin inhaler usa context, with the Depression, with the dispossession of internment? (And, yes: am I just excusing our love for clutter?) I wonder how long it takes my family to go back through those boxes, if at all.

In fact, a couple of nights ago, I woke up wondering about my own pack-rat tendency to keep everything, but rarely look back at it all. Why has it taken me so long to begin this book project, to go back through the family archive? The metaphor may be too obvious: put everything into a box, and imagine that the keeping will be enough. But as most historians and librarians would probably tell you, an archive’s almost no good until somebody processes it, makes sense of it, organizes it. The literary critic in me would add: and makes it into narrative.

Can memory work the same way as archives? Can you bury memories desperately, leave them untouched for years, and return to them intact? And if not, is this one reason why we need physical archives?

What draws me back to this archive, this set of memories about my dad, is something I can only describe as an insistent tug. I don’t think that nostalgia is drawing me back, if nostalgia means the desire to look back, relive, find pleasure in the bittersweetness of the loss.

It’s more like the reason you might press a bruise. Yes, that’s still there. Yes, it still hurts. But maybe your fingers want to return to that mark, precisely because it’s a visible sign that you have hit something hard and survived. You press it, and wonder if it’s healed yet.

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Desert chrysanthemums

Thus far, one of the best things that my dad’s book has given me is my grandfather.

Although there are pictures of me with my dad’s mother, I never got to meet my grandfather; he died before I was born. And my maternal grandfather actually died the year I was born, a few months before my birth in December. So I never had a biological grandfather, growing up.

But my grandfather, my dad’s father, is all over the manuscript.

He was a dancer. There’s an entire chapter devoted to a folk dance that my grandfather used to perform, and even performed in camp, a fisherman’s dance. As a granddaughter, it’s lovely to know that he was a dancer; as an editor, I am not sure why the chapter is there. But that’s a conversation I’ll have with the manuscript another time.

He was a rabble-rouser, a speech-maker. Contrary to what I used to think about our family history, my dad and his siblings were not sent to Tule Lake initially because of my grandfather’s “troublemaker” behavior. While at Tule Lake, my grandfather made a series of fiery speeches against the military recruitment policies in camp. For that series of speeches, he was taken away to New Mexico. I say this with pride.

He cared about his community. Upon his return from New Mexico, when asked what he would like to do, he answered, “I would like to serve the people of this camp.”

He was a man with a sense of history. When he learned that World War II had ended, he sighed, and said “From this day on, I will become an American Indian.” How did he know what it was to be an American Indian, to associate his own experience of dispossession with theirs?

In other words, the manuscript is shot through with a young boy’s hero-worship of his father. (I realize that’s something I’ll need to think about for my own book.) It makes a certain amount of sense: my dad was writing about the time from when he was 10 to when he was 14. Not long after that, I believe, he was no longer living at home, working in various jobs. (I’ll have to find out more about this gap.) For all I know at this moment, actually, my father was writing about and through the loss of his own father.

In my dad’s buy ventolin with no prescription manuscript, the loss is so palpable that even after my grandfather returns to camp from imprisonment in New Mexico, my dad thinks hard about what his father’s absence meant. “What is a family without a father?” he asks himself.

My father’s response to his own question stuns me: “Not much of anything.”

And here I can begin to write back to my father. After age 10, I grew up without a father. And while we missed him terribly—what he said about a father’s absence? It’s just not true. Or at least, it’s not true for everyone. It wasn’t true for us, for my sister and my mother and I, and our larger extended family (who never abandoned us, even though their brother had died). For my sister and me, the youngest of our generation of 13 cousins, it has been a family existence rich with love.

Before opening the manuscript envelope, there were so many questions that I wanted answered. I think that I went to the manuscript not just to find my father, but to find fathering: to find advice, support, strength. How does one endure terrible, difficult times?

And I have to confess that in this respect, the manuscript feels incomplete. Why? My friend B put it best, I think. I told her that I’d looked for a father in the manuscript, but didn’t find him, and she nodded with understanding. “You went to find your father—but what you found was another kid.”

So it’s unexpected and wondrous, painful and lovely, that while the fathering I wanted wasn’t in my dad’s book, the grandfathering was. “You must have the capacities to bounce back,” he said to my father, “no matter what the adversities are.”

