Animal Visitors

It's that time of year, when especially in Japan we get more animal visitors in and outside our house. Guido, the gecko, has been a regular on our kitchen window since the warm weather returned. We think it's the same fat gecko from last year, he has a sweet bug-catching spot there on the lighted window. We also see little green frogs outside the house, crickets and today a little praying mantis. Yesterday while I was cooking dinner, Callan came running into the kitchen from the sunroom saying "Mommy! Come See! A snake! A snake!" I was a little apprehensive, hoping it wasn't large and IN the sunroom, but I was excited to find it wrapped around the last "bucket" on our drain pipe (I guess it's not really a drain pipe, but it does the same thing.) He stared at us for a while and we watched him sway a little in the wind. We tried to figure out where he came from and how he would have gotten there. Then he decided to climb back up the inside of little hanging baskets. We came back about half an hour later and he was gone, so I guess he figure it out. In case you were wondering (especially you grandma types), I'm pretty confident this was not a poisonous snake. At first I wrote that there is only one type of poisonous snake in Japan, but I was wrong!

Having been to just about every major tourist spot within a few hours of our home, and having little desire to spend any more money than we have to, Eating out has become our 'wholesome recreational activity' of choice (If you don't get the reference, check out http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,161-1-11-1,00.html, sixth full paragraph beginning 'The family is ordained of God). Usually we hit up the small udon shop near our house that Grandma and Grandpa Franklin visited with us, but tonight we were feeling adventurous. We went to an Okonomiyaki shop in downtown Marugame that lets you cook your food right on your table. It was one of those little things about this country that we are going to miss.

Melissa, and incidentally, our new little baby boy, are enjoying the okonomiyaki. We ate a lot of Indian food when Callan was still in the womb, and he likes spicy food. I wonder if this one will have a hankering for soy sauce and fish flakes.

This is osaka style Okonomiyaki, and I have to admit Osaka style is growing on me. The ingredients, batter, cabbage, veggies, meat, egg, come in a small bowl and you cook right at your table. First you brown the meat, and then chop it up, mix it back into the bowl of other ingredients and finally poor the entire mixture onto the grill. It takes about five minutes on each side, or longer depending on how thick or thin you like your okonomiyaki.

Callan got a kick out of cooking at the table, although at first he wanted to eat the mixture raw, which, we explained, would have made him really sick.

Because we cooked right at our table, the finished product was very hot, and Callan had to eat carefully. Only once he tried to flip some food on the grill and got too close, a mistake which reduced him to tears, not because he was hurt so much as he was scared and embarrased. I quickly placed his hand in his glass of cold water, which was a bit ironic, since two minutes earlier I had told him to stop trying to fish out the lemon slice from the bottom of his glass, and now I was stuffing his hand into the cup, and spilling water on him to boot. He was a good sport though.

Callan ate his whole dinner, and here's the smile that tells you what he thought of it.

We only have five weeks until we're off this rock and curling our toes in the warm tides of Oahu, and since our backs, shoulders, arms, and legs have seen virtually no sun in over a year, we have made it a point to go the beach as much as possible. However, being the rainy season, the beach tends to look like this on most days. On Sunday we went to a near by beach that is tucked away on the far side of what used to be a small island and is now the natural end of a man made peninsula that stretches out beside the Seto Bridge. The purpose of our short drive was to see if it would be a good place to come on Monday to play in the sand and get some sun. It turns out that the water is a bit colder here, the kelp is ubiquitous, and there is actually a sign that says no swimming. The view is great though, and the location very remote, considering its relative closeness to the main part of the city.

I'd love to come back here and take some more pictures. The green and burgundy and black that covered these rocks were incredible, and I don't feel like I got a shot that did it justice. I know I probably look like a ridiculous tourist with my camera in tow all the time, but having it with me has meant constantly looking for significant, memorable, and photo worthy colors, shapes, patterns, and people. LIfe is so much more interesting when we see our world as art. The painfully mundane events of every day can become beautiful if we just look at them correctly. The way a student's head bends over there text book, the quiet way my son plucks at his toes when no one is looking, the smile on Melissa's face when she is teaching--these are all images I see everyday, and they are memorable to me when I think of them as a photograph, when I subconsciously shift the frame of the imaginary photograph so that the mundane is cropped out, leaving only the graceful curve of feature, the refraction of light, the play of shadow, and natural beauty and curiousness of the subject.

