Eleanor and Franklin

(Photo from About.Com: 20c History)

I've become obsessed with biographies of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, although I don't know exactly why. At the Printer's Row bookfair, the same one where I met Mary Morris, I picked up an old copy of Eleanor Roosevelt's This I Remember, the second volume of her four-volume autobiography, which covers her years with Franklin. It had a slightly ripped but original cover and the look of an old Book Club selection, something I often find irresistible. It was raining when Gary, Garrett, and I were at the stalls at the book fair, and we didn't have umbrellas or any sort of protection, so we scooted as close to the kiosks as possible to stay dry when I spotted the book. Instead of just putting it on the shelf (something I've been known to do with an old book I'll get to eventually) I started reading it and couldn't put it down. I've read a few biographies of ER, but this was mesmerizing and I read it late into the night on Saturday. I bought Jean Edwar d Smith's FDR (very good), Ted Morgan's FDR (same cover photo, same title, and a lot of the same material, although published more than 20 years ago, but somehow unsatisfying and absolutely tonedeaf when it comes to ER).

I'm still reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time and Blanche Wiesen's biography of ER. The male biographers of FDR so far are somewhat dismissive of ER, but Goodwin and Wiesen, especially, are much more sympathetic. And of course Wiesen, who is focusing on ER, writes extensively about the League of Women Voters, which I find fascinating. So I think a side trip to Hyde Park on the way home from Maine is in order. We'll see if that will fit in.

Please Don't Squeeze the Garmin

Second day. We're trailing a boat, for the first time in more than thirty years. And for a lot longer trip - the longest we did it before was from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Wayne, New Jersey. But this is from Naperville, Illnois, to Rome, Maine, almost 1200 miles! We're overprepared, having planned and plotted out this trip for months. But we find that we need all these newfangled tools: we triangulate between the GPS (which is perfect and accurate, so far, and terrific when you are approaching a complicated set of roads, like the approach to any city or beltway), the atlas (which gives you the big, multi-state picture, as well as detailed state maps), and the Triple A state guides, which list hundreds of hotels with all of their attendant information. How did my parents ever find hotels when we went on (fairly rare) road trips with six people in the car? I know - we saw them from the road, drove up, and found out if they had a room. If they didn't, we asked for a recommendation and drove on. Weird-sounding, I know. The atlases and Triple A info haven't changed much, but I can't imagine a trip without a phone now, and by the end of this one, we'll be hooked on the Garmin. Gary, who considers himself a human GPS, was not convinced that it was what he really wanted for his birthday (I kept telling him yes, it was!). Plunk him down in any city in the country, and he can find his way to the airport, to the interstate, to a restaurant of our choice. But no one can know the exact route to everywhere. When we drove to Maine and Quebec in 1968, with four kids in the car, aged 11 to 18, and two adults, we joked that we drove 13 hours to Bar Harbor, half of it backing up. Very little backing up with a GPS. It has authority. Believe it. It's right.

