Big grandfather

little granddaughter

seesaw anyway

Spirit Line

When you talk to yourself - and we all talk to ourselves, especially when we become elders, having improved over the decades into scintillating conversationalists - you're generally after clarity or understanding, working out an idea or seeking resolution, somewhat like traditional prayer in many respects except for one key point: it is not other directed. It is not not a plea for help from elsewhere, but a conversation with the closest presence of what most folks call god. 

When we talk to the god in ourselves, however, we are talking to an entity we know to be extant; no need to conjure faith out of printed matter. It feels comfortable and comforting to talk this way-- it feels natural, and there is a listener; it is also something to do in a tight spot, an action to take, if only to say something. What's better, it can guide us toward a solution that arises from all the tomorrowstuff our bodies in their ancientness know like the back of our hands.  

We spend our early lives asking upward, looking to our elders for such answers as we can find there, and when at last we have no elders but are the elders, we keep on asking upward, though now we ask of the height in ourselves, of the spirit that embodies us, that in every living person reaches directly back to beyond the start of time. 

We can speak to spirit about anything - and without reservations, since it is our own - most often about the lower, immediate emotions that ever trouble the bodied. It is best we ourselves deal with our own problems, to the extent we can, learn from them as we have evolved to do. We grow strongest without leaning.

The strength we have gained of ourselves is of greatest value, worthy of passing on down the spirit line.

Tiny so green frog 

sunning on garden latch -

 I'll get lettuce later

It Made Robert Wonder

We were sitting at dinner the other night, serving the last of the salad - which Miasa was about to finish up - when her sister Mitsuki said "Mitsuki wa mada tabetenai!" ("Mitsuki hasn't eaten any yet!"). I had heard this J-syntax countless times before, but for some reason I heard it literally for the first time, and it dawned on me that Mitsuki was speaking of herself in the third person! This form of Japanese is used mostly by females, toddlers to teens; not by males or older women.

I wonder if that is a cultural practice in any other language, and what effect that subtle sublimation of the "I" might have on the socio/psychological development of the female self. She is thereby enabled to consider and speak of herself as another person! This unique structure seems to be a sort of semantic means of averting negative emotional response to actions that would otherwise be seen as overtly selfish (by saying "I want x"), focusing any social negativity on a target abstraction out there in the semantic ether that bears one's name, but is not one, exactly; rather it is a selfless third entity, apart from oneself, a sort of cavitation in the emotolinguistic sea. It is only used in that specific way; Mitsuki wouldn't say "Mitsuki saw a great movie last night," a declaration of past action that would beget no possibly negative reaction.

Offhand I know of no other language in which it is traditional to distance selfness with such facility, pretty much enabling one (at least a young female - and why only females?) to speak of oneself as an additional member of the group... I know of no other culture wherein the power of politeness drives the need to make an other of oneself (only young females!), so as to deflect any negative reactions toward overt "I"-ness. I try to sense the difference between me saying: "I haven't eaten any yet!" and me saying: "Robert hasn't eaten any yet!" But as an adult male American semantic alien, it doesn't work for me; I can't 'feel' it, even in the slightest way.

Whence in long-ago Japan was such a word structure inspired to appear in a moment's discourse - and be understood! Be approved! Be carried on into the future of the language as useful! Apparently, when it was first said, no one went "Huh?" They accepted the distancing, and the need for it.

Given the cultural changes now ongoing in Japan, I suspect that this subtle usage, like the need for it, may disappear before too long; thought I'd mention it.

Monkeys Hate It When You Steal Their Beans

The other morning from the deck I shouted a solo monkey out of the garden, a female, not big but bigly disappointed at being rousted from her quiet (sneaky) moment in that peaceful, beanfilled, monkeyloving place. She climbed slowly back over the fence with that over-the-shoulder resignation that monkeys are so good at, because they really own everything. She was a scout; the troupe of beangrabbers would soon follow.