Callan wanted very badly to come out on to these rocks with me, and humored me with this happy pose.

Next to the beach we were looking at was a small cape graced by a well kept trail that leads to a pleasant observation point looking out onto the bridge, and the inland sea. The point is about a five minute walk from the car, and as we reached the top, it began to rain. It was the kind of rain that doesn't feel heavy, but is constant enough that after a few minutes out in it, you are fairly soaked. It felt a bit like the Oregon coast.

This trip was Callan's first trip being caught in the rain. As you can see it didn't phase him.

After our beach drive, we came home and played trains with Callan for a long time. I kept building this tower and Callan kept knocking it down. He loves the trains. He plays with them every day, sometimes three or four times a day. I like them to because, unlike a lot of kids toys, I don't get bored playing along with him. I always wanted a wooden train set like this, and thanks to the advent of the dollar store in Japan, and and also thanks to cheap labor in China, we have one now.

Ooze! (not for the squeemish)

I just removed the last splintered fragments of an ingrown toenail from my left foot (I'll spare you any pictures since I'm already going to hear about this post from the weaker stomached members of my family).  With the suggestion-cum-ultimatum from Melissa that we would go to the doctor on Monday if it didn't get better, I decided to take matters into my own hands, again.  You see I tried to cut out the offending nail about three days ago, but only made things worse.  Overnight, my toe went from swollen and painful to swollen, bloody, oozy, stiff, and painful.  Every time I wore anything except sandals my toe would throb as if my entire circulatory system resided in my left foot, and at the end of the day, my socks would stick to my toe like an old bloody gauze bandage.  It didn’t hurt all the time, but if I twisted it wrong, or if a little two year old foot landed on it, or sometimes for no reason at all, my toe would sting as if I’d just hit it with a hammer, stabbed it with a rusty nail, and then soaked it in lemon juice.
 
Tonight I approached the task systematically, clinically.  First I soaked my toe in extremely hot water, spiked with just a hint of tea tree oil to help the infection.  Then I gathered my tools: one pair of pointy kitchen shears, some tweezers, a bent-open safety pin, some fingernail clippers, and a box of tissues.  Next I sterilized my equipment over our gas stove and set them down to cool.  It was operation time.
 
Holding my foot into the dim kitchen light as much as possible, I began gingerly prodding at the swollen flesh so as to reveal the edge of the nail I had cut a few days ago.  This caused blood, and puss, and other unfamiliar liquids to ooze from various crevasses.  I wiped the area clean with a tissue. After locating the cut point I next had to negotiate the tip of a large pair of kitchen shears underneath the renegade nail as far as my pain threshold would allow me (which is about equivalent to half the thickness of a postage stamp).  This caused more blood, puss etc. to ooze, which I dabbed again with a tissue.  My attempts at gently working the scissors under the nail weren’t working, so I bit my lip, and just pushed.  After driving the blade to a depth I thought would be sufficient for the scissors to cut rather than just slip over the nail, I clamped down on the handle and made a clean slice into the nail.  

However, because the surrounding flesh was so swollen, the loose fragment was now pushed inward towards the underside of the remaining nail, rather than outward where it needed to be so I could pluck it out with the tweezers.  Setting down the scissors, I next reached for the bent safety pin.  The safety pin has the dual benefit of having a larger shaft than a typical sewing needle, and when bent properly, having its own handle.   With the safety pin, I slowly began to work the now splintering fragment out from under the main nail.  In the process I realized that there was a large fragment of nail left over from my first attempt that was detached from the root but still imbedded in the swollen flesh ( By ‘realize, I mean I unexpectedly bumped into it with the needle, and about bit through my lip because it hurt so bad).

“That’s why it has hurt so much,” I said to myself, feeling a bit like I do when I can’t find my keys, and I tear the whole house apart looking for them, only to find them in the cargo pocket of the shorts I’m wearing.  Having located this floating fragment, I picked up the tweezers and with a little effort grabbed hold of it and pulled.  It didn’t come the first time, but did the second, and with it more blood, puss, and other oozing obstacles, which I again dabbed with a tissue.  Following this fragment back along the side of the nail I discovered more ‘left-overs,’ and removed them as well.  I made one more cut with the scissors, pulled one more small fragment out with the tweezers, and then ended the ordeal with another short foot soak.  

