[this story was written as a sort of puzzle, as its name implies. What is the relationship between each part? And what does anything have to do with fathers (if that is indeed what this story is supposed to be "about")?]
[just to make it less confusing... At the time of this story, Dean (my older brother) and his wife Jani are about to have their first child. I have two children (Willow and Aiden), and my younger sister (absent from the actual story) has two children (Kathy and Marcus). My father babysits the kids much of the time. And my grandfather is steadily succumbing to Alzheimer's. It's supposed to be close to Father's Day.]
XIII. Sudoku
1. What does Dad want?
“So, what are you getting Dad for Father’s Day?”
Willow sits pretty in her carseat, but Aiden, her little one year old brother, isn’t happy. He wriggles like a little balding Houdini, trying to free himself from the strait jacket of safety harnesses. He whines and keens palpably sonic anger.
“Hold on,” I tell my brother over the cell. I reach my right arm behind the back of the front passenger seat, open the cooler that’s sitting there, and (by touch) find and grab one of Aiden’s bottles, all the while keeping one hand on the steering wheel, and an eye on the road ahead (not a picture of safety, this father, but perhaps an ad for a Cirque: the blindfolded bottle-juggling crash-test dummy). I hand Aiden the bottle, and (thank God) he receives it, the nipple silencing his frantic cries for the time being.
I return to the cell phone conversation. “What are YOU getting him?”
There’s a pause as my brother Dean chuckles. It’s the age old conundrum, reawakened three times a year in varying intensities (Christmas, Birthday, and Father’s Day): What does Dad want? “Well, I was thinking maybe some stamps, or some coins...”
He’s referring to my father’s closet collection hobbies. “Dude, that’s so old school,” I tell him with a laugh. “Don’t you know?”
“What?”
“Sudoku.”
“Pseudo- what?”
“No,” I correct. “Su - Do - Ku. It’s a Japanese puzzle. Sort of looks like a crossword puzzle, but with numbers.”
“Never heard of it,” my brother sighs.
“It’s in all the papers. Supposedly, it helps with the memory, you know, prevents dementia and Alzheimer’s and all that. That’s why he’s doing it.”
My brother’s a doctor, and while he is all for prevention of disease through proactive exercise (both mental and physical), he scoffs at the flurry of anecdotal health advice out there. “Yeah, whatever,” he says derisively. “But if that’s what he’s into.”
“Only,” I continue, “he has every book on Sudoku out there. He’s even getting into weird forms of Sudoku. Like, the normal puzzle is done on a nine by nine square. He’s doing it on a sixteen by sixteen, with numbers AND letters.”
There’s a pause. My brother obviously doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about. “So what you’re saying is, we can’t get him a- a Sudoku.”
“Yup.”
“So,” my brother repeats emphatically. “What are you getting Dad?”
“Well, I’m heading over to that Novel-T T-shirt store in Ward right now,” I tell him. “Lynn said there were some cute shirts, like one with this sumo wrestler scratching his butt that says, ‘Ichi Bun.’”
“Sounds- appropriate,” says my brother. “Pick one out for me while you’re there.”
I sigh loudly in frustration. “Dude, I have two kids with me. Two basically good-“ I cast a furtive glance into the rear view mirror “-but terribly restless kids. And you want me to do your shopping for you?”
“I’ll pay you back,” my brother says, as though that were any sort of defense. And before I can object further, he ends the call with a “Thanks!”
“You’re welcome!” I say with false cheer (I’m trying to teach the kids good manners, after all). Quietly, I append: “Your time’s a coming.”
Just then, I hear a hollow thud. Something was dropped (or thrown) in the back seat. I glance into the rear view mirror, and see that Aiden’s bottle is no longer in his mouth. Thus unplugged, it only takes moments for that volcano of dissatisfaction to erupt in a cry of fury, and his body to quake violently like a 7 on the Richter scale.
“Aiden has itchy buns,” Willow says with a giggle.
“Haha,” I mock laugh (secretly hoping that Willow never repeats that joke in front of Lynn). Then, I reach back with one arm and lay a placating hand on Aiden’s thigh. “Aiden, you don’t want your bottle? What do you want?” My voice is more plea than query.
He shoves my hand away, giving me a pained look.
I ask again, with insistence:
“What do you want?”
2. As If...
“What do you want me to say?”
The question comes out with more irritation and impatience than I intended, and hangs like a storm cloud in the air.
It’s a hot June night, and instead of sleeping in the bedroom, Lynn and I are lying on separate sofas in the upstairs family room (the cross draft is better here). The two sofas line the outer walls of the room, just beneath the open windows, such that we are lying perpendicular to each other, with our heads pointing to the intersecting corner.
