My grandpa, and writing

It's holiday season. Initially I was going to write about my grandpa, but it may turn into a longer piece about writing.

I've written about my grandfather before. Here's a post about pictures of him, describing both his love of haiku and his arrest during WWII. Here's a more detailed post about his haiku group. This is a long post about anti-immigration laws in California, with a bit about how my grandpa got around the property ownership restriction. (He mail-ordered a bride from Japan with American citizenship.) I also told the brief story about how I ended up with a golf hole in his backyard.

I surprised myself when I realized how much I had written about him. But I shouldn't be surprised; he was probably the man I spent the most time with in my life. He helped raise me and, for better or worse--but mostly for better--, a lot of who I am was shaped by him.

In a lot of ways, I saw the best of him. As a father who ran a farm, he was pretty much a dictator. Even the older cousins told stories about strictness on trips to Disneyland, or getting yelled at, or other things that cowed everyone else into submission.

But I am the youngest grandchild, the only son of his youngest daughter. So I was special. I could do things with both the naivete of a child and the fearlessness of one who is coddled, like scold him for coming home late. By the time I arrived, I was no longer a chrysanthemum farmer, but a comfortable owner (and groundskeeper) of a small trailer park. He wasn't rich, but he was pretty well off -- a member of the 5%, let's say. The trailer park was for senior citizens only, and he kept rent comparatively low.

So he had plenty of time, and a decent amount of money. He drove a Cadillac, and would take me to Chinatown (for haircuts) and to desert trips with his Haiku group. We'd go to McDonalds a lot. Whenever he went to Denny's, he'd always order his steak well done. And when we went to a seafood restaurant in Balboa, he'd always, always order Crab Louie.

He was someone of meticulous patterns. He folded his toilet paper into fourths before using it. (I know this because the flush on one of the toilets was not as strong as it could've been.) His wife would always make him breakfast the night before, leaving it out for him--including pouring the milk into the Cap'n Crunch. Yes, this was left out in the kitchen overnight. It's a testament to pasteurization, or modern paranoia, that he was actually quite healthy and lived until he was 91. When he rolled quarters, he'd stack them five each.

Thanks to the memory of youth, he lived in what will always be the most beautiful house I'll ever see.

It had a large backyard, with dichondra grass meticulously weeded-- he would be on his hands and kness, tweezing away weeds, even as he'd let me hack away with a tiny 4-iron. There were tiger lilies, and bamboo, and a rock path. He had kumquat and persimmon trees. And, of course, he had camelias, which, because of their prevalence in his backyard, I had always assumed were common, dusty, and ugly. (Only later would I learn they hold a special place in Japanese culture.)

He also had rice paper shoji doors to the tea room -- there was a dedicated tea room, with bamboo mats, that my grandmother used for tea ceremony. It also contained the butsudan, or the Buddhist shrine. As a kid, I'd stick my finger through those nice rice paper rectangles, which Grandma would dutifully repair with scotch tape.


He had these very nice scrolls of poetry and art in his house. Once, while watching either Card Shark or The Price is Right, they flashed a number on the screen. I must've really, really wanted to remember it for some reason. So I wrote it directly on the scroll. I might've gotten spanked then. That scroll got beat up quite a bit; it was near the television, where I'd lie down on a set of pillows.

I still have that scroll; it means more to me in its tattered state than anything else.

If someone knows what this blue writing says, please let me know.

The writing--I think he lived for writing. He used the pen name Hakuhanshi; to my shame, I don't know what it means.

He would always write at his old, reddish/brownish/black wooden desk, sticky and bumpy after years of disuse and not enough varnish. The lamp on it must've been at least 30 years old -- one of the lamps you see in the movies that take place in the 1940s on the desks of accountants or police officers. His haiku was written on very thin, crinkly paper. There was a red circle or dot, indicating the start of a line, I guess, and then his neat penstrokes. I still have his fountain pen -- it's a Parker, silver-plated, and it doesn't leak unless you let it. He wasn't a pen fetishist, and didn't really care about keeping them tidy. I was surprised, and a bit regretful, how clean it got with some polish.