My toe is now weeping gentle amber colored tears of relief, and all I can do is go to bed and wait.  Tomorrow if the swelling has gone down and the pain has dissipated, that will be the first indication of victory.  In two weeks, if the nail begins to grow without causing any more swelling or discomfort, I will consider the operation a success.  Perhaps I should just go to the doctor, lie back on the cool vinyl of the examination table, and turn my foot over to a professional.  Maybe these delicate matters of blood, flesh, and stainless steel should be left to men and women in white coats.   Maybe when my sink leaks, or my car engine stops, or my computer spits an error at me, I should just throw up my hands, and call somebody.  But then, in the words of my father-in-law, “Why should they get all the fun?”

Thoughts on Books and Emerson

I have been trying to get my hands on some good creative nonfiction in hopes that by spending time immersed in greatness some of it might rub off.  However part of me is worried more about drowning in it.  As inspiring and fruitful as it is to read awesome prose, it is also incredibly intimidating.  The seeming effortlessness of some of the really great work out there gnaws at my insides, telling me I have no place trying to write in their world, that at best I will only imitate and follow, and at worst I will pilfer and plagiarize, never really finding my own voice, but rather spending a life time trying to live up to a literary construct I have created out of the untouchable work I have read.  I constantly wonder if I have the courage required to find my own voice, to stand on my own through my writing, and not merely pay homage to what is out there.  In “The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson said,

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Because I feel currently that I am in a satellite state, I wonder how it is possible to free yourself from the gravity of great authors, allow myself to float free in space, to gather my own voice, to produce gravity of my own.  I find myself ever imitating what sounds real to me, the quirky word choice of a favorite instructor, the narrative approach of an impressive author, the jocular voice of favorite humorist.

Emerson continues:

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,--let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.

Perhaps like the tiny unborn child turning summersaults in my wife’s uterus that is just now beginning to be noticed,  my soul is just beginning the slow twitchings of a creativity, perhaps the world that will give birth to that original part of me is just beginning to feel that I exist.  If Emerson is correct, then this creativity is the only way I can come close to Godliness, the Character of the ultimate Creator.  If Emerson is right, then all the books in the world are only as good as the inspiration they offer my creativity.  If Emerson is right, Books can provide so much, and then one day our creativity must be born, we must cut ourselves loose from the placental life line of the past, and learn to stand on our own as a ‘soul active,’ not only seeing but uttering truth.  The process is slow, and may never be fully complete, but one thing is true, either we do it, or we die trying.
    

This is my neighbor. Actually he lives on the otherside of the series of rice fields that stretch out behind my home. I don't know his name, but I see him almost everyday working the three tambos (japanese for small field) that we look out of onto from our bedroom window. He is sixty years old and spends much of his day from dawn to dusk in the dirt, divining rice, onions, cabbage, broccoli, and raddish from the dark brown japanese soil. His two rice fields combined will yield about 1600 kilograms of rice this season (3600 pounds). At 300 yen per kilo retail that's 480,000 yen, or just over $4,000 per year gross income, assuming he sells it all. Likely he will keep his own families portion.

He asked me if I wanted to join him, but I declined. I read somewhere in a travel book once that there is a bacteria in rice fields that isn't very friendly to foreign born stomachs. Still I felt a bit silly standing next to him in my sandals, shorts, and sun glasses, holding my camera, whil he was up to his ankles in mud. I couldn't tell if he was humored by my curiousity, or just irritatd. Either way he aquiesced, and allowed me to take a few shots of him while he worked.

The old woman roles up each sheet of sod-like rice starts and hands them to her husband who sets them up on the planting tractor.

At last, my neighbor gets on the tractor, and begins his slow drive around the permitter of his rice field. In October, he and his wife will harvest the rice using the traditional method of cutting the rice and hanging it on wooden trusses built in the middle of the field.