I like to think that my grandfather learned that lesson from the gardens that they grew in camp. I didn’t know that families could grow anything in Tule Lake. But my father describes growing flowers and vegetables in his manuscript. “The flowers brightened the area,” my father says, “and the sense of desolation was removed.” Few people can talk about the power of endurance and regeneration like farmers can.

You see, all this time I thought that I love chrysanthemums because my father loved them. I didn’t know he inherited this love from my grandfather.

They grew chrysanthemums in camp, too.

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So you want to be a writer

As of this writing, Google generates over 81 million suggestions just for this phrase alone. I should take this as an inspiring sign that so many people want to write, or that so many people want to know how to write. Or, if I was so inclined, I could take this as a depressing sign that so many people have written about this topic already.

But, a happy person by nature, I’m not so inclined. Here’s a collection of links that have been on my mind lately when it comes to writing and the writing life. Since I’ve gone back to teaching last month, and started one daughter in kindergarten, I need to get back into a regular routine of creative writing, somehow. To clear my mind (and my bookmarks menu), I decided to start here.

In the literature/music class I’m teaching this semester, we’ve been talking about making mixes of songs. Here’s my mix of links and quotations that are running through my head, called “So you want to be a writer.” (Liner notes included: one of my favorite genres of writing, one that my students tell me is being lost with the IPod/MP3 playlist.)

Track 1: Dear Sugar, “Write Like A Motherf*cker” (Sorry, Mom.)
Dear Sugar (an advice columnist at The Rumpus) usually manages to make me cry, or gasp, or laugh, or all three. “I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to.” This column is the starting gun for the album.

Track 2: Voices of Our Nation, Summer Writing Workshop for Writers of Color
Application guidelines for the VONA workshop. I’d never heard of this workshop before, but it sounds like a wonderful experience, set in one of my favorite cities in the world. It looks like something I could apply for, eventually: an abbreviated, near-private version of an MFA, in a supportive community.

Track 3: Michelle Hoover, “So You Want To Be A Writer?”
Michelle Hoover’s “so you want to be a writer” roundup of links and advice, recommended via Twitter by Poets and Writers magazine. Some useful, practical advice for writers here and now.

Track 4: Renee Shea, “The Taste of Memory: A Profile of Monique Truong”
Continuing the Poets and Writers track, Renee Shea’s recent profile is a wonderful read. One interesting piece here is not only Truong’s impressive track record of awards, but also her methodical, disciplined approach to applying for awards in the first place. “As writers we are socialized into a state of perpetual gratefulness-to receive a grant, a publishing contract, a book tour- as if we didn’t earn anything with our labor and talents. Lawyers don’t think that way. They know that they have a valuable skill and expect valuable compensation for it. I love my fellow writers, but I wish that they would think and behave –just in this instance-more like lawyers.”

Track 5: Alexander Chee, “Getting Your Name Out There”
Alexander Chee’s series on author blogging. Chee is a gracious and generous Twitterquaintance, and I actually began to read his writing there. (And I just checked out his first novel from the library.) But his blog, Koreanish, contains helpful, thoughtful posts on the writing life.

Track 6: Junot Díaz, “How I Became A Writer“
I started reading about this story from Chee’s blog, but went to read the full story from O Magazine. I am simultaneously inspired and terrified by the heartbreak behind the writing of Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. One of my favorite novels, of all time—but, like so many amazing things in this life, it did not come for free.

Track 7: Jennifer Kahn, “The Art of the Perfect Pitch”
And speaking of free (and the need for money), here is some practical freelance writing advice from UC Berkeley School of Journalism professor Jennifer Kahn about how to sell a potential story to an editor.

Track 8: Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

I don’t have a link, but a quotation instead. I’ve been mulling over the question of audience for the book I’m writing, ever since early last week.
“If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this.”

Track 9: J.K. Rowling, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.”
J.K. Rowling’s 2008 commencement address at Harvard, her version of the famous Yoda mantra: “Do or do not do. There is no try.” Like Lamott’s advice above, some instructions on writing and life.

“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

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(Approximately) Five Questions About Writing, History, & Technology: Hans Ostrom

With the shift in new routines, I’m missing a few things that I know the non-private MFA would offer: externally-imposed structure and accountability. But! I’m a Capricorn, as I’ve said, and usually good with internally-imposed deadlines.