So I got my work duds on and went out there because I'd seen yesterday that there were lots of on-the-verge beans that would be ready now anyway. I opened the gate and walked in to check the damage, saw that there was none; the furry spy had been rousted before she could even nip a cuke-- she'd just memorized the inventory.

As I was going around double-checking the zooks and cukes and rows of climbing beans, nigglethinking what  a fool I am to grow such things in monkeyworld, I noted that the scout had remained nearby in simian confidence, sitting quietly in the shadows between the garden and the roadside trees, keeping an eye on her vegetables, feeling a bit proprietary toward her beans, just now at the front edge of their profusion (I had harvested a large bowlful of them yesterday in anticipation of just this sort of event, even though I'd seen only one stray monkey in the past 6 months). 

Seems monkeys are as punctual as bean caterpillars, which emerge hungry at precisely the time the beans are ready to feed them, a bug-bean arrangement finalized many eons ago, long before we learned to plant for our own purposes, despite bugs and monkeys. The bugs don't even bother to laugh at the thought that these are planted beans, and the monkeys don't care, they have the same sort of paleoagreement with the beans and the like: you grow it, we'll eat it. Pretty basic. Way unlike our Nietzschean struggles. 

It's in their genes; the earth's output is clearly their heritage, so in that sense she was sitting there watching me grab her beans and pluck them-- then not even eat them before another walker could get them, but put them in some kind of pointless container that interferes with climbing - What the hell for, she looked like she was thinking, stomachs are all you need... never understand these walkers - but I was bigger than she was, which is the way monkeys roll, bottom line - humans too, in more technological ways that include kill ratio and stopping power...

Once I started picking the beans, Scout finally gave up, ambled on out of the shadows, down the stone steps and across the road to the forest where she found a nice vantage tree and sat in it watching me through the leaves and uttering a regular sort of grieving sound, a single syllable moan, like those Italian grandmothers in my old NY neighborhood used to do when as outfielder I had to sometimes go over the fence into their kitchen gardens where there were the most delicious tomatoes in the world. Yes, I was a monkey in my younger days and this is all a form of karma, though I no longer grow tomatoes because I get so few of them, and none ever as delicious as those were...

Scout sat there continuously making that slow rhythmic lament all the while I went carefully along my net wall of her ready beans, taking for myself any beanpod that seemed large enough to catch a monkey's attention, because I knew that she was just being a sound marker, spotter, guide for the approaching troupe (which showed up before long), her eyes following my every move; a  companion of hers - male, probably retired, was not far away, breaking branches off an oak tree and throwing them onto the ground in a kind of bluster, which didn't work on me. There was much frustration in the air, except where I was.

The troupe arrived, as always with an unexpected flourish. About 20 minutes after gleaning the beans I was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee, keeping an eye on the garden, my bedding hanging out over the deck railing in the nooning sun, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a brown furry rocket leap from the cedar into the weeping cherry, thence with a whoosh down onto the deck railing, zip across my futon and from there into the plum tree, on into the bay tree and down to the ground, streaking for my garden. 

I looked out the big window and there was brown fur everywhere: there were mothers with newborn wee ones on their backs ambling along, slow loafing males who would get there after the harvest, midrange females just then sneaking over my garden fence but by then I was clacking a stone on the deck railing and whistling, shouting pretty nasty monkey curses and clapping my hands; tossed a rock or two and they all loped away to beyond rock distance, where they would wait until I went back inside my big box...

The word was getting around, though: there were no beans left. The troupe was buzzing; they couldn't believe I had taken their beans, and they were pissed: I could tell by the way they looked at me from the road, their faces an even angrier red than usual; they can't stand it when we steal their stuff.

You Talkinna Me??

This morning I was out doing the usual early Saturday round of little chores that build up during the week. I'd earlier scattered the kitchen refuse atop the compost pile - now nearbelow the cherry tree - and was bucketing the last of the wood stove ash from the ash heap to scatter along the feet of the biwa (loquat) and natsume (jujube) trees, the blueberry bushes and the mountain azaleas that line the inner road, then to sprinkle the last of it all atop this morning's compost. 

