Why Shoveling Snow Saddens Me So

I just shoveled the snow off of five spaces in the parking lot of the apartment/condo complex where I live. Not that I needed a spot to park, but who knows?  Maybe I will, but even if I don't, a fellow resident might need a place to park tonight when they get home from work, I cleared some spots for them.  I don't know why the management can't do it; it's their job, but regardless, it's been done now, and I got in my workout for the day...

Having said that... while shoveling the snow, I couldn't help but think of my father.... He was always trying to come up with a way to make shoveling snow by hand easier.  Until I left home for college, I lived with my parents in a house on a hill that had a fairly long driveway.   For many years, whenever a major snowstorm passed through, we had to clear out the driveway by hand shovel. No one enjoyed that at all, including my dad. He attached a 'handle' to a scoop that belonged on the front of a truck and we sometimes used that (sometimes in tandem) to scoop the snow off the driveway. Normally we worked 'in shifts', but my dad always worked the longest and the hardest to make sure we had a clear path....

And it was the snow that did him in.  Or, rather, the snow shoveling.   My dad had a long history of hypertension-- he had had a heart attack back in 1966.  At least I think it was 1966, because the last memorable Christmas we had was in 1965, when Dad was still in his prime. My dad's heart attack took away our sole source of income; with 7 mouths to feed (my oldest brother and only sister had graduated high school and left home by then) money was really tight, and I remember the horrible conditions-- milk made from that horrible-tasting Carnation instant powder, blocks of cheese from the government, hand-me downs that were ugly and outdated, not to mention being ostracized from the community...

Flash forward to 1989, when a huge snowstorm passed through Minnesota. I wasn't at home at the time-- in fact, I was on the other side of the globe, in Japan.  Dad had been out shoveling snow most of the morning.  My mother was working two jobs-- as an elementary school teacher's aide during the day, and at a nursing home during the night, so she was not home.. One of my brothers was living with my parents at the time, and he wasn't feeling well.  My dad came in from shoveling snow, and said something to my brother... maybe it was that he was tired, or not feeling well.  It's been so long, and I don't remember the details, but Dad went to lie down.  After a while, my brother asked if he wanted something to eat, and my dad said he wasn't hungry.  My brother left him alone, and while Dad was asleep, he suffered a massive coronary and passed away...

I got the call just as I was about to leave home in Japan for a speech contest.  I was supposed to give a speech in Japanese, and I was supposed to win (my sponsor had that much confidence in my skills.)  I called him to let him know I was heading out to the community hall, and when I set the phone back in the cradle, it rang.  Curious, I picked it up.  It was my brother.  That was even more curious, because my brother never called me before.  When he told me Dad had passed away, I thought he was joking. But when I realized he was telling the truth, the shock hit me like a ton of bricks.  What was I to do??

I called my sponsor back and explained what happened.  They told me I should come to the event, but not participate. He understood.  I said I was alright, and went to the speech contest, and I bombed.  I couldn't speak while memories of my dad ran through my head.  I fought back tears as I rambled and forgot my thread.  I told the audience to never take one parents for granted.  I was in a daze.  At the party held after the event, I sat numbly in a corner.

Many years have passed since my father passed away...  And I realize in many ways I am just like him.  Of my brothers, I probably look the most like him.  All the hair on my chest-- just like him.  All the wrinkles-- just like him.  All the good looks-- well, they, too, are from my father.  The saddest of it all, though, is that I never really appreciated him while he was alive.  It wasn't until after he passed away that I realized just how much he meant to me, just how grateful I should be for what he gave me. It wasn't until I grew up a little more that I could finally see what fatherly love truly means...

One last thing-- six months before Dad passed away, I had a break from teaching in Japan.  I returned to the U.S. for the first time in three years.  On the day I was scheduled to fly back to Japan, my dad stopped me on the porch, gave me a hug, and with tears in his eyes, told me he loved me.  I was very surprised, as this was totally unlike my father.  I told him I loved him back, but the truth of the matter is, I think I was in too much shock from his actions to really express how I felt.  Given another chance, I would hug him back like I meant it, hold him against me and tell him I loved him more than words can say... For being the hardest-working man I ever knew, for overcoming life's obstacles again and again, for always trying to be better, for trying to provide more, for every laugh at my god-awful jokes, for working with Mom to raise us right-- for all these things and more-- I would give him my heartfelt thanks.