So with the beginning of a new school year, it’s time for a new assignment. To help with more regular posts, I’m introducing a new occasional feature here: a series of short interviews with writers, historians, and anyone else who’s interested in questions of writing, history, technology, and memory.

Today’s inaugural series post is a short interview with my good friend and colleague, Hans Ostrom. One of my favorite stories about Hans is our very first meeting. I’d done some research before we met, and saw that we’d gone to the same high school. I realized that my high school principal also had the same last name, and so I asked Hans if they were related. Hans raised his eyebrows, dropped his jaw, turned slightly paler, and actually dropped the paper he was holding. My high school principal was (is) Hans’s older brother. Hans and I have worked together now for almost seven years.

*****

KikuGirl (KG): In the “customary” Google/Wikipedia search, I couldn’t find any interviews with you! Are you that reclusive? Has anyone called you the J.D. Salinger of Tacoma, or Sierra City, where you grew up?

Hans Ostrom (HO): Ah, this one is easy. There are no interviews because no one has been interested in interviewing me.  I like the interview as a genre, and I don’t mind being interviewed.  One problem, if it’s a problem, is that I have written in a bunch of genres—poetry, fiction, scholarship, criticism, journalism, textbooks, encyclopedias, blogging, etc.  I think if I’d decided on one thing early on, I might be better known as a writer of that thing—be it poetry or mystery novels or whatever.  But I love to try different kinds of writing. I would say I’m solitary—writing-groups, for instance, have not worked for me, and I’m terrible at literary politics—rubbing elbows, going to the right conferences, etc.  So by default, not really design, I’m a lone wolf and a contrarian. But I’m not reclusive, and  always thought Salinger was simply bizarre.  Whereas I’m simply obscure.  I think bizarre pays better.

KG: Speaking of all of that writing: you write and publish more, both in hard-copy print and online, than just about anyone I know. (Maybe you’re the Joyce Carol Oates of the West Coast.) In addition to the multiple, regularly-updated blogs, there’s the edited encyclopedia of African American literature, there’s the poetry collection, the textbooks about creative writing, the scholarly studies, the detective novel, and probably a whole other set of writings I haven’t discovered yet. How do you produce so much, so consistently?

HO: I’m probably a compulsive writer.  Not an obsessive one, but a compulsive one.  I just love to write, so I write more or less all the time—in waiting rooms, in bed, sometimes while watching TV.  I do very well with deadlines, which are a kind of drug for compulsive writers.  This all may have started at community college, where I had a full-time academic schedule, worked as an R.A., and wrote sports articles for local newspapers.  This required multitasking and writing quickly.  So I just tend to plunge in and write and then see what I have later, as opposed to a lot of planning, outlining, etc.—although these are often necessary, too.  And one genre tends to carom off the other, so in the midst of an  encyclopedia entry, you might get an idea for a poem.  [KG: I love this idea.] Writing is probably also my way of processing the world, perhaps of coping.

KG: In your historical novel Honoring Juanita, there are several metaphors for history. There’s the standard history as “the dusty, distant past”; history as the recurring, haunting Juanita; history as the origin of objects (the ventolin buy online trees that the main character, Mary, uses in her woodcarvings); history as sedimented levels of trees and nature. What did writing historical fiction do for you that reading written histories might not have?

Mary is a kind of poet, and I think poets are mad to make history “real”: palpable, something you can touch and smell.  Of course, this is impossible, as history is past, is gone.  Its effects aren’t gone, but it is, so it always exists once or twice removed. Perhaps my favorite metaphor is the sediment/compost one, history as a slow building up, an accumulation, something that feeds the present, for better or worse—good compost vs. unhealthy compost. A woodcarver, Mary wants to get her hands on Juanita, but of course she can’t.

KG: Elsewhere, you’ve written about the Kindle and e-books, and you (like I) have lived from dial phones to IPhones. How do you think these forms of digital technologies will impact our reading habits, and our memories?