The bucket was heavy with damp ash; I was just passing head down beneath the cherry tree when a blast of raucous sound from above made me look up. There in the branchy shadows blustered Mr. Crow, who owns this turf. Japanese crows can be uncomfortably loud even from a hundred meters away, but Mr. Crow was right there, yawping in my face. He wasn't flying away, as he normally would have done from this sudden proximity; he was staying put, hopping mad on a low branch: I had entered his dark presence just as he was planning his daily breakfast selection from the compost buffet, freshly laid out for him below. There was beaksome orange peel, onion skins,  tomato trimmings, cabbage core, tea leaves, broccoli stems, eggshells, you name it, all interlayered for Crow delight, what a feast it would be-- then I blundered into the picture and he became the essence of umbrage.  

I just stood there staring at him; he just hopped there, flaring and glaring. Then he raised his head and let out another blast, whoa loud under that canopy of leaves. Crow had never confronted me directly in this way, or this close up; only a couple of meters separated us. This was a bit too near even for my taste. I stared at him some more. He tilted his head and fixed me with his blackest eye: was I gonna get the hell out of his face or what.

For me, the next move was clear. I'd been waiting a long time-- about 35 years, actually. "You talkinna me??" I said, in my best Nooyawkese. He looked dumbfounded. "You talkinna me??" louder this time, more ominous, more threatening, half a step forward, just like De Niro, except this was for real. The big crow beak hung open in dark disbelief, like he could not believe his ears; like he'd seen that movie too! And I was using that very trope, out here in the -- semiwild, which was Crow's alone! What was Crow culture, then, if this was also an element of the human... whatever?

I seemed to sense a deep rift in the crow cosmos; a psychic shock wave passed through me. Crow looked here and there to his heavens for affirmation, as though he'd just read all of Nietzsche or its corvine equivalent. He gave a little croak upward. Forget about the select breakfast buffet. Human and Crow had just had a cultural exchange. We had crossed a line; there had been a merging of artistic elements. If this got out, things would ever be the same. 

The question now was, would Crow tell the others, or would he keep this bright secret for his own? Mumbling to himself, he flew off into the upmountain forest, likely to a distant higher branch of contemplation where he could be most alone-- as though he had to think about it. I'm sure he'll keep it all to himself, like that whole thick slice of bread he got not long ago. He'll never share this historic experience with another crow; crows don't do such things. 

But humans do.     

TIDES OF DAYS

   

The longer I've lived here, the more I've come to delight in that brief time of Spring when the wintered mountainside becomes more and more facets of blue sky as the paddies fill, until for a brief time before rice planting, from certain perspectives - like my front doorway - the sky is all over the ground.

Then come the little astonishments of lifetimes, like the early Spring morning when you walk out of the house into a mountain mist and behold upon that long watermirror the pale-green rows of just-planted rice shoots, stretching away into the soft wall of cloud right at your door... You can’t help but just stand there looking, letting the sight fill you with the miracle of magnificence just plain happening, in this day-to-day way.  

On the blue days, across that magic mirror glide the clouds that come sailing over the mountain like big baroque pearls, while hawks and swallows dive to snatch food from their reflections; at evening the calm of the mirror is broken into widening rings by a now-and-then rain, or rippled into memory by sudden evening breezes that shiver the silver light. 

From the morning train along the Lake, through Spring and Summer you can see the day-by-day changes all along the line, as the tides of days turn the land to sky that soon turns to rice leaves, the fields growing day by day into perfect levels of deep green blades that reveal the wind as they grow taller, until they begin to nod with the weight of their gold...

KYOTO JOURNAL DIGITAL NOW OUT!  

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TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like children and language - things are quickly no longer square or groovy and many of us remember a lush, no-Internet world - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood seem much nearer the stone age. 

