BIG RED LIPS

Today after lunch I came back to the office carrying a suspicious-looking bag with odd bulges in it that contained, if you must know, pairs of big red lips, big red-tipped noses, round red clown noses and a few masks.

They weren't for my own use - my Groucho glasses days are pretty much over, now that I look a lot like Groucho the elder as is - nor were the items for a bank job or anything, no anonymous escapade - though right off I can think of at least a dozen capers that would be cool and interesting, if societally questionable under the alien circs - fact is, I got these goodies for granddaughter Halloween chuckles. I'll add them to the EccentriCare package Echo is sending to the wee ones tomorrow.

I'm just doing my part to nurture the eccentric aspects of their individual natures, which will be severely challenged by their education. I made it through my education and was able to reassemble pretty well, and I hope they can too. It helps to have help when the other side is so vast and well agenda'd from way before your lifetime. I was going to say that it will be harder for them here in Japan, but I was educated in deep Catholic schools all the way through high school, so maybe it will be easier for them. Still, big red lips and a Groucho mask can go a long way toward restoring and maintaining the broad center that personal freedom stands strongest on.

I wasn't much tempted to put the goodies on and wear them into the office, though the thought did cross my mind, for thoughts do pretty much what they want in there, but anyway I've already done that stuff. After all, I have a reputation to uphold here, whatever it may be, I 'm not sure exactly, there are so many possibilities, this being a way foreign culture and all, but I suspect thick red lips or glasses and a eye-opening mustache would do little to enhance my reputation as a guy who frequently does that kind of stuff already.

Besides, I bought them for the granddaughters, who are still young enough to not know about somber office reps and suchlike. That breadth of freedom must be nourished early so it may survive the coming rigors, and the centers of themselves be made as large as they can make them before the balancing begins.

For that, you need your own fresh pair of big red lips, not ones your grandfather wore.

CENTAUR GENETICS

[Excerpted from my old journal, The Biwa Book]

[Feb 2000] One snowy night last month there was a knock at the door; I opened it and there was a white horse standing there. On closer examination, though, it appeared to be a centaur (the everyday mind isn't really prepared to make such distinctions): no, it was a person wearing a horse mask, a white horse mask, a very realistic white horse mask out there in the snow in the night, and I knew it had to be Keech.

No one else would come up the mountain to our house on a snowy winter night and knock at the door while wearing a white horse mask. The mask came down all the way to spread slightly over his shoulders, completing the illusion of oneness, of centauricity. Knowing Keech I didn't bother to ask why he was wearing a horse mask, because he wouldn't really see the point of such a question. Anyway, he was a horse at the moment.

I had thought that this spontaneous mask-wearing was simply an eccentricity unique to Keech, but then Echo told me that when the monkeys had come to our house and garden one afternoon, she had put on the horse mask and run out into the garden and the road in broad daylight, as if I myself weren't strange enough to the neighbors.

Then the other evening, when Echo came to the station to pick me up in the van because of the snow, there was a white horse sitting in the passenger seat. I had to take the wheel because, although the subject never really comes up, everyone tacitly agrees that horses can't drive.

Now I know it's not Keech; it's genetic.

FROG TAKES WING

This afternoon, while pausing in my digging labors, I glanced perchance at the blue sky and there beheld a small frog spinning languidly, legs outstretched. My eyes followed the amphibian as he plunged earthward and was caught gently by my son, Keech. Before my mouth could fall fully open the frog was airborne again, once more spinning languidly. When my mouth was available I asked Keech what in the world he was doing to the poor frog. "Sky diving," he replied, as the frog went up again. I pointed out that very likely this had never happened to the frog before in his life, or to any of his ancestors, that maybe the frog didn't know how to handle this, and that he might very well throw up all over Keech, but as I looked at the frog coming down again, to be sent up again, I had to admit that his greenness wasn't complaining, he wasn't struggling; in fact, in the moment of stillness at the top of his arc, spinning languidly as before, legs centrifugally outstretched, up there in the sky with the birds and the trees, bulgy eyes taking it all in with a kind of philosophical serenity, I had to admit that the frog appeared to be liking this a lot, and that Keech might actually be doing a very historic favor for the frog family, who will perhaps one day recall him fondly in their myths as the benevolent god who gave them the gift of flight, as the former amphibians soar in their new blueness, high above the mud they once knew as home. Frog had definitely never looked so far downward before; perhaps he was feeling in his breast the unwonted swelling of an unearned pride... We humans know where that can lead.

---First published, in slightly different form, in Kyoto Journal's Inaka issue---