We’ve just returned from yet another summer wedding, this one at the Hale Kulani for one of Lynn’s cousins. Tonight’s affair was particularly lengthy and expensive, with a slick slide show detailing the relationship from inception to fruition. Of course, the story depicted was incredibly romantic, filled with so many serendipitous coincidences that one could not doubt that the hand of destiny was involved.
And of course, having seen it, Lynn questioned our own relationship: “What if Jani hadn’t set us up, do you think we still would have met?”
I take a deep breath, curbing my edginess. Weddings in general tend to annoy me; big pricey weddings like tonight’s positively irritate me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’ve already seen a fair share of divorces happen to people around me. Why pay big money for another Titanic? Might as well buy a canoe and paddle around the icebergs. But then, that’s just me. Cynical with a capital C. Also Cheap.
“What do you want me to say?” I repeat, this time with a bit more calm. “That even if Jani hadn’t set us up, we still somehow would have met? Honestly, I doubt it. I mean, I believe in the magic of love and all,” I lie, “but think about it. You were working for Gymboree, a children’s clothing store. When do I ever buy clothes, even for myself? Never! And since the only place I hung out at was at Borders or Barnes and Nobles, well, maybe one day you would have been in the Romance aisle, picking up your latest Laura Ashley, and I would’ve been searching for a graphic novel. Oops, I guess we probably wouldn’t have met there either. I mean, I don’t think the nerdling aisle is anywhere near the soft core porn-“
”It’s Laura Moore,” Lynn corrects. “Laura Ashley’s a fashion designer. And actually, those aisles are next to each other.”
“My point exactly,” I continue, unimpeded. “Nothing in common. We ran in completely different circles.”
The silence that follows is dangerous. I suddenly realize that Lynn may send me back to the “reverse doghouse” (the bedroom) if I continue on this track. On a humid night like this, that would be particularly tortuous. I’ve got to ameliorate things before they get out of control.
“Look, Lynn,” I say, as softly as I can muster. “I love you. We’ve got two beautiful kids. Isn’t that enough? Does it matter that it wasn’t inevitable? That maybe it was just plain- evitable?”
Lynn sighs. I can sense that she wants to concede, but she still has misgivings, as she always does post-wedding attendance. “Okay, and this is not just some ridiculous hypothetical,” she begins, prefacing what inevitably will be a ridiculous hypothetical, “but what if we never had the kids? Would you still love me? Would we still be together?”
I suppress a cry of impatience. “Of course.”
“Sometimes when I look at married couples with kids, I wonder. I mean, they devote their entire lives to raising them. Then once they’re gone, the couple discovers they have nothing in common, and end up getting a divorce. Is that going to be us?”
“Of course not,” I say, with tempered evenness. “I love you. I love YOU. YOU- and the kids... although, now that we have them, they will probably be the center of our lives forever, draining us dry and driving us insane. So even if we do survive raising them, there won’t be much left of either of us, mentally or otherwise, to love. We’ll be empty dried out husks.”
Lynn chuckles, and I begin to relax.
“Look,” I continue, “the point is, I married you, and that means I’m going down with the ship.” A Titanic reference, I note distantly. And, something close to the lyrics of a song, which (inappropriately) I start to sing with much feeling and little accuracy: “I will go down with this ship, and I won’t put my hands up and surrender-”
“SHH!” Lynn hisses, “You’re going to wake up the kids!” But her voice sounds happier, more at ease.
A few moments pass in silence, and I wonder whether Lynn has fallen asleep. I’m about to drift off myself when she interrupts the dead still air with yet another question. “Randy?” she says quietly. “I wonder... I mean, since I was your first and all... When you go to a wedding like that, don’t you ever have any regrets?”
“Why?” I ask sleepily. “Because of all the hot single chicks there? As if.”
“No, not because of that,” Lynn says curtly.
“Why, do you?”
“No,” Lynn replies instantly.
She’s had a checkered past, unlike myself, but believes that everything ultimately turned out for the best (meaning our marriage).
But then again, maybe she has to believe that.
“Do you?” she asks me again.
“Of course not,” I say, carefully quick.
But in the silent moments that follow, memories surface like monstrous icebergs. I think of all the near misses (or near hits) in my past, all the missed doorways to other perspectives, other lives, other worlds...
For some reason, Satsuki’s face surfaces relentlessly.
I shake my head to clear it. “As if,” I mutter bitterly.
“What?” Lynn asks.
I get off my sofa and creep under Lynn’s thin blanket. It’s very crowded, or as she likes to say, “cozy.” “I chose you,” I whisper. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
It is precisely at that moment that Aiden lets out a loud wail from his crib.
I smile wearily, roll my eyes.
“Hold that thought,” I say, as I get up to check on the little monkey...
3. Picture of Youth
“Hold on.”
