Snake snack

   Out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, getting away from my work, I hoof along the crosstown trail, looking for woodpeckers, hawks, or maybe, if I'm lucky, a deer or fox.    And then right there, not twenty feet to my left, sits a fine red tailed hawk, sitting on the ground of all places. But then I see he has just caught a snake, the blood still bright on the brown leaves leftover from last fall.  The hawk pulls the snake apart and eats away, looking at me rather disdainfully I think.  But then I get my photos home and load them on my computer and there, in the larger image, is what seems like a pained expression on this hawk's face.  As if he is chagrined to be caught eating a snake.  There's no shame in that, though.  You take your protein where you can get it.  And the alternative is what, more rodents?

 

Winterfest

    Rachel's first volleyball tournament was the massive, multi-day Winterfest in Hartford.  Two dozen courts filled the main exhibition hall of the Hartford Civic Center.  Early in the day, as players were warming up on both sides of all the courts, serving and hitting balls all over the place, it seemed to me like being inside a giant popcorn popper.  

    I thought this was clever, so I said it to a parent sitting next to me.  It drew only a thin, polite smile.  

    Still, I thought it was clever.  So I said it to a few other people over the course of the weekend, to about the same effect.  

    Eventually I stopped saying it.  Except this one last time.

The 5:41

   Back Bay station.  Standing on the dirty concrete siding of Track 5.  Waiting for the 5:41 Worcester Local to arrive from South Station.

   A young man appears among the loose herd of commuters, walking up and down in an agitated way, nearly jumping as he speaks.  “Can anyone spare a dollar?  Anyone at all?  I need a dollar to buy a ticket to get to Worcester.  Anyone?  Please?

   He looks like a con artist to me.  I don’t believe he wants money for the train.  

   I watch him for a moment, pacing up and down and pleading with person after person, before I burrow back into the book I am reading -- Les Miserables.  The irony is not lost on me.  I choose to invest my attention on the fictional Gavrotte instead of the real urchin just steps away.

   The young man has no takers.  He becomes louder and more desperate as the moments tick by.  The train will be here any minute. 

   Then a voice calls out, “Here!”

   Down the platform a bit, holding aloft a dollar bill, is the blind man who rides this train every day.  Face uplifted, holding up a dollar to the young man he can hear but not see.     

   The young man races over, takes the dollar, saying “thank you, thanks man,” and then raises his cry anew.  “Who else will help me?  The ticket is seven dollars and now I have one.  Can anyone help me?  Please?”  He moves quickly down the platform, pleading as he goes.

   I’m still feeling skeptical but also rotten now.  If the blind guy will give him a dollar, then surely so should I.  He may really need a dollar for a train ticket.  And what’s the great harm if he doesn’t?  So what if I’m wrong and he’s really trying to rip us off?  It’s a lousy dollar for God’s sake.  A dollar I’ll never miss.

   I pull out my money clip and see that I have three singles among a bunch of larger bills.  I make myself a deal.  If he comes back this way before I get on the train, I’ll give him the three dollars.

   A large man, about my age, comes along and stands next to me. 

   “Ten bucks that guy doesn’t get on the train,” he says.

   “Yeah,” I say.  “He’s running out of time.”

   “No, I mean he has no intention of getting on the train.  I’ve seen this act before.  Not this guy, but other guys down at South Station.  They get people to give them a few bucks and then just bolt out of the station.  He’s not buying a ticket.” 

   I slip the three dollars back in my pocket, hoping the man hasn’t seen what a rube I was about to be.

   He goes on:  “A couple of years ago I was walking by the bus station and this woman outside was begging people to give her money so she could buy a ticket for the bus out to Springfield.  Total coincidence, but I was on my way to get my car to drive to Springfield.  So I says to her, ‘I’ll give you a ride,’ but she turns me down.  ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t let you do that.’  Right.  Like she can take my money, but she can’t take a free ride to Springfield where I am going anyway?  A con job, just like this guy.” 