Doctor Visit Day

Today we visited the Doctor's office for the second to last time here in Japan. The whole process took about two hours, and included among other things taking Melissa's weight, measuring her belly, drawing some blood, sitting through some exams, and having an ultrasound. The word from the Doctor is that Callan is going to have a little brother. That's right, another boy. The good news is that we won't have to buy much for this baby since Callan can just hand down everything he used, and the bad news, well there is no bad news, unless you were hoping for a girl.

Now that we know the sex of the baby, the reality that we are going to have another little person in our home in a few months is starting to gel for the first time. There will not merely be another mouth to feed, another bum to change, another body to bundle in the cold Utah winter, but there will be another personality, another little person who will depend on us for everything, another little boy who will want to play from sun up to sun down, who will call me daddy, who will giggle with delight when I walk in the door. We'll have another spirit child of our God sent to us from the Spirit World, a soul on loan for us to raise up, and to grow with. I am reminded of the parable of the talents in the New testament. The wise stewards used there talents to cultivate an increase, and the unwise steward of the Lord took his talent and hid it, afraid that by using it, by letting it out into the world, he might lose it. In the end the wise stewards where added upon, and the unwise steward had his talents taken away. Aren't our children just like the talents? We have been given them from the Lord, as a loan of sorts, to see how we will invest in them. The Lord has entrusted us with his children and he expects to collect on his investment. If we are obedient and do all we can to invest in our families, then the Lord will grant them to us for eternity. However, if we, like the unwise steward choose not to invest in our families, then we can be sure the Lord will do with us as he did with the unwise steward.

My father-in-law sent me this quote about child rearing. You know it is a good quote when it not only cuts you to the core, but inspires to things divine.

"In the ideal home, each child would be given every possible opportunity to develop his own personality without too much domination. Discipline is organized love, and children develop properly in an atmosphere of love, with adequate guidelines to shape their lives and their habits. More children are punished for mimicking their parents than ever for disobeying them. We should be what we want to see." LeGrand R. Curtis, "Happiness is homemade," Ensign, Nov. 1990

My two favorite lines (also coincidently the two most condemning) are

'discipline is organized love'

and

'more children are punished for mimicking their parents than ever for disobeying them.'

Thank Heaven (literally) for modern day Holy Men who speak inspired words like these. And thank Heaven again for the repentance process that allows us to become better parents inspite of our own mortality.

Callan has perfected his wind up. Now he just needs to add a ball to the equation.

Callan has learned all the positions on the baseball field, and next to pitcher, catcher is his favorite. I can't believe how big he'll have to be before this stuff really fits him. Right now the shin guards are as long as his entire leg, and the chest pad hangs practically to his knees.

I got quite a few funny looks when I put on the full catchers outfit, but even if they wanted to, most japanese retail clerks would be too shy to ask me to take it off. As it was, I don't think anyone cared, and Callan loved it. If you can't tell, he's winding up to throw an imaginary curve ball. We do this every time we got to a sporting good store.

Today we went to Takamatsu to find a maternity swim suit for Melissa, and we wer successful! In a country where many woman would have trouble filling out a size 0, Melissa was finally able to find a swim suit that was tall enough and proportioned properly for her American body. Going to the sporting good store is like going to Disneyland for Callan, who would stay all day and play with the equipment if he could. Here he is practicing his put with a $190 putter.

Brother Takashima with his youngest daughter Karin. He's an egg farmer and has 80 thousand chickens that lay 35 thousand eggs a day. He is the Japanese equivalent of my father in law. Not because of the chicken farm, but because of the way he treats his family and the way he cares about the Gospel and the Church. He is full of great advice about parenting, and always opens his home to everyone.

Naoki is the second oldest Takashima boy and one of only two priests in our ward. He's in the Kendo club at school and is as nice as he looks.

At the Takashima's on Sunday for Father's day, Callan couldn't get enough of playing with their kids. This is Nozomi and he is in my primary class at church . He is eleven, and he treats Callan like a little brother.

Can blogger get any cooler?

Happy Father's Day

Crickets have nothing on Japanese frogs

Before automated tractors, farmers strung taught lines from one end of the field to the other, marked with little flags to help position the rows of rice. Now they can plant a whole feed in a matter of hours, instead of days.