“Un-ko Wady,” Aiden cries, as he hugs my shins and stares up at me.
“Hold on, Aiden,” I repeat softly. “And I’m not your Uncle Randy, I’m your Daddy.”
Aiden’s puppy dog stare is relentless, and despite myself, I’m compelled to lift him up so that he can lean his damp head against my chest. He smells sour, not like milk or piss, but like the sweat of a working man. Like my father. “Whoa, did you fall asleep on Grandpa today?”
It’s 6:00 pm Wednesday at my parents’ house. I’m standing beside my mother as she pulls out old photo albums from bursting cardboard boxes and riffles through their pages. On occasion, Kathy and Marcus, my sister’s kids, aged 6 and 4, jump up and down excitedly beside my legs with requests: “Uncle Randy, put me upside down!” “Uncle Randy, be a horse!” Although I’m touched by their excitement, I’m tired, and besides, I’m here on urgent business. “Sorry, can’t,” I mutter.
Marcus stops jumping, and pulls on my pants leg. “What are you doing?” he asks inquisitively, looking at my mother, and then me.
“Grandma is looking for a picture of grandpa,” I explain. “I want to draw a picture of him for Father’s Day.”
“Oh,” Marcus says, with a smile. Then he pulls my pants leg again. “Uncle Randy, Uncle Randy, did you know what we got for grandpa?”
I kneel down so that I can be at eye level with Marcus (and also so I can put Aiden back down on his feet; he casually saunters off, looking for Thomas the Train). “No, what did you get grandpa?”
He giggles. “We got him underwear.”
I smile, mussing up Marcus’s hair. “Something he definitely needs.” Marcus screams and leaps away before I can tickle him.
“Ah, found some!” my mother cries triumphantly. I stand up, and look over her shoulder at the open photo album page. You can tell that it’s old, not just because of the black and white photos, but because the wax lines that run across the page are stained yellow, and the cellophane appears dull and foggy, like the haze of a cataract.
“Where?” I ask, scanning the page.
“Right here!” my mother says, pointing.
“What? Is that Dad?” I squint, not believing my eyes.
The photo quality is somewhat poor and grainy, but it fails to mask the liveliness of the subject. My father (is it really him?) is dressed in the full length black uniform of a school boy in Japan, in front of some indistinct, faded field. He’s posing somewhat casually, with his hands deep in his pockets, and one leg crossed over the other, toe planted into the ground. His face is smooth and handsome, with distinctive and animated features. And his eyes. They are eyes I have never seen my father have, eyes that are both bright with youth and dark with playful mischief.
I exhale slowly. “He looks just like a Japanese James Dean,” I say finally.
My mother looks from the photo to me. “He looks like you, when he was your age.”
“Not,” I blurt, laughing sheepishly. Then, “Can I have it?”
“Sure,” my mother nods. She uses the dull blade of a letter opener to peel the photo off of the aged wax, and hands it to me. “What do you need it for again?”
I accept it gingerly, my eyes never leaving my father’s image. “I’m going to scan this into my computer, enlarge it, and reprint it. Then, I’m going to use a back light to trace the large forms, and shade and fill in the rest. Low effort art. And all I have to do is invest in a picture frame.”
My mother, who is thrifty to a fault, nods. “But didn’t you already buy him a T-shirt?”
“Yeah.”
“So why do all this?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “I just wanted to do something- different- for Dad this time. Not just the standard crapola.” I’m quiet for a moment as I assemble my thoughts. “Don’t you ever wonder about Dad? If he’s happy?”
My mother seems taken aback. “Of course he’s happy. He’s got four, pretty soon with Dean’s kid, five wonderful grandchildren. Why shouldn’t he be happy?”
I shake my head. “Mom, he stays home all day babysitting and doing sudoku. On rare occasions, like now, he gets to go out and fill in gas or buy groceries for Japan grandma. Whoopee. Don’t you ever wonder about him?” And then, softly, “Don’t you ever think he misses Japan?”
Mom is thoughtful for a few moments. Then, she explains, almost as though to herself: “A few months in when I was pregnant with Dean, I started to develop asthma. I didn’t have any insurance in Japan, only back home in Hawaii, and since Kazu had just started his own business, he didn’t have any health insurance either. So we didn’t have any choice. We had to come to Hawaii, for my health, and for Dean’s.”
“Mom, that was almost 40 years ago.”
“He’s been back,” my mother offers in defense. “And besides, this is as much his home now as anyplace else in the world.”
I glance down at the picture in my hand, so full of youth, so full of promise. “But Mom,” I protest. “Don’t you- I mean, do you ever wonder if he has any regrets? About not staying in Japan?”
My mom shakes her head impatiently. Clearly, this discussion makes her uncomfortable.