Some Roads Lead to Rome

Gary and I are off to Rome, Maine, for a few weeks. I have seen my blog as something I closed at the end of the trip to China and Japan, which now seems like a magical interlude followed by two difficult years. A few months after I returned, Gary had a heart attack near Rochelle, Illinois, on the road to Madison, Wisconsin, necessitating a single bypass and a heart valve transplant in Rockford. An ambulance brought him first to Rochelle Community Hospital, which did a few tests and sent him on in another ambulance to Swedish-American Hospital in Rockford. Thank God our younger son Garrett was with him, who had the sense to turn around the car on Route 39, driving over the median, return to a speed trap where he had spotted state troopers, and flag down one of the troopers, who asked Gary a few questions and then called for an ambulance. During the next ten days Garrett, Sarah, Matt, and I hovered in the hospital room in Rockford while Gary went through the surgery and began his recovery. He has since lost 70 or more pounds, can swim a mile at a time, and has spent the past two months building a boat trailer that he ordered online and came UPS in three boxes. We bought an inexpensive, well-aged Sunfish through Craig's List, and he has been refurbishing it since May. We have a new daggerboard, tiller, and tiller extension, all ordered on eBay. A few trips to Wilmette took us to the only store that caters to sailors in northern Illinois, where we bought new lines and a few fittings and a bridle. In June we went into Chicago for the Printers Row Book Fair - how have I missed it for so many years? It was fabulous, and the best thing was that I got to meet Mary Morris, the travel writer whose work I talked about so much in my China/Japan posts. (She and I taught in adjacent classrooms at Rutgers when my oldest child was a baby and I was in grad school. She won the Prix de Rome that year, and several years later wrote Nothing to Declare (about a sojourn in Mexico) and later Wall to Wall (about a journey from Beijing to Berlin on the Trans-Siberian Railway), both groundbreaking travel memoirs. Her most recent book is River Queen, where she takes a trip down the Mississippi on a riverboat. Spoiler Alert: the child she finds she is pregnant with in Wall to Wall, which my students read in China, is now off to college. My children are even older; my oldest is 31 and just bought his first house; my second is 27 and in grad school, and just back from a trip to Greece and Italy; my third is 23, and an art student in Chicago, making shoji screens in his summer internship/job. And this trip that Gary and I are taking is a bit of deja vu: the last time we drove anywhere with a boat on a trailer was in 1976, before we had any children, and we shared a Hobie Cat with another couple when we lived in Oceanside, CA, and Gary was a lieutenant in the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton. We sailed that in San Diego. Before that we had an Aquacat in North Carolina, when we were even younger - I was 21 and Gary 22. We got married between semesters of my senior year - Gary graduated the year before. It's so long ago we could hardly recall the details of how to secure a boat to a trailer. In North Carolina we drove a Volkswagen Bug, and when we drove from North Carolina to New Jersey we were a sight, with suitcases piled on a roofrack and a large, if light, boat trailing behind. We probably had a map or an atlas. This time we have (1) Triptiks and Guidebook from AAA; (2) a brand-new Rand McNally atlas with a leather cover and pockets for pens and cell phone and (2) a Garmin GPS. I think we can find Rome, Maine.

Eel at Inari

This is a photo of the place where two of us ate lunch near the Inari (Thousand Torii) Shrine; we had eel, grilled in the open air right in front of the restaurant, combining the Japanese love for eating freshly cooked seafood and the necessity of squeezing a big task into a small space. The grill took up just a small space and it was easy to chat with the person cooking. It's at a shop near the shrine where I purchased the fox (inari) mask that hangs in my office.

Second to Last Post

Since the order of blogging is most recent first, this will make sense only if you read it from top to bottom. (I really wrote the post below first, but it will look last.) I should be sleeping since I have to get up at about 4:45 a.m., but I have a really great Internet connection for the first time in a really long time and I can't resist just a little more blogging. Above are Mr. and Mrs. Fukuda, owners of the house where I had a home stay. Mr. Fukuda works at Kyoto Gakuen, and the professors who preceded me also lived here. And below their photo is one of the fruit market directly across the street from the house where I lived; it was great to have it so close - and I mean just a few steps from my driveway. It opened every day about 9 a.m., and stayed open until 7:30 at night, closed only on Tuesdays. So if I felt like having a fresh pear for breakfast, I would just walk over and buy one pear. More than once I went out while we were getting together one of our Monday night dinners and bought apples, brought them across the street, and make an apple crisp.

Last Post from Japan

I assume I'll keep posting about China and Japan for a while, but this is the last post I'll actually write from Asia. I'm staying tonight in a hotel close to Kyoto Station, because Kameoka, where I was living, is so far away. I'll miss the pretty house I lived in, which had several rooms floored with tatami mats, and a low table designed so that you could put your feet in a well beneath it that was heated beneath its floor of wooden slats. There was also a kind of blanket surrounding the table that kept the heat in, so that you could stay toasty warm while eating or otherwise using the table. That's the photo you see. This is a very Japanese room, with rice paper window shades (they slide back and forth), tatami mats on the floor, large closets for storing futon, and lovely wood. The only other objects in the room were a small cabinet for dishes and a TV. The group ate many meals around this table (protected with some plastic foamy sheets I found in the foodstore) although the boys will complain they were often banished to a large room with a carpeted floor. Yes, I was afraid spaghetti sauce and cranberry sauce would end up on the tatami, especially if they decided to wrestle a bit. Despite all the dinners eaten sitting on the floor, not one dish was broken and only crumbs ended up on the floor, even when 25 or so people came for Thanksgiving.