Today for father's day we had banana and kiwi crepes with lime yogurt and Callan presented me with a new tie from the dollar store. Melissa got me In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones. The book has 90+ contributors and fills more than 300 pages, not including the 15 pages of biographical information and 7 pages of permissions, and a five page index of authors and titles. The essays are brief, meaning less than 2000 words, most much less. Some are only a few paragraphs, and all capitalize on creative nonfiction's ability to shows expansive human truths by reflecting them in tiny truths of every day. In the preface, Bernard Cooper writes: To write short nonfiction requires an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens, so to speak, until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human. To read In Short is to experience, in essay after essay, the disproportionate power of the small to move, persuade, and change us."

This may not be a good book for someone unfamiliar with the genre of creative nonfiction, or the literary world in general. As the following comment on Amazon.com form the books listing shows, creative nonfiction has a long way to go in entering into the popular psyche.

From a customer review entitled "A Never-Ending Parade of Lightweights" by someone who calls himself 'doomsdayer520.'

"I can't figure out why the editors and publishers of this volume are claiming it to be a celebration of a new art form. Brief creative nonfiction? Hardly. Some of the pieces here could be called creative, but absolutely none of them are nonfiction. Nonfiction is the study of issues or phenomena with evidence and analysis. Here we have a collection of what everyone else in the world calls memoirs, and which have been easily found for decades in magazines and newspapers. While such works can be a relaxing and non-stressful read when you come across them, in a compilation such as this book they are repetitive and mind-numbing. I count 91 submissions in this book, and every single one can be categorized as a simple memoir, especially since almost all of them have "I" or "me" or "our" in the opening sentence. Very few stand out from the crowd in any way. Incongruous winners include Richard Rodriguez's disturbing meditations on the struggles of Mexican migrant laborers, David James Duncan's piece about witnessing an accidental death, Michael Shay's thoughts about giving his son Ritalin, and six or seven pretty good pieces on the various horrors of war. But otherwise, the book inflicts upon us a never-ending parade of quaint musings and meditations, attempted deep thoughts on minor matters of human interest, and several dozen interchangeable Thoreau-like nature reflections. Memoir writing has its own strengths and usefulness, but this lightweight and sluggish book is not the groundbreaker it thinks it is."

First I must say that having not yet read the anthology, I can't say much for his opinion of the book, but I am disappointed in his understanding of the genre. If nonfiction where solely, "the study of issues or phenomena with evidence and analysis," as I believe he terms the issue, we would be left with nothing but history books, encyclopedias, and marketing reports. However, I think interpreted correctly his definition goes along way for the genre. Creative nonfiction is all about issues and phenomena-human issues, love issues, trauma, class, sex, race, gender, family, thought-all supported by the evidence of memory distilled into words and supported by data and research-often in the vein this reviewer was hoping for, but more often in the less easily identifiable evidence of emotion, experience, and recollection. There are plenty of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists in the world gathering data, running tests and analyzing it all to death, and perhaps not enough good writers sitting down to record what it all means on a human level. That, to me, is what this genre is about. Creative nonfiction is meant to entertain and envelope, as much as it is meant to educate and enlighten. If you just want hard 'facts' and cold 'analysis,' then pick up a copy of JAMA or the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you want liquid reality and living truth, if you want to know what life tastes and smells like in to those who may have been, done and seen things you may never get close to yourselves, then turn to a collection of essays, and there you will learn the patterns of humanity that we use to measure out the truths of life every day.

This was supposed to be a blog entry about father's day, but I guess I have switched tracks a bit. To continue, after breakfast we headed to Church, which was pleasant, but a bit warm. We are in the time of year in Japan where it hot, but not hot enough for the powers at be to feel justified in turning on the air conditioning. In my primary class we talked about Joseph forgiving his brothers in Egypt during the famine, and during sharing time we made cards for father's day.

After Church I translated an interview for the branch president and made it to choir practice just in time for the closing prayer. Later at home, we had Melissa's visiting teaching companion over to visit teach another sister at our house and then after everyone left, Melissa, Callan and I went for a bike ride. Melissa only lasted a few minutes being pregnant and hot, so we dropped her off and Callan and I continued on around the neighborhood for about twenty minutes. We took the following pictures on our ride and had some good daddy-son time. He switches between asking me to go faster and telling me to be careful not to drive off into a rice field.