So, with each shovel of snow, I am reminded of my father, and my loss.... and this is why shoveling snow saddens me so...    

Haiku Hankerings - The Cry of Cicadas (Part 1)

静けさや　岩に染み入る　せみの声
Oh, what quietness!    Penetrating through the rocks    The cicada's cry

The above poem is a famous example of a haiku written by Matsuo Basho.  I first encountered it when I was quite young, and for many years, it puzzled me.  I had heard cicada cry before and knew they could be quite loud, but not to the level where they could 'penetrate through the rocks' I had seen as a child... And anyway, how could there be such stillness?!? The real answers did not come until I actually spent several years in Japan.

The first part of the answer came to me during my first  trip to Japan in the summer of 1985. I had just graduated from college the winter before, and sold my original comic book collection to pay for a trip to Japan.  That summer, I visited Hiroshima for a week.  My acquaintance there was a high school teacher who let me stay in his guest room.  He had a son in college who was home for summer vacation and a daughter in high school. I sometimes practiced English with them, but for the most part we spoke Japanese. 

Hiroshima, if you're not familiar with the city, is on the coast on Honshu (the largest island of the four major islands of Japan) and surrounded by mountains on three sides. My host and his family lived in 'the suburbs' around Hiroshima, which basically meant he lived on the side of a mountain and not in the super-congested downtown area. The Japanese make use of almost every inch of land they can, so the house sat on a man-made concrete-reinforced platform to keep it level. (I am not sure, but there may have been some earthquake-resistant engineering built into the platform as well.)

Near my host's home there was a public tennis court; the daughter suggested we play a game of tennis to pass the time.  (She was a member of the tennis club at her school.)  She and her brother accompanied me to the tennis court, and on our way there we had to pass through a graveyard. I noticed during our walk through the land of the dead that it was fairly littered with statues, somewhat like the graveyards I had seen in the U.S., but on a grander scale.  Quite of few of them were fairly new, too. "Victim of radiation poisoning," one slab said. Another nearby also mentioned the A-bomb explosion that obliterated most of the city back in 1945.  I was sure quite a few of the people buried here were A-bomb-related deaths, whether from the explosion itself or from the radiation they had absorbed over the course of many years. 

When I tried to ask my companions questions about the statues I saw, they both shrugged their shoulders and pointed to the trees a short distance away.  I found out later that it wasn't that they did not understand my Japanese-- they said they just couldn't hear me. Shortly after we entered the holy grounds, the sounds of the cicadas crying increased in volume, and continued to grow in intensity until nothing could be heard but their sound.  When I tried to shout over the noise, it was useless-- I couldn't even hear myself.  After more gesticulation, we left the graveyard for the tennis court, which was much quieter.  It was there that I was able to ask my questions and get answers. At that time, I found the answer to part of the puzzle about Basho's haiku-- yes, these cicada in Japan could cry loud enough to penetrate the stones.

Haiku Hankerings - The Oddest Foreigner

When on my trip to the northern part of Japan back in 1989, I had the opportunity to visit the city of Sendai, the largest city in the northern part of Japan, with a population of over one million. The 'city' includes a lot of land that is not heavily populated, and reminds me to some extent of Columbus, Ohio, which occupies the entire Franklin County.  For the purposes of comparison, I looked at other major cities in the U.S.:

Los Angeles, CA  -  502.7 square miles
New York City  -        468.5 sq. mi.
Indianapolis, IN -      372.0 sq. mi
Sendai, Japan  -      303.4 sq. mi.
Columbus, OH -       212.6 sq. mi.
Seattle, WA  -           142.5 sq. mi.
Las Vegas, NV  -     135.9 sq. mi.

When going into Sendai by train or car, you can see a lot of landscape before you realize you are inside the city limits.  You may be familiar with the city of Sendai, as it received a lot of damage from the earthquake and resulting tsunami of 2011.  You may have seen some of the videos showing the tsunami; many of them were taken in the area around Sendai.