I copied him a lot. Once, I had gotten it in my head to sit at his desk and write, just like Grandpa. I proceeded to scribble all over his very neatly written haiku, prepared for mailing to a journal in Japan. I don't remember this, but apparently there was a loud "haaaa!", and I froze, sitting on his chair, with a big crocodile tear starting to come down. (I might've gotten spanked that time -- for whatever reason, I think I got spanked precisely twice by him... probably far less than I deserved.)

We learned "haiku" in first grade. It was basic stuff -- you look at a picture and count syllables. Real haiku has a lot more rules. But he was still immensely proud of whatever I had written.

He kept a scrapbook of my writings. When I wrote my imaginary newspaper, he kept it. I think I had an article about why Orchie [sic] Bunker was so angry (Archie Bunker of All in the Family). I also wrote a notice about his chainsaw accident, where he nicked a vein in his hand and had to drive to the hospital, a notice that I posted on a wooden stick in the middle of the backyard.

As stated in other posts, I'd generally be there when he had his monthly haiku group meeting. They'd talk, recite poems, and occasionally be forced to listen to me sing a song, at the insistence of my very proud grandpa. He'd generally go to his bedroom before the end; he always had the sleeping habit of a farmer, and felt comfortable enough leaving hosting to Grandma.

He was editor-in-chief of that group. He'd correct everyone's poems; I don't know if they corrected his. And he could be jealous; May Sakoda, the creator of delicious cakes and one of the few group members who spoke English fluently, once told me he got upset when a Japanese haiku magazine turned down his submission, but took his wife's.

I'm glad he lived long enough for me to read to him "Grandfather's Table", probably the best poem I wrote before college. It was about being around that kitchen table and listening to the haiku group. Most of all it was about remembering.

For whatever reason, I got the honor of writing, and reading, his eulogy. I remember it included a call for family unity -- his was falling apart as he got sick and after he died, over money, property, and, underlying it all, unresolved problems of not feeling loved enough. I suppose, in the end, all arguments and breakups start there.

***

I don't believe in writing genes. My paternal grandfather wrote a lot -- from what I can tell, mostly angry letters to the editor about some point of Constitutional interpretation. So if you believed in writing genes, I guess you'd say my political posts come from Grandpa Yamada, and my creative ones from Grandpa Yasuda.

But I don't believe in writing genes. As far as I remember, I don't even remember either grandpa teaching me about reading or writing at all. Grandpa Yamada lived in Hawaii, and I barely saw him. Grandpa Yasuda spoke a sort of broken English, and wrote creatively only in Japanese.

What I do remember, and believe in, is a writing culture, a celebration of writing above all else. I think that's why I wrote; in the end, I did it to feel worthy of the most important man in my life.

Writing is a godsend, especially to those of us who feel awkward or uncomfortable in public. Thanks to another titanic influence, my fourth grade teacher, Maureen Manning, I feel quite confident speaking in public. But I remain uncomfortable in public, if you understand. I'm still insecure, with negative body image, and, though I've been told otherwise by lots of people, I still believe I'm not a good conversationalist, and that I don't have much to offer.

Writing is a way for me to communicate in a way that mimics closer to what I would say. I make no claims to being a good writer. But I care passionately about it, which helps. I can be inspiring, or somber, or whatever mood I can think of conveying in a written piece better than I can in public. Because I feel that what is being judged is content, and not me. In the end, this isn't really true at either end--people do judge content when faced with a person, and enough of me is still in the writing that I, and my grammatical lapses, or over-long sentences, am being judged. And I'm a selfish writer -- this, and other posts, are more a diary than a public statement. It's too long; it needs to be organized better; it's not interesting to most others.

But I enjoy writing, especially selfishly. It's liberating. When I'm writing, I'm not thinking about the other things that weigh me down in my life. I'm just writing. For that brief time, I believe I'm someone who has something worth saying, something worth reading, and I can't stop until I can get it out there.

It took my high school English teacher, Eric Burgess, to really teach me how to organize essays, and how to use the power of writing to analyze things -- a book, a poem, or parts of the world around me. I'm grateful for that. But it wouldn't have been possible without the culture of writing I had.

Maybe I depend upon it too much; I can't challenge my negative thoughts about my fitness for society if I stay in my room and just write. But I know that writing will always be a part of me--for better or worse.

Thanks, Grandpa. You gave me a lot, but this, I think, was the greatest gift.