Tonight we went t the Takashima's house for a big dinner with all of the foreign teachers. We had yakisoba, steamed potatoes, Jell-O salad, green salad, grilled chicken, cookies, ice cream, and home made root beer. I teach two of the Takashima kids in my primary class and it was fun to be at there house where they are more relaxed, less interested in talking out, fighting, and disrupting and more interested in being themselves. We played Uno, ate good food, and got to talk with lots of people.

Brother Takashima and I were talking about children, and I told him that Melissa and I were fairly used to one child, but weren't sure what to do with a second. Brother Takashima, who has six children, told me that the first two are really difficult because you are still trying to figure out what to do, but the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth kids don't make it any harder, because by then you don't have any choice but to just go with the flow. We'll see.

On the way home we saw the left-overs of pretty bad accident (a half dozen police officers, one dented car, another car in a rice field, and several concerned looking bystanders) and it must have scared Callan because the rest of the trip home he wanted us to take a different road, and even after getting home he was really upset. He finally fell asleep at ten thirty and then Melissa and I fell asleep on the living room rug (only slightly more comfortable than the hard wood floor) and we woke up at eleven pm. She brushed her teeth and headed to bed and I sat down to write this, but five minutes into it Callan started screaming and I had to go in his room to help him (I think he had a bad dream). He is now asleep on the couch in the living room.

When Callan is that tired and that frustrated it is really difficult to know hat to do to help him. I asked him if he wanted a drink, if he wanted some raisins, or a cold rag. I even asked him if he wanted to watch soccer (world cup, you know, is on every night here), but he just kept screaming as he sat on my lap in a half asleep stupor. He moved to the floor, and then to the couch, and finally I asked, ‘Would you like a blessing?’ He said, ‘Yes, I want a blessing.’ So I put my hands on his head, and gave him a simple blessing in the name of Jesus Christ, and he calmed down and went to sleep. Callan has seen his mom and Dad get enough blessings to know I guess that they can help when you are feeling rotten. I think he was hot, tired, and maybe suffering a bit from a sour stomach brought on by the root beer and other junk he ate too much of tonight.

Tomorrow we’re going to the Doctor’s to find out the sex of the baby, we’re going to Takamatsu to look for a maternity swim suit that will fit Melissa for Hawaii, and in the evening we’re going to the batting cages with Brother Morimura and the Walthers.

A rice planting machine injects small clumps of rice starts into the mud, spaced evenly apart and perfectly aligned.

The tiny shoots just planted into the flooded fields don't look like much now, but in another four months there won't be walking room between these rows. And in the water, if you look closely, you can see what must be thousands of tadpoles.

This is the small neighborhood grave yard that sits at the northwest corner of a large section of rice fields. There are probably fifteen different fields all farmed by a half dozen different farmers.

These flowers were planted in a clump beside the road. I think they were planted to help keep bugs out of the rest of the garden

Most of the farming in our city and other cities is done by lone farmers or and older couples who spend all day under the Japanese sun working fields that have been used to grow rice, raddish, and cabbage for centuries.

Little Fuji makes a great background for this neighbor, who will plant his rice on Sunday. He is currently raking out thatch that floated to the top of the water when he flooded his field.

Here is a rice farmer down the street preparing his field for planting. first they turn up the dirt. Then flood the field and turn up the field again. Then, usually with a specialized machine but sometimes by hand, they plant the rice in rows spaced about six inches apart.

Onions. When the farmers pull the onions, the whole street smells like onions all day.

These are rice starts. Small groupings like these have begun to appear all over the city as farmers prepare to plant their rice fields.

The sixty year old man who owns the property next to our home grows broccoli, onions, daikon raddish, cabbage, and of course rice. He and his wife are in the field every day, usually from six thirty until four or five.

Here are the onions pulled two weeks ago from the field behind our home. They sell at the grocery store for about fifty cents a piece if the season is right.

In the spring, the onion field behind our home once again begins the slow transformation back into the rice field it was when we came a year ago. In a few days the little farmer who owns the field will plow up the ground beneath the water, and then plant small rice starts in neat rows that go on into eternity. One field this size will supply three people with rice for a year.

Callan loves to play outside. Can you tell?