Nara Tour

I just like this photo: you see half of Jeff, and most of Ashley, Forrest, Jackie, and Tim. Everyone is looking in a different direction. The day we went, which seems really long ago, was sunny and very hot - hot enough so that we could have worn shorts and sleeveless shirts. Nara has tame deer that live in several herds scattered around the city; during the day they wander through the temple areas, cadging food from the tourists. You can buy a kind of biscuit designed to feed them; they are cute but persistent. No deer in this photo, but I'll post some with deer.

Campus Festival

People in the group will recognize these as old photos, but I never got a chance to blog about the Campus Festival, which was the first weekend we arrived. It was excellent: every club (including sports teams) had a booth selling food, including sweet potatoes cooked over a wood fire, various kinds of fish and seafood stews (squid and octopus being the seafood), cotton candy, chocolate-covered bananas, and pancakes, which you see here being held by Ashley, Vickie, and Valeria. Valeria has been here for several months and has been glad to see so many NCC buddies. In the top photo you will see our KGU friend Nori, who is performing karaoke-style at the festival with lots of stage presence. He is enamored of American culture, especially films like Rambo and television shows like Friends.

View from Nishitatsu

The area of Kameoka where I live is called Nishitatsu, and here is the view from one of the upstairs windows. It was taken on a day when the sun shone, at least throught the clouds. Notice the gray slate roofs, ubiquitous in Japan, and the mountains in the background.

Teremachi

I need to post more pix of the girls in the group, and I don't have much time before we leave Japan: it's Thursday night and we leave Monday morning from Kyoto Station at 5:45 a.m. Here is a photo of Valeria (NCC exchange student at KGU), Natalia and I in Teremachi, a shopping district in downtown Kyoto. We also went to the Nishiki Market, full of all sort of food on sale in kiosks, including fresh fish, smoked fish, dried fish, big fish, and teeny-tiny fish used as a garnish.

Mini Choco Sundae

Tim, Erik, Jackie and I decided to try the Choco Sundaes at the Dining Hall at Kyoto Gakuen University - here you see Tim and Erik. Tim went for the full size and the rest of us chose the Mini. They were delicious, and even better, looked great. The apple in Tim's sundae is cut in perfect V-shapes that have been pulled into a kind of vertical fan. The cherries were kind of weird, though - they were pinkish but had pits and tasted like Queen Anne cherries, not the shiny red bad-for-you maraschino cherries that belong on sundaes.

Laundry in Japan

Top: Coin Laundry in Kameoka

Above: Coffee Shop/Karaoke Bar "Coffee and Sunak"

Long ago and far away in China I wrote a post about doing laundry, which at first seemed as though it would be hard, but turned out to be easy, like so many things in Beijing. The hardest thing to figure out was how to get the machine going: it turned out a kind of magnet shaped like a flat ice cream cone could be purchased at the front desk for a small deposit and charge per load - it cost about 36 cents to do one load of laundry. And it was really easy for me, because the machine was in a tiny room across the hall from my room - closer than the washing machine at home. I had it much easier than the students, because I had a cool arrangement in front of a large window with a bar (and hangers) that could be lowered and raised. In addition, it was warm, and often hot, in Beijing in September and October. It rained perhaps two days in eight weeks, and the clothes would dry in a day or less if they weren't very heavy. I even found Tide in the convenience store, and found I really wanted that perfume that smells like clean laundry they put into it. The heck with those fragrance-free brands: give me the chemicals that signal fresh linen. But I forgot the first time I did laundry to take the Kleenex out of my pocket, so I had a blue shirt polka-dotted with white and no dryer to remove it. After that I was more careful.

In Japan, I live in a beautiful house, but one that is not equipped with a washing machine. My host family, who live in the house adjacent to mine and who own both, pointed out the Coin Laundry a few blocks away. Most of the time it feels like my own personal laundry, with just two washers and two dryers. It costs 300 yen to wash and 100 yen per 10 minutes to dry, of course much more expensive than China, but at least I had dryers to use on rainy days in November and December - and in Kameoka it seems to rain several days a week, and always on Saturday and Sunday. I have no idea what laundromats cost in the U.S. these days, anyway. Most Japanese apartments and homes have washers, although dryers are much more rare: laundry hangs from most balconies even on rainy days, and most married women work only part time and do all the cooking and cleaning. Tonight was my last visit, I hope, to the Coin Laundry. And since I did it in the evening, I was able to take advantage of the "Coffee and Sunak" shop across the street from the laundry. I've passed it ten or eleven times, but it seemed not to be open during the day. It looked surprisingly European or American, sporting wrought iron chairs and tables outside, white lights, potted plants, and wreaths and vines decorating the painted white exterior. There is a reason why it's "Coffee and Sunak" - in Japanese there are never two consonant sounds together, so the "sn" of "snack" becomes "sunak," even if the "su" is elided so it really sounds like "snack." Similarly, "Spain," if written out sound by sound, would be "supein," but it's pronounced pretty similarly to the English "Spain."

