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Opening the envelope

I could tell you that it smelled yellow. Not in a diseased, Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman way. Not in an inscrutable, exotic, “Oriental” way.  It smelled like Northern California summer sunlight coming through shoji screen paper.

I could tell you that it smelled, predictably, like aging paper. But that might only tell you so much. If you haunt used bookstores like I do, you’d probably recognize the smell. You’d also know it if you’ve done a lot of research in the archives, or shelving in the library stacks. This week we took a family walk down the spiral stacks at the Seattle Central Public Library, and as we rounded a corner, something like that smell greeted me.

The envelope smelled, as my husband Josh pointed out to me, like my childhood house. When I was growing up, we had touches of Japanese décor around the house: a few kokeshi dolls, a noren that fluttered in the main entrance to the hallway, even a tokonoma with a bright red painting. But for me it’s the shoji screens over our windows and glass doors that quietly say home. That’s the smell: the yellow, the paper, the light.

Since I love paper with a cocooning fervor that would make a silkworm blush (another post, another time), you’d think that the feel of the paper would be my first sensory hit. I’ve had this envelope for years now, and it’s been at my mom’s house for a couple of decades before that, probably unopened.

But at first, I was too tentative to rub the paper between my fingers. I even did some writing before I opened the envelope; I wrote down the questions that I wanted to ask. During internment, how did you and our family deal with loss? How did you deal with the loss of your possessions, of your house, of your family papers and baby pictures? And the difficult, near-impossible questions: How have I dealt, or not dealt, with your loss? How do we endure?

It took me a week to think about those questions. I haven’t read the manuscript since I was eight or nine years buy ventolin without prescription old: almost twenty-five years ago. Then a week later, I wrote down why I was so afraid of opening the envelope. I’m scared that it’s going to make me cry and realize his loss all over again. I hate crying. I hate having lost him.

On my computer desktop, I opened up and looked at an old photo of my father. I wanted to say something like a prayer, but I didn’t know what to ask for. I don’t really pray, if we’re being very honest here.

I couldn’t think, didn’t say, probably felt: please.

Then I opened the envelope. Lately I’ve been worried that the manuscript inside the envelope has been deteriorating. But I noticed that though the first and last pages are a bit tattered, the bond paper’s doing its very best to stand up to the manual typewriter. In an age of slick laser printouts, there’s something engraved, almost letterpressed, about these typewritten pages.

And at the bottom of the very first page, he left me an unexpected gift.

Taku Frank Nimura

December, 1973

Out of the two-hundred plus manuscript pages, it’s this one that I just might cherish the most. He wrote this book—or at least this page—during the month and year that I was born. He died eleven years later.

In the wake of a recent loss, private for now, I am beginning to write my own book. It’s a book that speaks to my father, that will interweave his voice with the voice and artwork of my sister. I don’t know where this project will take us, but I know it’s about memory, family, technology, loss, and home. And it’s about the precariously shifting aftermath of history, or what I’ve come to think of as the wake.

The wake? Stand near the back of a ferry boat, and watch the waters below. As the boat engine starts, the waters will seem to hum. All that unseen energy will churn itself into a thick, gorgeous procession of rippling upheaval. We know the procession will eventually disappear. And so we treasure the wake because we are always leaving it behind.

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Assignment #2, draft 3

Reading Out Loud

1.

There is a framed photograph sitting on top of my rolltop desk, the left-hand side. Say you’re someone who is drawn to faces. Say you’re also someone who looks at faces first, in pictures. If you saw the picture for the first time, your eye might be drawn to the bottom left corner of the picture first: the largest dark spot of the picture, the back and right side of my auburn head, my face in profile. Then you might glance at my dad’s dark head above mine. Following my dad’s gaze, completing the triangle, you would find my baby sister’s face. Following her gaze, you’d see what the three of us are looking at: a children’s book. It’s a picture that my mom took of me, my dad, and my baby sister, twenty-something years ago. We’re all lying down in bed, reading out loud.

I wonder if I put the photograph there because I’m left-handed, and so I placed it at the writing-hand side of my desk.

2.

I love thrift stores, but usually not for the books. It’s not because I don’t like used books. Powell’s, the city-block-big, six-floor Portland bookstore, is one of my ideas of heaven. No, it’s because the filters that Goodwill sets for its acceptance rate must be pretty different than the filters set for used bookstores. The children’s book section at my favorite Goodwill has, inexplicably, a high ratio of Christian “Little Golden Books” to just about anything else. But then came the day I found this book in the thrift store, which restored my father’s voice.

3.

For the sake of literary symmetry, wouldn’t it be great if that book was the book in my framed family picture? Alas, it’s not.

4.

“One day, a big wind blew. Trees fell, and a gas pump flew….” The book is by Ellen Raskin, and it’s called Moose, Goose, and Little Nobody. Published in 1974, a year after I was born, the book’s illustrations seem to me a product of the long 1960s: delicate outlines of pen-and-ink drawings, filled in with psychedelic colors like coral and chartreuse. It’s a sweet, funny book, about a little mouse (“Little Nobody”) whose house is blown ventolin inhaler price uk away by a tornado—that “big wind” of the first line. He bumps into Moose and Goose, who decide to help him find his name, his house, and his mother.

5.

I put the book in my thrift store shopping cart. I don’t look at it again until I am reading to my daughter, Celia, that night. And from the very first page, to the very last line, there is my father’s voice: (gruffly) “’Hello, Gas,’ said Moose, ‘howdy-do.’”

I am reading it, and there’s my dad’s voice again: his intonations, his alternating between Moose’s avuncular silliness, Goose’s motherly concern, and Little Nobody’s squeaky anxiety.

I am reading it, and there is my father’s voice, in a way I haven’t heard in over twenty years. I was born before the digital age. My dad was an amateur photographer, not a videographer. I think we have one audio tape of my dad’s voice. I don’t know where that tape is.

Even stranger: I don’t think I would ever have read this book out loud, even to myself. Even though to my last day I would passionately defend the importance of reading out loud to children, I can’t believe it:

I am reading the book to my daughter. My dad is reading the book to my daughter. To his granddaughter, whom he never met.

6.

For the sake of literary symmetry, I’d like to tell you that the book is about the mouse trying to find his father. But it’s not. For the same reason, I’d also like to tell you that when I showed this book to my mother and my sister, they remembered it, too. But they don’t.

I don’t mean to criticize them, of course. My dad was a librarian. He checked out, brought home, and read us bookshelves upon bookshelves of books. However, this also means that the memory is just mine.

7.

We writers often write against loss, against death, which our culture may regard as the same thing. But that evening I remembered again how many times the written word has saved me, has restored to me what I thought was lost forever.

These are the luminous, the numinous, ways that we may regain our dead.