With summer approaching like the rising sun on the black interior of a small car, we are trying to get in as many pleasant spring walks as we can. Not only are we doing our best to enjoy the weather, but the neighborhood itself. Everything is so different, so beautiful, so Japanese. I know that is stating the obvious, but it is those obvious things, those small truths of each day that we will miss, especially if we don't realize they were there until we are gone. I want to appreciate the way a sculpted pine defies gravity as at balances in a protective arc over a sliding gate that opens to a small garden crowded with tiny bushes pruned to perfection by an old man so bent with age that he only stands erect if he's sitting down. I want to feel the unobtrusive closeness of the houses that line the narrow streets in our neighborhood and remember how their closeness never felt cramped, only familiar, intimate, and cooperative. I want to breath the smells that are sucked from the kitchens of little Japanese women by small pull string fans mounted to the walls above their efficient propane stoves--the curry, the shoyu, the oil, the fish, mingled with propane exhaust, ascending into the sky above our home where the setting sun glows like a nightly retiring of the flag. In forty days we'll be on a plane, and all this will be a memory we will see, taste, and smell for the rest of our lives, but only if we take the time to live it now.

All the World is Vanity, and it Can All be Found Online

So I was inspired by a friend and I Wikipedia-ed myself (that means I typed my name into Wikipedia.com to see what would come up).  Turns out the only Joseph Franklin listed was a serial killer from the late 70’s who had a thing for sniper gear and Nazism.  How awful.  Somewhere there is a person or persons whose life was shredded by a Joseph Franklin, and if they ever met me, or read my essay, all they would think is, ‘he has the same name as the animal that killed so and so.”  Of course there are also those who might read my name somewhere someday and think of the 1960 variety show host with the same name.  Apparently that Joe Franklin is in the Guinness book for having the longest running television show in history-40 years if you believe www.joefranklin.com.  Then there’s the Elvis Impersonator in Vegas. According to gigmasters.com,  
“The voice of the king is alive in Joey Franklin. To hear him is like a step back in time when Elvis’ music entertained thousands.”  Our thoughts our not our own, our lives are not our own, and most assuredly our names are not our own.  I wonder what the other Joe Franklins out there would think if they found out about me.  Maybe one will read this blog.      

Tennis?!

On Monday, Joey and I had a very rare date. We let Callan play at the school for about an hour while we attempted to play tennis. First we went to the city sports park, only to find that the entire complex, gyms, track, tennis courts, etc. are entirely closed on Monday. Then to a little park with two very fenced tennis courts. It too was closed on Mondays! Both these places you have a to pay a few dollars an hour to play. It was a little frustrating, there are no free city parks with tennis courts anywhere around. It's so different than america, you have to pay to do just about anything besides swing on a swingset! There was a free badmittion court of sorts, so we turned it into a makeshift tennis net and played a little before it was time to go get Callan. We're looking forward to the free tennis courts in Provo, our tennis skills have been rapidly declining.

Callan is now a contributor on the blog, though his comments will have to be imput vicariously. Look for his profile soon, complete with pictures and biographical information.

Callan and Mom, posing for their profile pictures.

Homemade sleep charms

Tonight it was a spatula to scrape away any scary people; last night it was a ‘sleep train’ to play with in bed.  Before that it was a sleep tissue, and a sleep rock, and there were some sleep raisins.  Every night for the past two weeks Callan has gone through more than a half hour of songs, books, stories, and gentle good nights from Mom and Dad without calming down enough to fall asleep.  Usually we say good night and shut his door and go into the living room to wait quietly for him to emerge.  He usually comes out holding his doggy, and says, ‘something’s wrong.’  We ask him what he needs and instead of responding with an answer, he collapses into a limp pile on the floor and whimpers a little.  At this point one of us picks him up and puts him back on his bed and asks what he needs to sleep.  Sometimes he says a glass of water, or a snack, but usually he just says, ‘umm, umm, I need…’ and then we say ‘how about a sleep rock’ or some other object that comes to mind.  Almost without fail, we can narrow in on something that he can use as his key to falling asleep.  Tonight, like I said, it was a spatula.  After I gave it to him, he lay on his chest scraping the spatula back and forth on the floor for a few minutes, and then fell asleep.  I just went in to check on him and he is asleep with his doggy under one arm and the spatula next to the other.