   By now the train is pulling in.  I chat a bit more with the large man while we are getting on the train, before I find a space to stand and open my book again.  I don’t bother trying to see where the young man went.  He’s in a bad spot no matter what. 

   I put the three dollars back in my money clip and open my book and go back to France.  To Gavrotte and Thenardier, Jean Valjean and Javert, Marius and Cosette.   The noble and the not-so-noble poor.  The con artists and convicts.    

   The young man on the platform – is he still there? At the ticket window? Running down the street?  He’s somewhere in this cast.

Hiroshima

   In Hiroshima we ride one of the old street cars from the main train station along a wide street with old paving stones until we almost reach the river, with the so-called A-bomb dome on one side and the peace park on the other.  The museum is at the far end of the park. 

   We work our way through the crowds in the museum.  A series of panels along the wall narrates the history of Hiroshima, a central part of which involves the military units that were based there, and how they were deployed to Russia and China when Japan's wars with those nations “broke out.”  The panels do not say anything about who started these wars, and why, and what happened after the surrender of Nanking.  

   A video installation describes the course of the Second World War, or parts of it.  It ends by saying that the American government decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it had to justify to the American public the enormous expenditure that had been made to develop these weapons.  I watch the ending twice to see if it really did say that.  And it did. 

   Exhibits display glass bottles, ceramic cups, metal forks and spoons, all melted and fused together by the heat of the explosion.  The scorched remnants of a child’s school uniform.  The famous granite steps that bear the shadow of a person incinerated in the blast.  Or is it a model of the steps?  It’s too crowded to read the placard.  Either way, we get the point.  And if we didn’t, there are the gruesome wax models of people walking in numbed horror with their arms outstretched, their flesh sagging and dripping from their bones. 

   Video installations chronicle the cold war arms race, subsequent efforts to limit the spread and reduce the number of nuclear weapons, and the thousands that still remain.  And finally, on the way out of the museum, there are books in which you are invited to record your impressions of all of this.  The first entry I see is from an American woman, whose entry begins, “I am so very, very ashamed.” 

   Yes, what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is gruesome and terrible.  But the fate of the man incinerated on the granite steps was no worse than that of the girl who was raped to death in Nanking.  Or of the marine medic on Guadalcanal who responded to the cry of the wounded Japanese, who waited for the medic to kneel down before pulling the pin on his last grenade.  The Japanese chose war and chose how they would fight it.  And in so doing they made Truman’s choice for him.  As awful as the atomic bombings were, the alternative was more awful than that.  It would have been, at best, the 
conventional fire-bombing of every city in Japan – like Tokyo, and Dresden before that.  As with the Germans, who were handing out rifles to boys and old men long after their defeat was certain, the Japanese would surrender not merely to defeat, but only to a defeat so crushing, so obliterating, that it extinguished the will to fight at all.  

   I leave sobered and sad.  But not the least ashamed.

Eating Japan

   Some of what we ate in Japan: 


   A bag of little dried fish chips. 

   Freshly made rice crackers dipped in soy sauce at the market in Asakura.  

   Sweet black beans and tiny dried fish in the open market, and then a terrific sushi lunch, around the corner from the Tokyo fish market.  

   A bento box lunch on the train from Tokyo to Nagoya, with sushi and bits of cooked shrimp and eel and noodles and pickled vegetables.  

   A can of melon soda.  

   Three hot, steamed buns from a small shop in Takayama, one with beef, one with red beans (so much better hot than cold), and one with pumpkin.  

   Also in Takayama, a perfect cup of sake sherbet, maybe the single most surprising and delightful thing we ate the entire trip, unless it was the Japanese marshmallow, a warm square of meringue, which we got from the vendor along the river the next day.  