Anyway, I had no hotel reservations when I arrived in Sendai; I called someone I knew from my college days to ask if he had any suggestions; I ended up staying overnight at his home.  When I knew this guy, he was a high school English teacher; that night, I found out that he was actually a member of Sendai's Board of Education, and had an office in 'downtown' Sendai. He invited me to visit his office, and I, thinking that it would be some time to get off my sore feet, agreed to go with him. 

Shortly after I arrived at the office of the Sendai Board of Education, one of the Japanese there asked me what I was doing in the northern part of Japan.  I explained to him that I had read "Oku no Hosomichi", the seminal work by Matsuo Basho, and was hoping to see the same sights that Basho had seen.

"Oh, you must have read that in English!" the man said. 

"No-o-o-o.... I read it in Japanese," I replied.

"Oh, it must have been the modern-day Japanese translation," he said. 

I knew by that statement that the man I was speaking with had to be a teacher of the Japanese language and literature. Many Japanese teachers act as if their native tongue is impossible for gaijin (foreigners) to understand on a rudimentary level, so if you can master the language and do things that Japanese people do in their everyday lives, you are relegated to 'hen na gaijin' ("odd foreigner") level. "Odd foreigners" have these interests in Japanese culture that equal or surpass the Japanese themselves. If you own Japanese swords, enjoy sumo wrestling, sing a karaoke song in Japanese, enter a Buddhist monastery, or partake in any form of Japanese culture, or speak perfectly fluent Japanese, you are "hen na gaijin". 

"No, I used the college-prep guides," I explained. (The college prep guides have the original classical Japanese text, followed by a modern-day Japanese translation, and then a section describing the grammar and 'dead' vocabulary of the classical Japanese.)

"Oh-h-h-h?  So you understand classical Japanese?  You understand haiku too?"

I did not like the condescending attitude of this Board of Education member.  While I knew my understanding of classical Japanese wasn't perfect, it was good enough.  After all, I had read "Oku no Hosomichi" and believed I enjoyed Basho's poetry enough to want to make my own trip to northern Japan.  Wasn't that enough? 

Without answering his questions, I decided to turn the tables on him.  After I confirmed that he was, indeed, a teacher of Japanese language and literature, I said, "Many Japanese teachers don't know classical Japanese, nor do they understand haiku."

"That is true."

"What about you?  Do you know classical Japanese and understand haiku?"

The teachers sitting around us were all listening intently to our conversation, and maybe some of them were surprised by my brazen challenge.  Maybe they sensed something else was going on.  All ears and eyes were glued to this 'hen na gaijin' in their midst. 


"Of course I do!" the Japanese teacher replied.

"We-e-e-l-l-l," I said, and paused for dramatic effect. "If I gave you a haiku, would you be able to identify who wrote it?"

"Sure, I can!" the teacher replied.

"OK," I said, and paused again, as if I was thinking about which poem to give. Actually, I already had my choice:  時雨ふる　旅のはじめや　国分寺　(Shigure furu  / tabi no hajime ya / Kokubunji)

"That's a Buson work!" the teacher said excitedly.  (Yosa Buson was another famous haiku poet of the late 18th century.) 

"Chotto matte!  (Waitaminnit!)" a fellow Board of Education member said.  "I think that was by Issa!" (Kobayashi Issa is another famous haiku poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.)

The two teachers argued for a few minutes over who was correct, and I sat and listened without interrupting.  Finally, a third member asked me to settle the argument.  "Who did write it?" she asked. 

"I did, in the spring of this year!" I said, and raucous laughter ensued, as the crowd of teachers realized they had been duped by the oddest of foreigners they had ever seen. 


NOTE:  Astute readers of my blog will realize this haiku first appeared two posts ago.  It was the first haiku I ever made, and my haiku teacher's comment that it was "just like Basho!" made me so proud that I memorized the haiku so I could 'whip it out' at any time. Practice made this one absolutely perfect! 

 

Will the Classics Wither Away?