HO: I think they are revolutionizing reading and writing—right now.  And this will only accelerate.  There’s something called “Moore’s law,” which is that micro-chip storage capacity doubles every 12-24 months.  I think you’re seeing an erosion, even a collapse, of publishing hierarchies.  Vested interests need to try to prevent this from happening, but I don’t know if they can. We could be witnessing a vast democratization of writing and publishing, and I love it.  The old way depended upon an economy of false scarcity, which is reinforced by rigid ideas of “genius,” by making art mysterious (“it can’t be taught”), a fixed canon, only so many slots open for “great” writers, etc.  Many people are nostalgic for this setup, but I’m not.  Interestingly, you can archive books with Amazon  after you’ve read them on Kindle, so there is a chance that people will leave their Kindles to their children—a library of hundreds of books, maybe thousands, if we go by Moore’s number.  Few saw this coming.  Huge personal libraries owned by everyday folk.  At the same time, we may also be entering an era in which most people don’t have the patience to read for a long time or to read complex things.  Don’t get me wrong—I love books as books, as artifacts, but I also love these new developments.  It’s not an either/or question for me.

KG: What’s your favorite metaphor for history, or your favorite quotation about it, and why?

HO: The compost one I mentioned. I think maybe another expression would be “a necessary illusion.”  That is, history represents what is gone, but we need an illusion of its still being there, so we continually create  illusions of past—in our personal lives, in history books, in the media (“founding fathers,” “the greatest generation”).

Where history is still alive is its effects, and oddly enough, people are often reticent to accept that reality; thus the U.S. has never fully come to terms with the effects of  slavery, for example (just one example—there are many).  A kind of deep denial festers, therefore—and you see it coming out in the overreaction to Obama’s being elected.  He is as moderate as Eisenhower, but confused racist reactions drive people to make him some kind of Other—socialist, Kenyan, proto-dictator.

I can’t think of a favorite quotation, but I’m sure it would be something  ironic, something to let the pretentious steam out of history.  There’s probably one from Wilde or Twain.

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I’m honored—and frankly, surprised—to note that this is Hans’s first interview. And it’s my first written interview, too. Many thanks to Hans for being the first contestant, and for playing along.

Writing, history, and technology are going to be important in my book, so these interviews are also a form of research. If you know anyone who would be interested in being interviewed for this series, please send me a message at kikugirl (at) kikugirl dot net.

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Today’s fractional finding

Today’s fractional finding: my dad’s annotated bibliography of “Japanese in the United States,” published in 1969 by Sac State Library. The cloth binding is red. It’s got a Library of Congress call number (E184 J3 J37 1969), which we might dangerously equate with an Amazon listing or an ISBN barcode presence. But I accord a similar kind of official-ness to these numbers: once you’ve got one, you’re published, baby.

Josh said that it was an amazing feeling to pick up the bibliography from UW’s Interlibrary Loan today: someone handed him a book that my dad wrote. I asked Josh what he meant. But thinking about it, I can only describe it as a presence that physical (not virtual) objects can carry. This pamphlet is, in all likelihood, an object that the two most important men in my life have now both touched.

Somehow, this copy of the bibliography did not come from Sac State Library, which would be expected. Instead, it’s from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. I have no idea how it got there. (But my sister now lives in Austin, a little over an hour from San Antonio.) Inside the back cover, the card pocket has an empty chart printed on it, which suggests that the bibliography’s never been checked out, or at least that it wasn’t checked out before the digital age. Or maybe even until now.

The contents: first, there are two introductions. There’s an introduction by the College Librarian, before my father’s introduction. Some of this first introduction is useful, historically speaking. It says that my dad’s bibliography was part of a series of publications by Sac State Library staff, intended to showcase the Sac State Library collection for faculty and students.

Then, there’s a longer paragraph, assuring the reader that my dad is “especially well qualified.” Given what I know about the publication of American literature by minority authors, this part of the introduction seems to echo the well-meaning-but-slightly-problematic genre of “white author introduces and thus validates minority author.” Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar: all African American authors who had these kinds of introductions to their first published works. The introductions were something like a gentleman’s “letter of introduction,” trying to smooth over bridge (or boundary) crossings.

I don’t mean to critique the college librarian heavily: he’s promoting my dad’s work, saying what my dad could not, and did not, in his own introduction. This librarian knew a fair amount about my dad’s personal history: he talks about my dad’s internment, and he mentions my dad’s book manuscript. And he says that my dad spoke in secondary schools and colleges about internment.