That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was current to the max with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, mumbledy-peg, trolley cars, typewriters, mimeos and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with five-digit phone numbers, young men in fedoras, grandpas in derbys and high-lace shoes, women in odd-feathered hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school inkwells with slate tops, there were stenographers, dictaphones, telegraph wires all the way across the nation and teletype internationally, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk, bread and ice, there was no tv, "plastic" was a new word, and the old styles, language (Don't say "ain't"!), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere, everyone smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter was the norm, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I saw in a film clip an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives, back in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, off-the-wall Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question, the kind of question that even then was so Edwardianly orotund and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan uncharacteristically became so sympathetic to the asker as to not be his usual journosassy self, and as I listened to the question unfold I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism, attempting to speak as though the past fitted perfectly into the right-nowness of his moment, he assuming that he could position this young musical upstart relative to the post-Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback-telegraph-spittoon-historied way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. 

In his long professional life he himself had perhaps at last become his own ideal of the Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant present. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since 1940 have been more radical than any before in history (atomic bomb!) (iPad!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well have been "Mr. Jones." 

Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bigger bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat, or a new pair of spats to get one through a goodly period of modern living, but this acceleration is new to the cutting-edge elders; we must now adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever had to. How does one adapt to warp speed from the penny-farthings of yesteryear?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will find and learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made,  especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for accelerated adaptation is becoming exponential, presenting a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs crocheting or reading the local gazette while listening to the radio in the evening; now every day they dive headfirst into the global infosea, living Moore's Law. There's no shore to information now, which is as it should be, since there’s never been a shore to our hunger; we are, after all, living headlines. 

A most exciting time to have such a lengthy past.

RAISING VEGETABLES

Vegetables have been around longer than we have, you'd think by now they'd have figured out how to grow pretty much on their own. In the wild, they are indeed boss; too much so in some cases - kuzu finds an in and soon takes over. After generations of kitchy-koo domestication, though, the plants we call our vegetables can be a lot like children.

Gardeners must therefore now and then provide temporal guidance to our selectively bred green friends, who in their growth and development are prone to undesired tendencies that can accompany human preferences and require staking, training, shading, netting, fencing, heading, stringing up and so forth. Such guidance, however, should be administered with balanced judgment and tender interspecies diplomacy. You don't want a garden full of offended tomatoes or even worse, peppers. Lettuce, forget about it. 

The other day I spotted my newly emerged Climbing Bean tendrils just hanging around lowdown, looking for green action in an arm-over-the-shoulder kind of way with the Spinach, a family that can be bad company for vegetables that have been bred for higher aspirations.

I know from personal human experience, mutatis mutandis, that lowlifery in the early phase sets a bad precedent, and can tend to restrain upward ambition. If Climbing Beans remain too long in an earth-hugging relationship, they may never regain their full powers, never reach the heights to which their birthright entitles them. So without sounding too elitist about it, I had to take the gangly neophytes aside and, in the gentle language suitable to sprouts, give them good advice without bruising their spirits. 

There's an art to vegetal diplomacy. To the young but unstriving reachers, I said: "Listen here, greenies-- there are a few things you've got to learn about life. First of all, you've got to choose your companions wisely. Don't hang around with the groundhuggers-- no offense to you, Spinach, don't get all bolty. This isn't personal, it's gardening. You do your job well. We love you. You're tasty, you're nourishing, you're beautiful. Keep up the good work..."  (Gardeners often sound like Hollywood agents.) 

"But you, all you young beans, reaching with your tendrils: choose high-reaching companions! At your age, take all the help you can get! See those nets up there? Look for the net overhead and use it. Climb as high as you can and don't look back; grab a stake and keep on reaching! Believe me, the sky's the limit for you youngsters, so go for it with all you've got! You'll be blooming way up there in no time! That's your destiny!" 

And so I went on, a bit over the top, the green young tendrils hopefully hanging on my every word, though now that they've known the ease of Spinach life, I thought it wiser to lash them to the masts of ambition with plastic twists.

