stepped down from the curb, spinning and talking to friends. She would turn and wave to Mother without slowing the hoop’s speed.
It always amazes me that such different children can grow up in precisely the same soil. My mother found the perfect way to describe the differences when she wrote to her mother, “From now until eight tonight I lose all personal identity—I’m Mary Beth’s ‘Mother’—very dignified—Nancy’s ‘Mommie,’ and, since last week—horrors—I’m Jay’s ‘Mama Guitar.’” Different as we were then, and are now, what binds us is family and years of being each other’s most constant friends—and, until we were adults, each other’s most constant enemies as well.
The summer that I was between fourth and fifth grades, we had a base-wide war between the boys and the girls. We were all enemies. There were no malls, and there was no television—unless you wanted to watch sumo wrestling or
I Love Lucy
in Japanese (which, frankly, everyone should see at least once, just to hear Ricky Ricardo dubbed in Japanese). So fifty military children of all ages did what you might expect: we waged a war. My parents had had a piece of furniture delivered that spring, and the empty crate sat in the backyard. The garbagemen ignored it, so I asked my mother if the girls could have it for a fort. Of course, every day the boys would take it over by force, and every day Nancy or I would march home to complain, and Mother would come out and tell the boys that the prized crate was ours.
The movie theater. The pool. And the war. That was Iwakuni.
Or it was Iwakuni inside the air station gates. Outside was Japan, a Japan almost untouched by Western culture. The roads were usually dirt with
benjo
ditches running along the side and separating rice paddies or other fields from the road. The Japanese had an efficient, if fragrant, way of dealing with human waste. Receptacles in the houses emptied into open wide ditches along the road. Every road. Periodically, a man with a wooden bucket would walk beside the
benjo
ditches and scoop out the floating waste, which he then put in his wagon—which we called a honey wagon—and carried it to a version of a compost heap to later be used as fertilizer. As hard as it is to believe, it wasn’t difficult at all to get accustomed to the unrelenting odor. On our second and third trips to Japan, we arrived, took a deep breath, and said, “Ah! The smell of home.”
Directly behind our house was a stone seawall that formed the border of the base and the retaining wall for a river that ran to the inland sea. From my brother’s windows or from the cliffs right outside the gate, we would watch as the Japanese celebrated Obon, a summer festival honoring the dead, its last day marked by a moving and beautiful ceremony. The Buddhists believe that at death the spirits cross the river to the other side, but that once a year they return silently and, for the several days of Obon, visit the living. To guide the dead back across the water, Japanese families would use tiny straw boats, and in the bow they would place a candle to light the way. To entice the dead into their boats, the living leave messages and elaborate treats. That last night of Obon the little boats would be set out on the river, and the landscape would gleam with the tiny flames and then gleam again with reflection of those flames in the water and on the white paper sails of some of the boats. The beauty and the glory of this image never left me, not just of the image but of the sense that all these souls, thousands of them, were being led by the delicacies their families had prepared and by the lights in their bows glistening above the black water, and that all of the souls were traveling together to be on the other side of the river, together. Even if in life they may not have known each other, these souls crossing back across the river formed a great and glorious, even a joyous, community. It was like the title of
It always amazes me that such different children can grow up in precisely the same soil. My mother found the perfect way to describe the differences when she wrote to her mother, “From now until eight tonight I lose all personal identity—I’m Mary Beth’s ‘Mother’—very dignified—Nancy’s ‘Mommie,’ and, since last week—horrors—I’m Jay’s ‘Mama Guitar.’” Different as we were then, and are now, what binds us is family and years of being each other’s most constant friends—and, until we were adults, each other’s most constant enemies as well.
The summer that I was between fourth and fifth grades, we had a base-wide war between the boys and the girls. We were all enemies. There were no malls, and there was no television—unless you wanted to watch sumo wrestling or
I Love Lucy
in Japanese (which, frankly, everyone should see at least once, just to hear Ricky Ricardo dubbed in Japanese). So fifty military children of all ages did what you might expect: we waged a war. My parents had had a piece of furniture delivered that spring, and the empty crate sat in the backyard. The garbagemen ignored it, so I asked my mother if the girls could have it for a fort. Of course, every day the boys would take it over by force, and every day Nancy or I would march home to complain, and Mother would come out and tell the boys that the prized crate was ours.
The movie theater. The pool. And the war. That was Iwakuni.
Or it was Iwakuni inside the air station gates. Outside was Japan, a Japan almost untouched by Western culture. The roads were usually dirt with
benjo
ditches running along the side and separating rice paddies or other fields from the road. The Japanese had an efficient, if fragrant, way of dealing with human waste. Receptacles in the houses emptied into open wide ditches along the road. Every road. Periodically, a man with a wooden bucket would walk beside the
benjo
ditches and scoop out the floating waste, which he then put in his wagon—which we called a honey wagon—and carried it to a version of a compost heap to later be used as fertilizer. As hard as it is to believe, it wasn’t difficult at all to get accustomed to the unrelenting odor. On our second and third trips to Japan, we arrived, took a deep breath, and said, “Ah! The smell of home.”
Directly behind our house was a stone seawall that formed the border of the base and the retaining wall for a river that ran to the inland sea. From my brother’s windows or from the cliffs right outside the gate, we would watch as the Japanese celebrated Obon, a summer festival honoring the dead, its last day marked by a moving and beautiful ceremony. The Buddhists believe that at death the spirits cross the river to the other side, but that once a year they return silently and, for the several days of Obon, visit the living. To guide the dead back across the water, Japanese families would use tiny straw boats, and in the bow they would place a candle to light the way. To entice the dead into their boats, the living leave messages and elaborate treats. That last night of Obon the little boats would be set out on the river, and the landscape would gleam with the tiny flames and then gleam again with reflection of those flames in the water and on the white paper sails of some of the boats. The beauty and the glory of this image never left me, not just of the image but of the sense that all these souls, thousands of them, were being led by the delicacies their families had prepared and by the lights in their bows glistening above the black water, and that all of the souls were traveling together to be on the other side of the river, together. Even if in life they may not have known each other, these souls crossing back across the river formed a great and glorious, even a joyous, community. It was like the title of
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