In my previous post, I had mentioned how some people believed that Matsuo Basho, the famous haiku poet, may have been a ninja spy when he made his trip to the northern part of Japan in 1689.  This is because the area where Basho was born and raised was the home for a variety of ninja and the journey as described by Basho in Oku no Hosomichi is impossible for the average human with the methods of transportation available at the time, but as I stated last time, I think those people are forgetting that Basho is a poet and an artist, and as such took a few liberties with the truth. 

Basho himself clearly states the reason for his trip to the northern part of Japan, away from ever-busy, densely populated Edo (modern-day Tokyo): he was impressed with the works of Saigyo (1118-1190), a Buddhist hermit and poet who lived during the a time of major political and social upheaval in Japan, and Basho wanted to see if he could find the same majestic scenery that Saigyo had described in his much longer poems centuries before him. 

In the 19th section of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, he describes his feelings about his journey in the footsteps of Saigyo when he finds a monument that had been inscribed with Chinese characters on it from almost a thousand years earlier:   

According to the date given at the end of the inscription, this monument was erected during the reign of Emperor Shomu (724-49), and had stood here ever since, winning the increasing admiration of poets through the years. In this ever changing world where mountains crumble, rivers change their courses, roads are deserted, rocks are buried, and old trees yield to young shoots, it was nothing short of a miracle that this monument alone had survived the battering of a thousand years to be the living memory of the ancients. I felt as if I were in the presence of the ancients themselves, and, forgetting all the troubles I had suffered on the road, rejoiced in the utter happiness of this joyful moment, not without tears in my eyes.

                The above is taken from this website: http://terebess.hu/english/haiku/basho2.html

In other words, Basho wept with joy in finding some physical evidence that connected him with the 'poets through the years'.  That is the beauty of art in its myriad forms; whether it is a famous painting, a statue, a movie, a book, a song, a poem, or anything else, when we encounter the works left behind by ancient masters, and feel that connection that crosses the centuries, we too may feel that 'utter happiness' in knowing that we are not alone, and we come away feeling that our troubles were totally worth it. This is especially true if we understand the Buddhist sense of impermanence, when things are expected to change and even vanish from existence, and in time, from our collective memory. 

I can sometimes understand why students hesitate to get caught up in the Classics of literature. I never really understood Shakespeare as a child, and hated being forced to read "Romeo and Juliet" in junior high school-- the language was uncool and the social settings were not anything like I knew.  "Hamlet" was a little more passable, but at the age I read it, my classmates were still giggling about the word 'codpiece'.  "The Three Musketeers" was too florid and I settled for the comic book adaptation and the movies instead.  "Great Expectations" was easier to read, but the only real great expectation I had was to finish the book, which was mandated reading. I have always loved to read (I chose to read "Shogun" by James Clavell in high school before the mini-series came out on TV, and my classmates thought I was nuts) but the Classics were hard to appreciate at such a young age. 

When I was teaching in Japan, I found that the youth there had little appreciation for Classical Japanese literature.  Tosa Nikki (The Tosa Diary, written in the 10th century), Hojoki (An Account of My Hut, written in 1212), and Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North, in the late 17th century) are all stories in Classical Japanese that I have read, mostly on my own after graduating from college. I had to use college-prep books that had an explanation of the old grammar along with a modern-day translation to enable me to understand the content, but in the end, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the books. I have even memorized the opening lines of Hojoki, and have used them to impress the Japanese on my knowledge of their literature.

The Japanese students I taught, however, hated Classical Japanese with a passion, which I believe stems from the fact that these ancient texts are used by colleges and universities in Japan to weed out applicants for study in their entrance exams, and due to the difficulty of the test questions, the focus in teaching Classical Japanese is not the content of the Classics, but the esoteric grammatical rules used by the writers of yore.  The students at that age should not be forced to remember how to parse the grammar of some 'dead' language that is practical only for one short period in their lives (i.e., when taking a college entrance exam) but that is where the focus of the college entrance exams lies.  I believe the content of the Classics is far more important-- that is why the works have been admired for centuries after the death of the writer.  It doesn't matter, though, as even the students who may never qualify for a higher education because they didn't have the stamina to memorize obscure grammar rules have to drudge through the rote learning of beautiful text that suddenly withers and turns into something horribly dreary.