THE CLARITY OF DISGRUNTLEMENT

Last night on Japan tv I saw one of those health programs, there seem to be a lot of them these days, there were no such programs back when I was younger in the West and there was only one channel (and when "health faddist" store clerks dressed like doctors and nurses!). These are programs on which some hip-hyper expert shovels out heaps of information that is soon proven to be more or less inaccurate - who really knows until the last pitch - but this claim was pretty convincing; what's more, it was right up my alley (that's an elder idiom from a time when alleys were a big part of life).

This claim was convincing because I could tell it was true. In fact, I'll bet it is true. I sure hope it's true. Be good if it was. It declared that elders who are "grumpy" (i.e., emotionally discerning), "cranky" (sensitive), "opinionated" (knowledgeable), "fussy" (tasteful), "disgruntled" (perceptive), or as we used to say, "testy" (not many truly testy folks around anymore), are less likely to become senile or develop Alzheimer's, there being some significant iota of laboratory correlation between discontent and mental acuity; I can certainly see why that would be the case.

The fact is, that if you continue to actually grow with age, you naturally grow more discerning, and by the time you reach the early levels of the life summit you have had so much experience, acquired so much concise and incontrovertible judgmental ability - overall awareness on so many fronts - that you can easily tell, for example, the difference between wisdom and its absence.

For this and other reasons, it would be a massive loss to humankind and its evolutionary potential if there were not always sufficient elders to nurture the Big Germination. It would be disastrous if disgruntlement, the surest sign that one knows what is right, was not viewed as a good and necessary, even laudable quality, as good for the world as for the individual, like all the other laudable qualities mentioned above.

Indeed, the older I become the more apparent is the urgency for those at the summit to point out the facts of these matters with a forcible forefinger, providing detailed explication to these wisdom-starved whippersnappers! Why, we elders haven't even touched the surface of staying sharp in today's world; I'll get on with my part as soon as I find my glasses.

BAMBI MONOGATARI

You gotta love those rare special events you have no idea are coming, moments you couldn't have imagined would be waiting there just ahead of now, like the other night. I was driving the grandgirls (12, 10 and 10) up to our place to stay the weekend; the darkness lay heavy on the mountain and the fog was thick, the way it loves to get in Spring.

As we wended our way up the winding road toward the house, I was driving slowly, expecting who knows what, some wild pigs, a buck, maybe - even a bear - to dash out from the forest and across the road... Then, in that quiet mood, as we came up around the last curve to the crossroads, just past the tunnel, with not much visible in the lowbeam glare, we met the unexpected: standing there, all alone in the swirling mist, at the center of crossroads and headlights, stood the actual Bambi.

I must say, in the dense silence of a foggy mountain night there is nothing louder than the sudden spotlit appearance of a baby deer in the roadway with three little girls in the car. A high moment it was for the Trio, and a strange moment for that tiny creature out there, panic shivering its white-spotted golden fawn body, big dark eyes staring into blinding light, in a world as new as it ever gets...

The girls slowly hushed at the emotion of the sight; I slowed the car even more, not knowing which way a skittish Bambi might bolt as we crept slowly toward him standing there bouncing around on four brand-new gangly legs - boing, boing, boing - then bobbling away - But that way was uphill, houses up there; then heading left - fence there; then to the right - fence there too, what to do what to do, it would have to be downward then: into the jaws... of the glaring monster... Would there be such courage in that new life? Or might a skittish infant just bolt under the car? What do we evernew creatures know about such things?

I slowed... and then stopped; Bambi bounced his way toward the side of the road and teetered squeezily past us, within arm’s length out the open windows, the girls calling his name right into his big ears, until he could skitter for deer life into the welcome darkness. Bet he never forgets that time when the huge nightbeast came at him with blinding eyes and roaring voice, and how he managed his escape.

A tale of courage for all descendants.

ROGUE WHAT?