“Everyone has regrets,” she says, getting up slowly. “But not everyone dwells on them.” She wobbles on her bad knee towards the kitchen. “Now, I’ve got to cook dinner for these kids, so if you don’t mind.”
She pulls out a large ham from the fridge, and, from the pantry, a can of pineapples...
4. “Pai- Nap- Pu- Ru”
It all started at one of the countless morning services.
I was in Tenri City, in Japan, undergoing Shuyoka, a “Spiritual Development Course” for the Tenrikyo Religion. It was a three month ordeal, during which time I and about six hundred other “devotees” learned about Tenrikyo doctrine, practiced the Te-odori (or Hand Dance), played the various instruments of the service (like the fue or kotsuzumi), and performed hinokishin (“daily gratitude,” meaning free, unsolicited labor). And every morning, day in and day out, like sleepwalking zombies, we attended morning service at the Main Sanctuary.
It had been about two months since I started Shuyoka when it happened. The novelty of being in Japan had faded somewhat. Although the daily routine set up for us had become familiar and comfortable, a part of me was undeniably restless. It was showing in the kinds of clothes I was wearing. I was a slob by nature, but I was really starting to push the envelope. That morning, for instance, I wore, below the required standard black happi coat, a pair of super torn up jeans. I also wore a pair of white karate gi pants underneath, and thank god, because there were holes everywhere in the jeans; let’s just say that some of those holes would have made me look like the Artist Formerly Known As.
I sauntered up to sit in my position on the tatami, with at least two dozen rows of black heads between myself and the hinoki wood railing encircling the crater housing the performers of the morning service. My eyes felt swollen from lack of sleep. They wandered aimlessly across the dim and cavernous hall, taking in the tall hinoki pillars, the expansive grid of tatami mats, the black coated mounds of hundreds of seated worshippers...
And then I saw a girl standing in the middle of nowhere looking right at me.
Even half-closed, my eyes could tell that her glance was neither passing, nor accidental; in fact, technically, it couldn’t be called a glance. It was more a stare, one that held me, then passed into me, causing my breath to catch, and my heart to skip. She wasn’t quite smiling; her delicate mouth was slightly open, as though in the midst of a word whispered across the distance.
Before I could turn away to discount it as coincidence or dream, she walked over to me, eclipsing the distance, until she was right beside me. She took a seat, and, looking up, urged me to do the same.
I stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do.
Then, with a sound like thunder, everyone in the hall began to clap, signaling the start of the service. Shaken and embarrassed, I sank to the floor beside the girl.
During the minute-long period of silent prayer that followed, as everyone kneeled in quiet reflection, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the girl’s lips curl into a laughing smile. And I became aware of a subtle scent, lightly sweet, one which I would forever after associate with spring, and sunflowers...
That was how it all began.
Her name was Satsuki, and she was from Kyoto. She told me, as we walked back from service to our respective tsumeshos (dormitories) that she liked my pants. “Anna zubon wa Amerika de fuete run desuka?” she asked. “Are those kind of jeans popular in America?”
I struggled mentally to construct a reply out of the rudimentary Japanese that I had retained from elementary school days. All I could say was, “Eeh, Maa.” “Yeah, well.”
She was a cute girl, with thin bright eyes that never seemed to change shape regardless of feeling or situation, but sometimes seemed to burn with differing intensities. Her mouth was small and delicate, and when she smiled, she reminded me of a rabbit, or a mouse. Her hair, tied into a ponytail, exposed the smooth curve of her neck.
Yes, she was cute, but she was hardly innocent. At one point, her fingers brushed my thigh lightly through a hole in my jeans, through the karate gi, tracing invisible pathways deep within. It was hardly an accident; her look right afterwards told me as much.
I wanted to know more about her, and asked her as many questions as I could clumsily stutter. As we passed a flower shop on the Hon-dori, the main market street, I asked her: “Donna hana ga suki?” “Which flower do you like?”
“Himawari,” she answered instantly.
Unfortunately, there were no sunflowers in the shop, only roses and purple irises and chrysanthemums.
I dropped her off at her tsumesho, awkwardly telling her that I would see her tomorrow. “Jyaa, ashita mata.” “Tomorrow, again.”
That night, I tried to dream of Satsuki.
I assembled all the fragments of my brief experience of her on that day, her eyes, her smile, her voice, her touch, and most of all, her scent, and tried to unite them into a single sensation, one that would well up inside me, one that I could grasp and hold onto forever. Or at least that night.
But I couldn’t.
I kept thinking about the script that went along with the movie. What could I say to express my feelings for her, what could I say to move her? The only things I knew were “Suki da yo” (“I like you”) or “Aishiteru” (“I love you”) or even “Kimi no koto suki” (“Baby I love your way”). All clumsy, flat, cliche. Inadequate.