*****

A memory detour here: my dad used to come to my elementary schools to talk about Japanese culture. Sometimes he’d bring food, but most of the time he’d wear his dark blue kimono along with an array of objects. He’d shake the huge pocket-sleeves of the kimono, making them jingle: “What do you think is in here?” he’d ask the kids. “Money!” they’d shout. The year before he died, he spoke to my fifth-grade class, but he didn’t talk about Japanese culture. Then he talked about internment, at least for the first time that I can remember.

*****
My dad’s own introduction to the bibliography is oddly detached and academic: the first sentence is in the passive voice: “This bibliography was compiled by…”. After that, there’s a note about how the annotations “are not critical evaluations, and there is no attempt to make value judgments of the materials under review.” (Why not? And, the humanist-skeptic in me asks, “How not?”) He concludes his short 3-paragraph introduction with a bit about scope, which strikes me as overly modest, or perhaps very Japanese enryo: it is “not a definitive and comprehensive study of the subject field.”

No first-person voice, no “I” whatsoever. Maybe all of that “I” is in his own manuscript.

A bit more about the content for now. Because it’s a bibliography about Japanese Americans, my dad included annotations about both Miné Okubo’s graphic novel Citizen 13660 and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter. These are now two of the most well-known (and now widely-taught) narratives of internment. I’ve written scholarly papers about both of these books.

So the bibliography gives me something unexpected about my father: He was a scholar of internment literature and Asian American literature, like me. We could have had a conversation about those two books, Okubo’s and Sone’s.

And in a sense, I suppose, we’re having a conversation now. Peeking behind the Interlibrary Loan tracking slip, there’s the cover image for the bibliography: the pen-and-ink outline of a red chrysanthemum.

P.S. Didn’t win the writing contest, but am nevertheless excited that I submitted something, and that it made it to finalist status at all. And, some exciting news: I’ve been asked to talk about the book-in-progress, and possibly give a reading from it, in November. More details when they’re finalized.

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Maybe that’s why

Dear C-bird,

It’s the night before your first day of kindergarten. Tonight, as I tucked you in, you wanted to talk about how you didn’t want to go to kindergarten. The only thing you liked about kindergarten, you said, was the outside playground part. And that you got to pick your own lunch (peanuts, pasta wheels with feta, dried cranberries, homemade chocolate chip cookie, apple juice). And that you get to see Kaiden every day. Those are some of the familiar things.

We’ve been trying to get you ready for kindergarten, of course. All summer we’ve been playing at the playground, so you know that “park” really well. You saw your classroom and met your teacher last night at the open house. It’s got a lot of low tables, and tiny chairs, and white wooden cubbies, and a round bench, and a couch, and a piano, and so many new books within arm’s reach, and a view of Puget Sound. We’ve read books about kindergarten, and we’ve talked about some of the new things you’ll learn, like counting money, and new songs, and reading books without someone having read them to you first.

And still, there are traces of fear amid the traces of excitement. Dad and I have been trying to explain to you that our brains don’t like new things at first, and that’s what your brain has been doing: it’s resisting the new. So you won’t know what you like about kindergarten until you get there. We won’t really know, either. I kind of hate that.

But it’s hard to explain ambiguity and ambivalence to you at five, because at thirty-six, I’ve been feeling this way, too. I’m excited for you and scared for you, even though I know you will be fine. You’ve been practicing the monkey bars, challenging yourself to hold on just a little longer, or drop down all by yourself, or making it all the way around from one end to the other. You’ve been wanting new games to play on the computer. The crafts that you usually love (drawing, paper cutting, gluing) are getting old. Even daycare, which you’ve loved for several years, is getting stale. That’s how we know that you are ready, have been ready for a new school.

I’ve been wondering if I will cry when we drop you off tomorrow. And you might know this about me already: I hate crying. I’ve heard all these stories of moms crying on their kids’ first day of kindergarten and I’ve wanted to resist. Why? I don’t know.  Maybe I don’t like the idea of crying just because I’ve been told that it’s a moment to cry. The PTA may even plan a coffee-and-kleenex moment.