So inside I went, dressed as always in my Beiwai sweatshirt and black pants. As soon as I entered I realized I was underdressed for this tiny but sophisticated bar/coffee shop. In fact, it turned out to really be a tiny karaoke bar. But I was the only patron, and the hostess, dressed beautifully in muted colors, like most women in Japan, brought me coffee in a pretty china cup with a little Venezualan chocolate on the side. I inquired about the "sunak" - perhaps I could eat something while my clothes spun in the washer and dryer - but no menu appeared and it didn't seem as though there was really any food to accompany the drinks. I pulled out the papers I was grading and settled in, wondering if a karaoke crowd would show up. But I was there pretty early, from 6:30 to about 7:15, and the only customer, so the hostess brought me two magazines, one the Members' Directory of the (British) Royal Horticultural Society and the other something very Martha Stewartish about English Kitchen Gardens, with pretty photos of thatch-roofed cottages and photos of recipes I'll never make, like crackers embedded with edible leaves and flowers. Apparently there were 1000 members of the Royal Horticultural Society in Japan, not surprising considering how many people in Japan are serious gardeners. We talked about our children and China, and I showed her that I had some of the same jazz tunes on my iPod that were playing, including one by Ella Fitzgerald and some Cole Porter.

After two serious cups of coffee I had that I-can-paint-the-house-and-write-a-book-before-l-go-to-bed feeling so I figured I'd better leave and watch the clothes rotate in the dryer before I got more caffeinated. Even so I was unable to complete the laundry without singing out loud along with the BeeGees on the iPod, safely enclosed and soundproofed in the capsule of the Coin Laundry.

Floating Tori

One of the most famous scenes of Japan, found on every tourist brochure, is the Floating Tori of Miyajima, an island close to Hiroshima in the Inland Sea. The tori and the shrine that accompanies it are the subject of the final chapter of Donald Richie's book and comprise some of the last images in the documentary made about 1990 from the book, first published in 1971. Shinto shrines are bright orange and very cheery; they also surprise with their huge size, when the gates are immense, or with repetition, as in the 1000 Torii shrine in Kyoto, which takes an hour or more to walk through. I liked this particular shrine because it was on the water and you didn't have to climb up a mountain to see it. We took the ferry at dusk and by the time we arrived in Miyajima it was dark. The shrine was closed, but the tori was dramatically lit. It was low tide and you could walk out to its base, if you didn't mind getting muddy. We took a pass on that.

Postwar Shack in Hiroshima

(I wrote this post hastily to take advantage of fleeting Internet availability so I have rewritten it a bit.)

There is a Japanese short story called "Fireflies" about the years following the bombing of Hiroshima, long before the economic miracle of the 50s and 60s. After you have been to the museums in Hiroshima, you can understand the devastation that occurred and what it must have been like to survive the blast and go on. The Peace Museum is designed to let you understand the experience on a very personal level, and many of the stories are about mothers and children. (Almost all the emphasis in Hiroshima is on how terrible war is, rather than ideological argument about one side or the other being right or wrong, a great contrast to museums about the Allies and Axis in the European theater.) In "Fireflies" one woman's only wish is that she will live long enough to live in a house with running water; she lives in a hut where worms crawl in and out of the walls. It's often a difficult story to use in a literature class, because American students have a hard time imagining a Japan where people lived in huts; if they have any impression of a Japanese city at all, they think of it as Tokyo, the city in Lost in Translation, all glitz and Ginza, or a place so modern that, as Parker suggested once in class, that robots walk the streets. The changes in Japan that occurred between 1890 and 1940 were huge in terms of engaging in foreign wars, but the changes in its physical appearance were greater between 1940 and the present. Hiroshima suffered a devastation no other city on earth had experienced, and it was rebuilt as a 20th-century city.