And what did I really know of her anyway? That she liked sunflowers, scentless?
Without words, without language, how could there ever be true connection, true relationship?
***
My last conversation with Satsuki occurred a couple of days later.
We were to the point of holding hands as we walked back to our tsumeshos, but I still knew nothing significant about her. I had asked her about what kind of music she liked, who her favorite actor or actress was, anything and everything that I could. And, either because she didn’t understand the question, or because I couldn’t understand her answer, there was always a deep disconnect.
The clincher came just as I reached her tsumesho. We had managed a tenuous thread of conversation about, of all things, lunch the day before. I mentioned that the thing I especially liked were the pineapples, which reminded me of home.
“Eh?” she asked, tilting her head. She hadn’t understood me.
“Pineapples,” I repeated.
She shook her head, again misunderstanding me.
Masking exasperation, I pronounced the word in Japanese: “Pai- Nap- Pu- Ru.”
Satsuki nodded, smiled, but in the meantime, had probably forgotten why I had mentioned pineapples in the first place.
I reached into my happi coat, pulled out a carefully folded piece of paper, and handed it to her gently.
“Eh, nani kore?” “What is this?”
I laid my hand on hers to prevent her from unfolding it. “Ato de mite kudasai.” “Look at it later.”
Then, I smiled softly at her, trying to memorize the shape of her eyes, and the unpredictable fire within them.
“Jya, mata ashita,” I lied, turning away.
After I rounded a corner, I began to run, and didn’t stop until I reached my dorm room, where the sunflower that I had painstakingly tried to draw the night before drooped and wilted silently...
5. Find Your Voice
“Pineapple,” I say, pointing to the fake plastic yellow toy. “This is a pineapple.”
Aiden turns away, uninterested, picks up his favorite toy, and holds it up. “Train,” he says, with utter seriousness. “Thomas.”
“Yes, that’s Thomas the Train,” I say, nodding. “And this-“ I again point to the object, “is a yellow pineapple.”
“Train!” Aiden cries. “Thomas!”
I smile in resignation. “Okay, okay.”
I rise up from my crouch, just before Marcus can scramble on my back.
My mother, sitting in the corner La-Z-Boy, has been watching my interaction with Aiden. She smiles fondly.
“Was I like that?” I ask her.
“Like what?” And before I can respond, she answers. “You were obsessed, too, but with cars. We could leave you alone for hours with them. You would sit on the kitchen floor, and just roll them backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, over and over.”
“What about talking?” I ask. “Was I able to talk at his age?”
My mother shakes her head no. “Aiden is fast, for a boy,” she says. “I think he’s going to be really bright. You, on the other hand.”
“What?”
She sighs. “Didn’t I ever tell you? For a little while, I was worried that there was something wrong with you. That you were retarded.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” my mother nods. “You were such a quiet boy. And at two years old, when most kids were saying short sentences, you rarely even said single words.”
“Really.”
My mother smiles sarcastically. “Actually, not much has changed.”
I match her smile. “So, what did you do?”
“Do?”
“Yeah, how did you get me to talk?”
My mother looks down thoughtfully. “I didn’t do anything,” she says softly. “But Dad, well, one day, he took you out for a drive, just he and you, for about an hour. When you guys returned, Dad said, ‘He’s okay. He can talk just fine.’ And you could. In fact, we discovered that you could talk in full, complete sentences, that you were actually quite articulate.”
I smile faintly.
“Yeah,” my mother nods, deep in recollection. “Dad found your voice for you. Funny, huh? He’s so quiet himself. But he was the only one that could get you to talk. Maybe it’s because he was the only one that could reach you, the two of you are so alike.”
My mother rocks the La-Z-Boy.
I crouch down, picking up the fake plastic pineapple, and stroking Aiden’s thin, sweaty hair.
I try to remember that drive. I seem to have dim memories of it, of being driven around Mililani, of seeing green fields of weedelia roll past, of riding beside my father. I can’t remember what he said, what magic words he used to unlock my tongue.
But I almost recall, like a distant and long forgotten dream, a vague feeling, a feeling of communication, of acknowledgment, of being heard and understood...
And I remember that it felt good.
6. Absence: Father and Father Away
“Dad, can you teach me some moves?”
I’m back from my freshman year at college, where I’ve been learning Isshinryu Karate. I’ve learned rudimentary throws from my sensei, like a sweeping takedown and a hip throw, but I want to learn more. Perhaps if I do, when I return to Massachusetts in the Fall, I’ll have improved enough to get revenge on some of the higher ranking students.
I also want to bond with my dad. I’ve never been into sports, so I could never participate in conversations about football or basketball with him, like my brother could. But since he was a black belt in judo once, I thought that finally I might have something slightly in common, something I could practice with him.