I've heard of rogue a lot of things, mainly elephants and traders, but rogue wheat? If a seed can be rogue, it must be from Monsanto, the reclusive corporate individual who brought agent orange to the dinner table, funds all the useful PACs and sends its execs to head the U.S. Dept of Agriculture under the pliable presidents, pretty much passing its own laws for the benefit of mankind. You might call it a rogue company.

*

"Asia curbs US imports of wheat after genetically modified sample found.

The discovery of rogue genetically modified wheat in a farmer's field in Oregon shook global confidence in the safety of America's food supply on Friday.

Billions in food exports were potentially at stake following the disclosure by the US Department of Agriculture of the existence of the GM wheat plants.

The GM variant, developed by the agricultural giant Monsanto, has never been approved for human consumption."            more...                   PLM rogue Monsanto page

window...

              window...

window...

                                                            ...sky

setting free the dragonfly

THE NATURAL THING

Not long ago I saw a Japanese tv program in which the audience reacted to the astonishment of a Saudi Arabian visitor to Japan who was profoundly amazed at everyday Japanese conveniences and practices. 

I too was shocked to see the foreigner's awe at beholding the small parking buildings, the yellow traffic flag method, the floor-polishing schoolkids, the wet-umbrella covers etc., but I've been here a long time and such impressive things have become invisible to me. After living here all this time, though, I'm still a newbie, as this morning proved.

While heading for the farm store after breakfast, and having driven about halfway down our winding one-lane mountain road, which has the local junior high school at the bottom (where you take a left or right to get into the village and thence onto the main lakeside road), I noticed ahead the bizarre phenomenon of a large mass of -- whiteness, moving up the road toward me. For a few dozen meters further I still couldn't tell what it was down there, I had never seen such a thing on the road before... As it and I drew nearer, I could finally make out that it was all of the school's baseball players in their white uniforms, many dozens of guys from about 11 to 15 years of age, running up the mountain in a training exercise; must be a new coach... 

Needless to say, their numbers filled up a great length of the roadway, and in a section where the paddies are high-fenced on both sides against wild animals; how could we pass each other? Surely the teams couldn't be expected to turn around and run all the way down, then back up again? Looked like I might have to back up the twisted road, which would be difficult and take a while; whichever way this went, those guys puffing and sweating at the edge of stamina wouldn't be too happy at my intrusive presence. 

Despite my time here, my western mind was kicking in at this unknown occurrence, seeing what it might expect out of old-home habit, projecting, anticipating the vibes... I could not foresee, in this new circumstance, what spontaneously came to pass: as the red vehicle and the white mass were about to merge, the big puffing, sweaty teen crowd magically disappeared, as each member pressed tightly against the fence all along both sides of the road, opening a comfortably wide gauntlet through which I could easily pass.

As I did so, and in awe moved slowly through them, they all said, over and over (in polite Japanese): "Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Sorry!" Even for me, that was so far from what I had been alienly expecting; I rolled down the window, put my hand out and waved and yelled thanks and apologies to them in return, and it felt good. 

It was in fact - as they had shown me - the natural thing to do.

*

via http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/

ME AND THE MINGS

I knew this day would come. I just thought I might get another summer out of it. The burgeoning beauty of my select lettuce varieties must simply have been too much for the drooling deer, who've had to live on conventionally blah weeds and good grief tree bark, and finally had it up to the antlers gazing through my not-antimonkey net fence at my neat rows of appetizing salad lettuces, top-of-the-line cucumbers, spare-no-expense zucchinis and deliciously crunchy beanpods, the apex of feral menu items. 

Seems the animals  living on the edge of civilization these many decades, deeper and deeper in the thralls of indulgence, have been getting fussier with each generation, becoming ever more accustomed to the finer points of civilized life, such as rap music and fast food. We must have had a similar experience back when we were Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons moved in next door. 

If this keeps up, pretty soon the animals will have urbs and burbs of their own, commuting to offices in their own beastly bureaucracies, the Deer Department, the Monkey Agency, the Inoshishi IRS...  For starters, though, last night one or two or three or more deer, maybe seven thousand, found a weak spot in my garden fence, widened it and partied on my lettuce, tangoed on my chard, buzzcut my chives, noshed my nasturtiums, beheaded my cukes, zapped my zukes... 