   At the ryokan in Takayama, the simple, soothing, hot, green tea we were served in our room when we arrived and two enormous dinners featuring slices of tender, fatty Hida beef, which we grilled ourselves on the petals of the shabu-shabu pot in the middle of our table in the tatami-matted dining room, and corn, onions, peppers, greens, three kinds of mushrooms, four kinds of picked vegetables, a giant raw sweet shrimp, two kinds of raw fish, a small curious dish with chopped mushrooms and walnuts, soba or udon noodles, miso soup, rice and a desert of strawberry mousse; and a breakfast at the ryokan with its own array of small bites, and grilled trout instead of beef, and a perfectly poached egg. 

   In Kyoto, in our own little dining room upstairs at a restaurant on Pontocho Street, overlooking the river, sukiyaki for the three girls, which we cooked at the table, and eel, more eel, for me.  

   Chocolate croquettes at the Nishiki food market in Kyoto.  

   The satisfying pancake-noodle-cabbage-egg-sauce mash-up that is okonomiyaki, first in Hiroshima and then in Osaka.  

   One of the plums that Noburo and Akiko had put up in a jar, soaked in strong sake.  

   A fine kaiseke dinner in Himeji, which featured a blissful soup with corn tofu, and a warm-potato-salad-stuffed eel –- better than it sounds, and indeed, one of the best dishes on the trip.  

   And everywhere the different styles of little monju cakes and the essential vending machines with their cold, little cans of sweet iced coffee, and cold bottles of water and tea. 

   The crowded McDonald’s on the Ginza is a sad sign of things to come in Japan.  It seems will take their sushi and green tea (and excellent cars and electronics) in trade for our hamburgers and heart disease (and washed-up baseball players).

   

Time to make some tea.

Tokyo

   In Tokyo we stay in the fashionable Shibuya district, at the Tokyu Excel Hotel, a block away from the Shibuya train station, where we get our JR train tickets for all the pieces of our trip:  Tokyo to Takayama by way of Nagano.  Takayama to Nagano to Kyoto.  Kyoto to Himeji.  A day trip to Hiroshima.  Himeji to Osaka.  While KC works out all the tickets with the patient young clerk at JR, I stand outside the station, watching the office workers and schoolchildren pour in and out of the station and across the busy square in front.  The children in their school uniforms are as young as five and six – traveling alone in the big city.  I watch a boy no more than six as he slogs along alone, slaps his pass against the sensor at the turnstile, hikes the strap of his backpack up his shoulder, and heaves a sigh as he makes his way for the train.  Another long day at the office.

   The Meiji Shrine, in the middle of this city of 13 million people, is an oasis of woods and broad gravel paths and elegantly simple wooden buildings.  Mina, our cheerful tour guide, teaches us how to enter a Shinto shrine and to offer our prayers.  At a sheltered trough of cool water we take up one of the long-handled ladles and dip a cup of water, first rinsing our left hand, then our right.  Then we pour a bit of water into our left hand and slurp some into our mouth to rinse that, too.  Then we dip another cupful and raise it up to let the water spill down the long handle to make it ready for the next person to use.  Inside, at the front of the shrine itself, is a long box with slats across the opening at the top.  The girls each toss a coin in through the slats, bow twice, clap their hands twice to get the attention of the gods, hold their hands together as they offer a silent wish, then bow once more.  They don’t believe that this ritual will make their wish come true, but they also believe it will not work if they say their wish out loud. 

      The large wooden columns just in front of the coin box are pitted from the countless coins that are thrown toward the box on the important holidays, when the main square inside the shrine is jammed to capacity.  To the left of the box a Shinto priest sits in a small booth, waiting to sell a variety of charms.  On the right is a place where you can buy a small wooden shingle, on which you can write your missive to the gods, before hanging the shingle on a great peg board with all the others that have been left.  When the board gets full, the Shinto priests put all the shingles in a pile and burn them, releasing their messages to the sky.  The prayer offered most often here in these times is not to find love or have health or live a long and happy life.  It is to pass the university entrance exams.