We’ve just finished washing the car, and my father is winding up the garden hose. I lift the damp bottoms of my sweat pants up over my shins so they look more like karate pants, and throw some clumsy side blade kicks into the air.
My father just smiles, shaking his head. He walks around the side of the garage to put the hose away. I follow him.
“Here,” I say, as soon as he drops the hose and his hands are free. I hold his shoulder, shifting his body so that he faces me squarely. “Check this out.” And I go through the sequence of moves for a sweeping takedown, calling them out as I perform them: “Pull down, push, step, bring the foot around, and sweep.” I don’t follow through, but even so, at the end of the movement, I feel as though I am more off balance than my father. My initial pushes and pulls never even budged him, and with my right foot snaked behind his right heel, I feel like I’m leaning backwards.
My father takes a small step forward, and confirms my instability. I wobble for a moment, then save myself from falling by skittering my feet around unsteadily.
“Hetakuso na,” my father sighs. He starts to walk to the front door of the house.
“Come on, Dad,” I cry. “Can’t you show me something?” I follow him as he walks past the little Japanese garden in our yard, the one with the mondo grass hill and the stone lantern. I try to lay a hand on his shoulder, to catch his attention.
But my father is suddenly not there.
Before I know it, the world spins, and my stomach turns end over end. The next thing I know, I’m staring up at the evening sky, coughing. Mondo grass is all around me, and the stone lantern looks close enough to fall on me.
I clumsily sit up on my own. My father is already at the front door, taking off his slippers.
“Cool,” I cough. “How did you do that? What did you do?”
The front door shuts behind him.
I sit in the darkening twilight, alone.
I stay in that position for many minutes, crushing mondo grass and half hearing the growing sound of crickets around me. I think about the distance between fathers and sons, and how that distance is maintained through silence, and sometimes, in my case, physical throwing. The distance has something to do with respect, I surmise, but at times, it seems to involve something far more fundamental. It is kin with the repulsion of like-poled magnets, or the irreducible gap between parallel lines.
Its inevitability makes me want to hurl.
“When I’m a father,” I whisper out loud, “I’m going to be different. I’m going to be close, and involved, and teach them everything I know, and give them everything I have to give... whether they like it or not!”
Venus and the first and brightest stars pop into being in the darkening sky, oblivious and unchanging, as they have since the beginning of time...
7. “Presents”
Dean stops by to pick up the father’s day present I bought for him to give to my dad.
Willow gets to the metal screen door first, yelling a friendly “Hi!”
“Hi Willow,” Dean calls through the tiny holes.
I open the door, holding Aiden in my arms. He’s tired and fussy, and instead of offering any sort of greeting to my brother, buries his face into my chest.
“Hi Aiden,” Dean says.
Aiden digs his face deep into the hollow near my armpit, shaking his head no.
“He’s tired,” I explain. “Come in.”
I lead Dean into the living room (Willow traipsing along close behind), carefully weaving a path around fragmented Lego Quattro structures and mismatched diecast and wood versions of Thomas the Train characters, to the island where I put the shopping bags.
“So, how’s Jani?” I ask, as I shuffle through the contents of a bag with one hand.
“She’s good,” Dean says. “Tired and anxious, but good. Only two more weeks.”
I smile wearily. “Get ready, dude, ‘cause you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep for a while once the baby comes.” I pull out a large black shirt. “Here it is,” I say, unfolding it and laying it on the island.
It is plain, except for large white letters on its front: “Old F.A.R.T. / Fathers Against Radical Teenagers.”
“Rand,” Dean complains. “We’re not teenagers any more.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say, shifting Aiden slightly. “That’s why I bought a cloth pen. It’s in the other bag. You can cross out the Teenagers part, and write in Thirty-somethings. Or-” the idea suddenly hits me- “Toddlers.”
Dean half-smiles, appreciating my ideas, but reluctant to make the modifications himself. “Well,” he says, “it DOES match him. Remember when we were young? He used to fart in his hand, open up his fist right in front of our noses, and call it a ‘present.’ Remember that?”
I crack up despite myself, shaking Aiden. He whines a complaint. “Man, don’t remind me. He used to make the most foul-smelling farts ever. They were so thick, they were almost liquid. I could almost taste them.”
Dean laughs, shaking his head.
Willow, jumping up and down at our feet, squeals and pretends to be in on the joke.
“You know,” I continue, “it’s ironic, but that was the only time he really shared of himself.”
Dean chuckles. “If that’s sharing, I wish he didn’t. Sometimes he was a bit too, shall we say, generous.”
“But that’s dad, huh?” I say thoughtfully. “I mean, really, he was, in some ways, just like his farts. Silent but violent. I mean, inwardly I guess.”