I know there's no point in putting up wanted posters on trees around the forest or even in the post office, with a deer mug shot and my phone number, so I just fixed the fence pro tem - not that it matters, there's always a weak spot in a fence, fences are all just a bunch of holes anyway. I just never had an actual fence before I moved here and took up the folly that is gardening on the edge-- this working hard to feed the wild and thankless animals.

For them, the feast was just laid out there on the carefully prepared banquet table; looked like they partied pretty much through the night; they have really quiet raves, not even a crunch... It must have gone on with subtle munching excitement until well near dawn, but I wasn't even awakened by wild belches. Not until I went out in the morning to get some lettuce did I realize I had to pick up the tab...

Right now I'm pondering new fence plans. I know how the Ming dynasty felt; it didn't work for them, but those were different times. That may sound something like Alfred’s definition of insanity, but I'm not a dynasty. My ambitions are much humbler. Like lettuce.     

BECOMING ARCHAEOLOGICAL

I don't feel all that Jurassic, but archaeologists are already digging up relics from after I was born, a time shrouded in the mists of history along with my early playmates the Neanderthals and other formerly youthful individuals, including for example Julius, Marc and Cleo, with whom I am now aggregate, though I didn't know any of them very well until fifth grade or so. I entered this world in - let me adjust my stone calendar to Julian - 1940CE, not long after the ice age that followed the late Pleistocene, which comprised my school years. 

My eyes still work, so I was just reading the news on one of these newfangled computers, it uses what they call "real time," to differentiate it from the other kind. It was saying how some archaeologist - a field that started before I was born, believe it or not - had found items from a tragic fire of long ago, greenhorn readers apparently having to turn their mindclocks nearly all the way back to WWII to realize the chronospan involved: archaeological artifacts from - which archaic period is that? The 1940s? - Wait, was there time then? 

Yes, grasshopper, there was; we had hourglasses to prove it. And I was there, already walking and talking in the early language of those days, the archaic one spoken by Whitman, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Mencken et al., famous paleoauthors of whom (or is it all-the-way 'who' now?) you may have heard. By that time I was going to school, a fairly recent phenomenon, where they had stringent language and grammar requirements and taught handwriting - perhaps you've heard of cursive? 

We practiced the Palmer Method (crucial for careers and professional respect in a world now archaeological) with a "nibbed" pen dipped into "ink" in an "inkwell" that was inset into our wooden "desktops" (the original kind). The inkwell had a little sliding cover and was fashioned entirely from slate, of all things. Plastic was just becoming a word. Nibbed pen calligraphy was so much more elegant than ballpoint is; the concept of elegance, like history itself, has lost quite a bit of steam (an old idiom) and relativity since Archimedes and I first played marbles together, back in the good old days.

Rain and Lake 

never stop 

becoming each other

SPRING SHIVER

Here it is, still cold, and near the end of April; never had woodfires at this time of year before; sometime in early March is when we began to get all our warmth directly from the sun again... I have to keep going outside to raid next year’s stack of split oak.

Even the intrepid early frogs are shivering, though not so many early ones this year; the rest are still biding their time. I can hear the eager ones at dusk and dawn from my bedroom, doing their best out there in the new cold mud and the dripping cedars, trying to get out the traditional chants in the usual vigorous way, but they can’t with such stiff diaphragms. A lot of jumpy quaverpeeping out there.

Frogs are cold-blooded of course, so can’t shiver in the mammalian way, but they’ve been around way longer than we have, and have evolved other ways to shiver in reaction to bizarre temperatures, and do their shiver equivalent. You can hear it in the songs they sing: not golden-oldie exaltations at the warm, invigorating burst of spring, but sad, jerky strings of woes and alases, barely making their way through the cold air without falling frozen to the ground...