I’m so happy that you are ready for kindergarten, that we are sending this confident, sweet, giving little girl out into the world for school. You draw pictures with captions for your family and friends. You run to pick up your little sister when she falls down and cries. You like doing “strong things,” whether it’s climbing a rope ladder, mixing a huge bowl of cake batter,  picking up your little sister for a twirly hug, or trying to outrun your dad at the track. You’re picking up new facial expressions every week, it seems: this week you’re holding up your hands palms-up, looking up at the ceiling, shaking your head and smiling bemusedly. You think hard about what should and shouldn’t happen in a book or a movie, and you still ask questions about characters’ motivations and actions. “What is it with him?” you like to ask, as the bad guy throws a temper tantrum or makes somebody else sad. You think it’s cute that Yoda has a light saber, and you picked out your first graphic novel, a Star Wars one, at the bookstore. This morning at breakfast you were preparing your little sister, telling her that you were going to go to kindergarten tomorrow, and you didn’t want her to be too sad. You and your sister are amazing, and you still make us laugh every single day.

Now, the script for mommies crying on the first day of kindergarten goes something like this: “She’s growing up! It goes so fast!” And you are, and it does. (And I don’t mean to offend any mommies who do cry for these reasons.)

But here’s why I don’t want to cry: I don’t want to stop you. I am so glad that you are growing up to be who you are.

I wanted to resist crying when I married your dad, too. But I was so happy that day, I was going to burst if something didn’t release. And I still hate crying, even though I’ve now cried out of joy more times than I can count, since you were born. “It’s a girl,” your dad whispered to me in the delivery room. “We have a little girl.”

Oh. Maybe that’s why it’ll happen tomorrow.

Love, Mama

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Panzanella to celebrate summer

“Fahmis makit!” cried toddler M when we pulled up to the Saturday farmers market.

I am thrilled that she recognizes it. Our long-delayed, dearly-missed summer weather finally arrived in late July or so, and the Tacoma farmers markets have been overflowing with berries, peaches, zucchini, eggplant, green beans, corn. C loves the chocolate croissants from Grand Central’s stand on Thursdays. I love the apple baked empanadas on Saturdays. I’ve made a lot of blackberry jam because I realized that it’s hardest to find that flavor in stores. We’ve visited the farmers markets at least once or twice a week, for the last month and a half.

Here’s a recipe for my version of panzanella, my favorite way to celebrate summer salad.  I’ve come to love panzanella because it’s one of the best ways to celebrate summer tomatoes. (And I’ve come to love it for the rarity: it’s just not worthwhile to make it when tomatoes are out of season.) This salad is meant to be a dinner salad, one that you can assemble in the salad bowl, toss, and then portion into two large sturdy bowls.

We may have had our last panzanella of the summer tonight. A new year of teaching has started for me; C is starting kindergarten on Thursday; it’s supposed to rain about an inch tomorrow in the Seattle area. Summer, we hardly knew you.

Recipe

This is probably not the most authentic recipe for panzanella (which is really supposed to be more of a bread salad than a bread-with-greens salad). It’s more of a deconstructed sandwich, maybe a caprese-style sandwich? But I make it almost every week during summer. You just have to eat fresh tomatoes in season.

Ingredients

  • About 4-5 slices day-old crusty white bread (sourdough, levain, etc. have worked). This is a great way to use up the ends of artisan bread loaves.
  • Olive oil (for brushing onto the bread slices)
  • A garlic clove, cut in half and pierced with a fork (to rub onto the bread slices)
  • 1-2 stems’ worth of fresh basil leaves (pinch off the hearty stems, then roll the larger leaves and cut into slivers)
  • A large handful of washed and dried spring salad greens (spring is fine, arugula is peppery)
  • About half a pint of ripe tomatoes, preferably cherry or heirloom, cut into bite-size pieces
  • About 1/3 cup fresh mozzarella pieces (if using ovolini, halve or quarter; perlini are bite-size). Low-moisture skim mozzarella, the kind that most people buy for lasagna,  will not taste as good in this case.
  • Fresh Parmesan cheese, shaved, to taste.
  • Dressing: about 1-2 T each of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and about 1-3 tsp. of brown sugar
  • Fresh cracked black pepper to taste