“A quiet riot,” Dean retorts. Suddenly, we’re playing some kind of game.
“Soundless but boundless,” I shoot back.
“Unstated and deflated,” Dean blurts, after a pause.
Aiden is now squirming and shrieking in irritation. Willow, meanwhile, is jogging around in circles around my brother and I, screaming and crying out “That’s funny” over and over again.
Suddenly, Dean grows quiet, wrinkling his nose. “Must be having flashbacks,” he says, “cause something around here stinks.”
I lift Aiden’s wriggling angry diaper-clad butt up to my nose. My sudden shuddering causes Dean and Willow to burst out in laughter together. “Ai- den,” I complain wearily. I hold him away from myself, offering him to Dean. “Here, wanna practice, dad-to-be?”
Dean just shakes his head.
“No way. Forget it.”
8. Remember Dad on Father’s Day
“I heard memory is strongly tied to smell.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” says Dean, addressing my mom’s comment. He straightens up in his seat to assume the doctor’s role. “The olfactory region of the brain is located close to the hippocampus, so when you smell, you stimulate the seat of memory.” Nobody’s really listening after that point, but Dean continues. “It was an adaptive mechanism. Animals needed to remember smells in order to survive. This was the smell of a predator, that was the smell of prey.”
Dean, my mom, my grandpa and I are all sitting around the dining table at my grandma’s house in Ewa Beach. It’s late in the afternoon, we’ve all finished eating an early dinner (shrimp tempura, shoyu chicken, gobo kimpira, namasu and rice), and the fathers have all opened their respective presents. My grandpa got some chocolates, a “Nostalgic Hawaii” T-Shirt depicting Arakawa’s in Waipahu, and some orchids. I received a large black and white happi coat depicting a Chinese dragon on the back to wear at the summer Obon festivals (so that my clumsy, unschooled dancing can truly stand out). My dad received pairs of socks and underwear, a bunch of sudoku books, a kakuro book, a couple of shirts (Dean’s revised “Old F.A.R.T.”), and the picture that I drew. He seemed to pause upon receiving the picture, holding it at arm’s length and squinting at it, as if he couldn’t recognize who or what it depicted. After my mom cried “That’s you!” he smiled briefly in recognition, and nodded to me in acknowledgment.
Now that the gathering is winding down, the family has broken into enclaves, killing time in more or less individual ways. The kids (Kathy, Marcus, Willow and Aiden) alternate between chasing each other in circles and chasing my grandparents’ not entirely tame chihuahua Coco. Jani and Lynn are sitting on a sofa, talking about the trials and tribulations of pregnancy and parenthood. My uncle Masao and my grandmother are playing hanafuda. My aunty Kiyomi and uncle Elmer are sitting together, watching “The Usual Suspects” on the large television in the living room. My father is sitting at the round table in the living room, trying to figure out yet another puzzle. And the rest of us (my grandfather, my mom, my brother and me) are in the dining room, talking.
My grandfather reclines in his chair, silent and for the most part oblivious to the conversation. The pupils in his eyes seem to be dissolving into the moist off-white conjunctiva around them. In my mind, they represent his mental state.
My grandfather is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.
Occasionally, he comments about the heat, or asks after my grandmother, or breaks into some old Japanese song. Sometimes he looks one of us in the eye, making a friendly comment, like “How are you?” or “Did you eat?”, but he never refers to any one of us by name, not even my mother.
We are all simply strange and temporary guests in his home.
So, like vultures circling around still living prey, or (perhaps more ironically apt) like people ignoring the elephant sitting in the middle of the living room, we talk around my grandfather’s problem. Deep down, we all know that there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, that my grandfather will gradually decline into oblivion, like an image that steadily blurs out of focus. We can say and do nothing to change this. But rather than sit in helpless silence, we choose to do the next best thing: talk about memory in the abstract.
“You know,” I begin, “in Chinese Medicine, memory is linked with the Heart and Kidneys. They say that the Kidneys are associated with Short Term Memory, while the Heart is associated with Long Term Memory. Well, actually, sometimes they say it in reverse. Anyway, as people get older, their Kidneys get weaker and weaker, and they begin to lose their Short Term Memory. At the same time, they start to reexperience older, long term memories stored in their Hearts.”
“Interesting,” my mother comments.
“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” my brother scoffs. “Memories aren’t stored in organs.”
“Oh yeah?” I cry. “Haven’t you ever heard of the phenomenon of post-heart transplant memories? About how heart transplant recipients experience foreign memories, memories once owned by the donor?”
“That’s all anecdotal nonsense.”