He is testing a lot of boundaries lately.  Whether it’s coming inside for dinner, or picking up his trains, or putting on his diaper, or getting out of the bath, or out of the car, he has been very choosy about what he will and will not do.  It has been a real lesson in patience to reason with him about his decisions and help him make good choices.  Tonight when he wouldn’t pick up his train set, Melissa said, “Callan, perhaps if you are not old enough to pick up the train set, then maybe you are not old enough to play with the train set.”  To that Callan responded, “No,” and picked up his trains.  Creating non-threatening, rational, understandable consequences to his actions has been the goal, and though sometimes it seems like it would just be easier to pick him up, or force him to do what we want, the benefits of finding a more creative, more diplomatic solution are immeasurable.  The hymn that says ‘every soul is free’ certainly applies to parenting as much as to discipleship.  

I have been having a surprisingly difficult time dealing with his new found independence.  There is a part of me that feels like because I work all day, then take a bath with him, make him a snack, get his bed ready, and basically take care of everything he needs, that he owes it to me to be obedient.  Now the rational part of me knows that is a bit much to expect from a two year old brain, but when I’ve spent thirty minutes reading stories and singing songs only to have him pop up and say, “I want to watch TV,” it is difficult to feel rational.  I am amazed at how easily the temptation to lose my temper comes, and how awful things turn out when I do.  When I raise my voice, or get stern, or otherwise become negative, Callan’s independence becomes worse, and he becomes more aggressive.   Things are much more successful when I remain calm, and help Callan choose on his own to do what he needs to do.   Wow.  And were supposed have two of these in October?  

What really goes on in a writer's head?

My marriage is a mosaic of peanut butter sandwiches, made in the blinking hours of the morning for my pregnant wife who can’t get out of bed without putting some protein in her stomach.  It is a kaleidoscope of laundry loads, foot rubs, and trips to the grocery store, sprinkled with stories told to our two year old before bedtime about baseball and Jesus.  A thousand tiny points of light in my past reflect the fragments of memory that make up the life we have built together, illuminating on occasion glimpses of the eternity that is rolling out before us.  The question, “why do we marry,” may never be answered, but that may not be the important question anyway.  Certainly the meaning of marriage, what we create it to be, what we do with this oldest of social covenants, becomes the true measure of our existence. Blah blah blah blah.  What manipulative garbage.  What are you trying to say about marriage anyway?  I don’t know.  Perhaps if you sat down in the quiet for a few hours you might be able to figure that out.  Perhaps if you could take a few quiet moments to think clearly, to create, to write, and to research, something good might come out of this silly compilation of details about marriage that are currently worthless.  So the truth is that you have not yet discovered what is worth writing about this topic.  You don’t care about it enough.  You are trying to hard to prove something, to say something, instead of just letting the truth create the story and the feeling for you.  What works about collage essays is that you are reporting detail, and only riffing commentary occasionally, like subtle paddle strokes on a quiet river.  Nothing big is needed.  The details will carry your reader most of the way.  Your job as a writer is to occasionally nudge them in the right direction, help keep them in line with the current of your thinking.  If we paddle too much we get to our destination too fast, and the reader is disappointed, they want there money back, and they certainly aren’t going to recommend you to their friends.   By limiting our paddling, our prodding, and our commentary, we allow the reader to not only think at there own pace, but to arrive at there own destination.  You are writing a current of thought for your readers.  Leave the paddling to them.  

Earthquake!

Just before 5 am this morning Joey got up to go to the bathroom and I kind of sat up to see if the little shaking I was feeling was just me or if it was actually an earthquake. Joey came out and then it started to rock! He told me to jump out of bed (we're right next to a big window) and we went in Callan's room where he was already awake! Joey was concerned it might get bigger and we sat together on Callan's bed for a few minutes before we realized that was it. According to the AP it was a 6.2 centered in Kyushu (a nearby island).

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/J/JAPAN_EARTHQUAKE?SITE=GORBC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Joey's telling me he's disappointed it wasn't bigger, but it was plenty for me! It was actually my first "feelable" earthquake. Hopefully that will be it for eathquakes in the next six weeks before we head for home.

Melissa took this one of Callan and I, with the massive Seto bridge in the background.