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.

More happy Callan shots.

Here are some more shots of Callan, who had too much fun at the park.

Melissa took this picture to send to the editors at Raondom house. We couldn't figure out how to get the patched elbows of a tweed coat into a head shot, so we settled for a turtleneck. Now if only I had a pair of reading glasses resting lazily in my hand below my chin, that would be literary :-)

Seto Bridge Park

I just wrote a long blog about these pictures and our day off at the park near the Seto Bridge but it got eaten by the blog monster. I gave up, but here's the pictures at least!

Here is the rather cool cover of the rather cool book that some rather cool editors decided to let me be a part of. It comes out in August, so you can do some Christmas shopping early.

Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (and one by me)

A lot of people who read this blog, by virtue of their blood, legal, or otherwise obligatory relationship to me already know this, but for those who are here out of your own free will, and know little about me and what I do besides teach english and travel with Callan andMelissa, I have a pretty cool announcement (Well cool for me, and twenty eight other young writers at least). Last November Randomhouse Publishing held a contest, asking for essays on being twentysomething in America. The winners would be published in a new tradepaperback anthology called "Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The best new voices of 2006). Well, I submitted a short essay about working at Wendy's last year when Melissa was finishing up at BYU, and it was selected for publication along with 28 other essays.


I am in the middle of reading the galley proof of the book, so I don't know a lot about the company I keep in this anthology, but from what I have read, being twentysomething is different for everyone. I'll cut and paste the randomhouse.com blurb about the book. That will be easier than trying to redue it myself.

quoted from randomhouse.com:

"Selected as the winners of Random House’s national contest, a stunning collection of essays ranging from comic to poignant, personal to political, by the newest, brightest young writers you haven’t heard of . . . yet.

Here, for the first time, current twentysomethings come together on their own terms, in their own words, and begin to define this remarkably diverse and self-aware generation. Tackling an array of subjects–career, family, sex, religion, technology, art–they form a vibrant, unified community while simultaneously proving that there is no typical twentysomething experience.

In this collection, a young father works the late-night shift at Wendy’s, learning the finer points of status, teamwork, and french fries. An artist’s nude model explains why she’s happy to be viewed as an object. An international relief worker wrestles with his choices as he starts to resent the very people who need his help the most. A devout follower of Joan Didion explains what New York means to her. And a young army engineer spends his time in Kuwait futilely trying to grow a mustache like his dad’s.

With grace, wit, humor, and urgency, these writers invite us into their lives and into their heads. Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers is a rich, provocative read as well as a bold statement from a generation just now coming into its own.

I have begun to coorispond a little with some of the other authors and one of them started a blog (how twentysomething of her, right). ONe thing is for sure, these folks can write. Its inspiring, intimidating, and just plain cool. I feel a bit like I did in seventh grade when I made the A2 basketball team and at our first practice we all stood on the baseline giving each other nervous looks, wondering where we fit in, wondering how we got chosen when so many others didn't, and wondering if 13 year old shoulders look right in the new tanktop uniforms. We were all weighing the value of the social capital we had earned by making the team, and were really unsure of what it all meant. Okay so maybe getting published isn't as cool as making the 7th grade basketball team, but it's at least as awkard and guardedly exciting.

http://twentysomethingauthors.blogspot.com/


The book will be released August 29th, 2006 and I can't wait to put a curl in its cover.

On my way home from work tonight I passed this scene. A full size minivan had slid off the road and was down in an irrigation ditch. Besides some probable scratching and maybe some denting on the side of the car resting on the concrete gutter, the car looked unharmed, so I don't think it was caused bya collision. More likely the woman was trying to hug the edge of the road to allow another car to pass, and she misjudged the location of the edge. This is exactly what I did back in October, but this woman's car is about four times the size of the car I drove into the gutter, and she was probably going faster, since the car would have needed enough momentum to not only slide off the road, but then topple over completely. I can't imagine being inside the car when it went over, or climbing out of it and having to call the police to tell them what you did. The other day Melissa drove by a man who was talking on his cell phone and standing in a rice field next to his car, which had somehow left the road completely. The man in orange at the center of this picture is the tow truck driver who I imagine is trying to figure out how to get the van out of the ditch. I'm not sure what the policemen are doing besides just holding clip boards (something they do well, and do often), and taking notes. I felt a little bad driving all the way home just to get the camera, and then driving back, hopping out of my car Paparazzi style and snapping a few pictures, but I wasn't the only one who had stopped to look. Several people where craning their necks from the windows of nearby homes, and other passerbys were gathering.

I have no idea how this car ended up in the ditch, but I do know the city planners in this country are not going to win any awards any time soon.

Power rangers are popular in America, but nothing like they are in Japan. Here, at a local festival, parents have brought their children to see the clash of Good and Evil (or at least the clash of spandex and Styrofoam) acted out on a temporary stage in an a city park, beside a row of Japanese carnie venders hawking cold French fries, Octopus popovers, and dried squid. We were there for other reasons.

Last Sunday while on a walk with Callan I met a woman in her fifties who was out planting flowers in front of her home. She lives in the house next to the small park in our neighborhood that is home to the oldest looking dog I have ever seen. We first noticed her dog from atop the park slide, which is tall enough to let us see over her garden wall and into her backyard where her old dog spends most of its time sitting in a dog house, unless it gets its chain tangled around a nearby rock, and then it sits next to the rock, waiting for someone to unhook him. Callan and I have often gone into this woman�fs backyard to untangle the poor dog�fs chain.

This woman, Mrs. Matsunaga (her name means eternal pine by the way), helps run a local group that practices and performs traditional Okinawan dance and music. She invited us to come see them perform on Sunday afternoon last week, so after church we drove down to the community sports center where the �gTokiwa craft industry Big Festival�h was being held, and the Okinawa dance team was scheduled to perform. When we arrived, the Power Rangers where at the climax of a galaxy shaking battle with a monster that looked a bit like a large gray asparagus. The stage was soon cleared and we got to see the Okinawa show.

The epic battle that took place on the stage, complete with music, dubbed over voices, and cheesy costumes, thankfully came to an end about three minutes after we arrived at the park.

After the ridiculous 'Vulcan Ranger' fiasco which we thankfully missed most of, the Okinawa group came and performed for about ten minutes. Okinawa is a part of Japan, but definitely foreign in so many ways. The food, the music, and the dancing is so unique, so seasoned with polynesian culture. I've never been there, but the way people talk about it is almost as if it is a foreign country. On 'mainland' japan it is uncommon to meet people from Okinawa, and when one Okinawan meets up with another, they act like I do when I see another American in a shopping mall here. They go out of there way to say hello, share some 'insider' comment about back home, and wish each other well.

What made the performance cool for me was the age spread in the group. The youngest girls were probably 6 or 7, but there were also teenagers, young adults, and older people as well. We bumped into one of my students at the festival and she told me that she usually is involved in the group, but just happened to be busy this time.

I remember seeing a group from Okinawa at the Awaodori festival in Tokushima when I was a missionary. There was a large drum line of men like this marching down the street, waving their sticks, spinning their drums, and striking poses like this.

i think that the short kimono is an Okinawa thing.