Method

  1. Make the garlic croutons. Brush the bread slices with olive oil, then rub them with that garlic clove pierced with a fork. (I use a fork so I won’t have to get too much garlic on my hands. You can leave out the fork and just rub the garlic on with your hands, if you want.)Put the slices into the toaster oven or very quickly under the broiler. Take the bread out before the slices turn golden brown, and cut them into bite-size pieces.
  2. Add the greens to the salad bowl. While the bread is toasting, cut the basil leaves into slivers. Add greens and basil.
  3. Throw in the cut tomatoes. Ideally, you want the tomato juices to mix with the croutons and coat the croutons, making them just a teeny bit soggy.
  4. Throw in the fresh mozzarella pieces.
  5. Shave the Parmesan over the salad, using a vegetable peeler. I really think that here is a place to be generous. Real Parmesan is expensive, but it adds so much flavor here. And it’s fun to use your fingers to chase that last fleck of Parmesan in the salad bowl.
  6. Using a fork, whisk together the dressing of olive oil, balsamic, sugar, and (optional) pepper. Add a bit of dressing to the greens, mix, and taste. Then add more dressing to the salad as needed.
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Giving the cliché a second chance

This morning, I had three separate dreams about the same thing: the writing contest that my sister and I entered at the beginning of August. Each dream had a different review of or reaction to my contest entry. In the first one, someone whose name was written in Korean Hangul felt “alienated”; in the second one, a panel of judges described my entry as “this odd little project that kept hanging on”; in the third one, my entry was competing against my husband’s, who thought he’d enter the contest just for fun.

In all three of the dreams, though, I made it to finalist status.

Now, you know what they say about these kinds of dreams: they predict the opposite of what happens in real life. You dream about winning, you’re probably going to lose. But, sometimes clichés are stranger than fiction. At 10AM this morning, the organizers announced the names of the finalists on their website.

And the gist of all three dreams came true; I actually did make it to finalist status in the contest.

(!)

I know. I’d been saying that I hadn’t really entered to win. But I hadn’t realized how much I wanted it until my subconscious hit me with three of those dreams in rapid succession this morning. The website kept appearing, over and over again. I actually clicked on it in my sleep. I’m not sure the Internet’s ever appeared in my dreams before, as hard as that is to believe.

Here’s another cliché, though: I am so happy and honored just to make it to finalist status. In an excellent series of blog posts about getting an MFA, the author Alexander Chee suggests that you shouldn’t apply to MFA programs without publishing more or (hey!) placing in a contest first. I don’t think that he is suggesting this as a form of gatekeeping (e.g., “only published writers should have MFAs!”), but as a way to explain that you shouldn’t see acceptance into an MFA program as your only ticket to being a writer. In other words, you should have a sense of how your writing’s received outside of an MFA program before you even begin applying. So I see this finalist status is a stamp of approval for my creative writing, from women who have years of professional publishing experience.

Or maybe “stamp” isn’t quite the right metaphor. I worked so hard as a student, as a graduate student, for something that felt like validation. But unlike my academic grades, this doesn’t feel like validation so much as affirmation and confirmation. Validation: well, maybe you can do this, because we say so. Affirmation: yes, you can do this! but you knew that already. It’s showed me, from a different angle, how much I want to be a writer again.

End of the Miss Universe clichés for now. But thank goodness there’s no bathing suit competition.

*****

In other news, the book project continues to grow. And I’ve found that opening these doors have helped others to reopen. Just watching the water lit up by a boat last night made me think of a memorable night we spent on a cormorant fishing boat in Japan.

  • While I finished (re)reading my dad’s manuscript, I still need to take the time to write about all about what I found. Interestingly, it felt unfinished in certain ways, so I need to write about what I didn’t find, too. So after I write that, I want to reread a few other memoirs of internment, such as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar. How did Houston’s memoir succeed, to the extent that it was adapted for a TV miniseries? What was the appeal?
  • My brother-in-law has suggested that I find out more about my dad’s military service, and that I may even be able to locate those who were in his unit. There are unit reunions, and so on. Fascinating!
  • Have you been following this series in the New York Times? All about technology and attention span and memory. I’m struck by this portion of the article: “At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.” Maybe rats need to blog. Or turn off their Twitter feed. Or both.
  • I am continuing my e-mail correspondence with my dad’s friend, who first commented here. She knows something about the writing of my dad’s book, since (I think) they kept in touch during that time of his life. She wants to give me some memories of my dad, partly because she lost her own dad at a relatively young age. “I too have a drive to understand more about my father,” she wrote in a recent message. “You never get around to asking all the questions you could have asked, no matter when they leave you.”