   In the Asakura neighborhood of Tokyo we see the Hozo-Mon Gate and the Asakusa Kannon Temple, where you also can throw your coins in the box and buy charms from the local priests, but where, for 100 yen, you also can buy a fortune, which you receive buy picking up and shaking a metal box, and pulling out one of the wooden sticks inside, each of which has a number.  Then, at the wall of small, wooden drawers, you open the drawer with your number, and pick out the top sheet of paper, which has your fortune.  Mina, our cheerful tour guide, explains the process but discourages us from trying it because the percentage of negative fortunes is too high.  But she also explains that while you can take your good fortune with you, you also can leave a bad fortune behind.  Rachel confidently asserts that she wants to do it, and so she pops a hundred yen into the offering box, shakes the metal can, and pulls out her wooden stick.  Mina reads the number for us and points us, with a genuine nervousness, to the wooden drawer.  Rachel pulls out the sheet of paper, which contains the best of fortunes.  Mina is delighted.  We are, too.  And not surprised in the least.

   

   We visit the Imperial Palace, where the Emperor and his family live, and which used to be the castle of the Shoguns.  Like the Meiji Shrine, this is one of the major sites inExcept that you don’t really get to see the Imperial Palace.  You get to see the moat and the walls and the main gate, which are impressive.  The Palace itself remains hidden behind all of this and the trees.    

   The Tokyo fish market.  A daily adventure in commerce and controlled chaos.  Whole fish of every description.  Knives as long as samurai swords.  Raw eel, still bloody, set on skewers, ready to be grilled for someone’s lunch.  Men fill and pull decades-old wooden chests full of ice, while small motorcycles zip through the narrow aisles.  Two large starfish have been set aside on the ice, along with two bottles of soda.  Women sit in the interior shacks, working their phones and ledgers.  Men in dark suits come stand looking and pointing at some tuna.  Men in boots hose blood and scales from the wood and concrete.  Men on gas-powered carts speed in all directions, nimbly dodging each other and the tourists with their digital cameras, snapping away at all of this common exotica. 

   Exhilarated, nerves still jangling a bit, we retreat to the nearby market, where we sample little dried fish and buy a bag of sweet black beans and eat a lovely, cooling, soothing sushi lunch, and then walk past the three-stool stalls selling bowls of noodles, on our way back the Ginza. 

How hard is it really?

   I wake with the rising sun, make my coffee, wash the pot, shave and pack my razor.  The cab arrives and finally I am off to meet my family.  In Japan.

   First Logan to Dulles, then the long haul from Dulles to Narita.  We reach altitude than then settle in for the run north and west, threading around the Buffalo and Toronto, and then pushing up, up, up, across the western shore of Hudson Bay, the great Canadian northwest, Alaska and the Bering Strait, and finally, finally descending to Narita. 

   When people ask if you have any plans for the summer, and you sheepishly say that you are vacationing with your family in Japan, you want to sprinkle in some notion that this won’t be entirely greater than your friend’s week of sand and fried clams on the Cape.  And so you make sure to say how long a trip it is to get there and back.  And how much the change in time will disrupt your sleep. 

   But how hard is it, really?  Especially if, like me, you have just read Nathaniel Philbrick’s Into the Heart of the Sea, which recounts the true story of the Nantucket whaling ship Essex – rammed and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale in the very middle of the South Pacific, the crew consigned to the open sea in three whaleboats, an ordeal that only a handful of them survive, and barely, and only after eating several of their dead companions’ flesh and sucking the marrow from their bones. 

   As compared with 93 days in an open boat, and nothing to eat after the few biscuits but your neighbor, I am prepared for 13 hours on a plane with the lovely stewardesses of All Nippon Airways, my choice of in-flight movies, and two full meals and snacks.   The stir-fried scallops with mushrooms, asparagus and oyster sauce was a bit heavy on the pepper, and the French chardonnay could have been chilled just a bit more.  But happily I need contemplate my neighbor’s forearms only as they pertain to the armrest.