“Anecdotal,” I spit, “That’s what Western Medicine always says with regards to things they can’t understand. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies try to isolate chemicals from traditional herbal remedies, and doctors call acupuncturists quacks AND YET claim they can do something called ‘medical acupuncture’ after watching a few hours of videotape-“
”Enough!” my grandfather suddenly calls out. “Jesus Christ!” For a moment, grandpa’s eyes seem ablaze with irritation. But then the moment passes, and he reclines in his seat, closing his eyes as though trying to recall the words of a long-forgotten melody.
“Sorry grandpa,” I say.
Dean apologizes too. “Sorry.”
In the silence that ensues, I try to think of a more neutral topic. “Hey, did you hear? At Stanford, they’ve developed a crystal, I think it was called a photonic crystal, that can basically trap light long enough to slow it.”
“What are you talking about?” Dean mutters, perhaps still irritated from the previous argument.
“It’s a crystal that slows light,” I reply calmly. “It only slows it by an infinitesimal fraction of time, but it is at least a measurable delay.”
“So what?”
“Well, that’s what I thought too,” I say. “So what? But it turns out that they may be able to use light to retain information in the future, instead of electrical circuits. And they said that light would be far more efficient, that it could store a lot more information, than within the microprocessors of today’s computers. And they said that the use of crystals to bend or delay light would be essential to that development.”
“Wow,” my mother murmurs. “You know, it’s amazing what they can do nowadays. Crystals holding light. Technology is so- fast.”
“Tell me about it,” Dean mutters. “Computers are obsolete as soon as you take them home from the store.”
I continue with my line of thought. “It makes you wonder, though. What is a memory? Is it really a time and a place and a person? Or is it just, I don’t know, something folded up a jillion times? Like origami, or a paper airplane?” I sigh. “Someday, maybe the human brain and human memories will become obsolete. Everything, everything will switch from analog to digital. And maybe then, we won’t even need to remember anything.”
“Someday obsolete?” my brother laughs. “Look at you.”
“Haha,” I bark sarcastically.
My grandfather suddenly breaks into a song. It sounds like a Japanese version of “Auld Lang Syne.”[1]
We all look away, uncomfortable, pretending not to hear, as his dull eyes search the invisible distance for an audience.
My eyes happen upon my father sitting silently in the living room, pencil in hand, tackling yet another sudoku. His concentration makes him appear peaceful and distant- isolated- in a world without time or trouble...
9. Sudoku
Fathers are like Sudoku puzzles.
A few of the squares are given to you.
The rest, you’ve got to figure out yourself, through inference and imagination.
Fathers, after all, never express themselves directly.
I know and remember a lot of things about my father: that one of his favorite movies is “Bridge over the River Kwai,” evidenced by his ability to whistle its signature tune; that he can sing a soulful Elvis in “Only Fools Rush In”; that his yellow Datsun B210 had an air conditioning vent that looked like the eye of the Death Star, and it uselessly recirculated his second hand cigarette smoke; that his feet would smell of old cheese beneath his desk (where my sister and I hid, barely containing giggles), as he recorded the Japanese news broadcast for KOHO radio in a voice as smooth as silk; that he once beat three marines single-handedly in a Judo tournament in Iwakuni, Japan; that he kept my humerus from breaking when I tried to chase a softball as it fell into the top of a tall hollow tile wall...
Yet, there are a lot of missing pieces as well, preventing me from ever getting a complete picture of who he is. I’m stuck with fragments, like confetti out of a paper shredder, trying to piece everything together to steal an identity. Who is my father? Does he love me? Does he respect me? Is he happy with his life? If he had the chance, would he do it all over again exactly the same way, or would he have chosen a different path, a different life?
***
One day, my father will offer to teach me how to do it. And, although I think I already know how, I will let him, absorbing his voice, and reading truth within his imprecise English.
“Easy,” he will say.
“Just fill in. Only rule is you cannot repeat, cannot have two of anything, this way, that way, or in a square. If you repeat, then you made a mistake, you have to start over.”
“If you stuck, just look. You will see something. You will see one answer.”
“If you still stuck, sometimes, but only sometimes, you gotta guess.”
“You got it? Understand?”
“Now you try.”
----------------
[1] “In Japan, the Japanese song ‘Hotaru no Hikari’ (‘Glow of a Firefly’) uses the Auld Lang Syne tune. This song is sung as a song of the separation in the graduation ceremony etc. Most Japanese know this song. This song was created during the Meiji period as part of an effort to create a body of songs for children to learn in school. An American educator was brought in as part of this effort, and various Scottish tunes were used, but applied to completely different Japanese lyrics/poems. In the case of ‘Hotaru no Hikari,’ the words are a series of images of hardships that the industrious student endures in his relentless quest for knowledge, starting with the firefly’s light, which the student uses to keep studying when he has no other light sources.”
-from the Wikipedia entry on “Auld Lang Syne,” as of July 27th, 2006
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