As to the garden, the “spring” garden, even the Boston lettuce is hunched over, though the stolid iceberg looks at home; the spinach is all tentative green entities hunkered over on the ground, looking around for some sign of life in the cold wind; the lusty Mediterranean tromboncino, forget it, those seeds are dreaming of a coast somewhere south of Naples. Last year’s radicchio is turning purple, the zucchini needs a down vest...

Wonder what a winter in Sorrento costs these days...

TRYING TO SEE

This morning was way over its head in the Spring mist, which is great because when you're moving about in a cool blanket of vapor you have to try and see farther, which would be better to do all the time, but being human we are often too deeply involved with shallow concerns...

Still, it’s always welcome to be challenged by a physical mist, as opposed to mists psychogenic, mediagenic, politicogenic etc., so there I was whiling my time on the train platform, peering at the mountains, trying for the summits, here and there on their faint green slopes a bright cherry or tulip tree exulting despite the curtain of haze; then I turned the other way and looked out over the Lake, the mythic lake, where dragons and silver live in the shimmers, the water surface that morning just disappearing not far into the mist, no one knows how far precisely, all silvergrey and cool, that dull bright disc up there making it all squinty if I looked too high so I looked low and saw that Lakeside rice paddy preparations are well under way, here in the lowlands-- some are even tilled and ready for the planting, their green shoulders smooth as velvet...

Then I heard what sounded like the whine of a weed whacker down there somewhere; I looked to see, and right about where the sound seemed to come from I noticed on the high shoulder of a deep paddy an obachan's (grandma's) walker cart (the commercial euphemism is "Silver Car," but I suspect the obachan underground has its own name for these wheels-- (obaguruma?)) standing there as out of place as can be: what semi-ambulatory grandma would walk her wheels way out there into the weedy unpaved, heavy labor workplace?

Nowadays, all the Japan ladies of a certain age, bent by the tribulations and deprivations of living and childbearing through and after the war, use these wheeled carts to lean on when they amble about the country ways or go shopping at the village stores, and to sit on when they need a rest. Odd to see one of those carts sitting out there...

The grandmas do take part in the work at harvest time, when they can be very useful with their decades of know-how and their long practice at focused energy, but now it’s all muscle time, so what can they do at this point-- and where is that weed whacker noise coming from? 

It was coming from around there... Then in the mist I saw the top of the head of someone above the paddy verge, just one person out there in the mist, working on a bit of a slope that hid whoever it was, the head moved upward, the shoulder was swinging - a weed whacker - then a bit more and it was indeed an elder lady, owner of that cart and bent of back... 

She must have brought that whacker all the way out there on her cart, started that gas-powered tool, bigger than she was, all by herself with a hefty pull or two or more, and was still swinging it back and forth, bent over as she moved up and along the paddy shoulder, working toward her walking cart, mowing down weeds, making way for rice. Those elderladies get more impressive every time I look.

Glad the mist made me try to see.

TERRITORY OF THE HEART

So then sometime down the time road there you are, going along as you always have, the way you went through youth, parenthood and age since you became an adult and had to begin making decisions of ever greater importance and complexity, all the way through study, travel, marriage, family, economy, kids leaving home--

And through it all, one big fallback has been the perspectives you gained from the words and examples of the elders met in your own life thus far; but in my case, it was only up to a point. For a while now, in terms of one aspect of life experience, I have been in no man’s land-- as solo as I can get, because I never had a father or a grandfather or any other who had resided in Japan, married into a Japanese family, had a son and a daughter, a daughter who also married into a Japanese family and had children.

It's hard to find the full foresight for this, so thus one day you run into the soft but impenetrable wall of the fact that as one-half of an international marriage and the singular chain of events that have led to this moment, you are an international grandparent, of grandkids who are more products of their native culture than their mother and way more so than I, and who completely speak another language than my mother tongue. With all the mystery that attends such a state. No Wikipedia entry for that. New territory of the heart...

Wondrous place.