Returning to Japan: Kyoto

I've been spending quite a bit of time lately talking to my little German brother, Steven, who left his life in Mannheim for a year to come to the US. After a few months back home, he's discovering what I found when I moved home from Japan. When you drop your whole life to immerse yourself in a new experience -- a school, a job, a journey -- it comes at a price. The friends you make in your new locale aren't there to bolster you up when you get home, and the time away has distanced you so completely from your old friends that they are worse than strangers. Steven's life, like mine, is now gloriously shattered by the social San Andreas of "living abroad."



We all compartmentalize our lives: work, friends, relationships, family, that crazy summer with the traveling circus; but in normal, healthy lives, we have cross-over. Our coworkers meet our friends who hang out with our boyfriends who make awkward appearances at family gatherings and so forth. Those subtle links bind our experiences together into one collective mass we call: Life. Without them, we become scattered, disjointed; instead of being multifaceted, we become multi-lived. The problem with Dissociative Life Disorder is that whatever side of your life you happen to be on becomes dominant, reducing its counterpart to that slippery, half-imagined state of dreams. Kind of like the way we all felt about Top Gun after this.



Returning to Kyoto this summer, I was a bit apprehensive. I had been away for three years, and in that time, I wasn't sure how much I had romanticized my experiences there. Kyoto was the epicenter of my life in Japan -- not just a city where I lived, but a city where I fell madly and irredeemably in love. In love with the play of light on the Kawaramachi; with the clatter of bamboo in the wind; with narrow, snaking alleyways and a thousand little bridges; with the startling white glide of a crane; with soaring orange tori and ten-story buildings dripping with neon; with the lullaby rock of subway trains; with 7-Eleven sushi and one very well-worn blue sweater. In love with a lifestyle, with a rhythm, with an aesthetic, with a man. I was afraid that returning to Kyoto might shatter its magic for me -- might flip the garish house lights on after an enchanting show.



Instead, I discovered that even my most vivid memories didn't do any more justice to this incredible city than snapshots do to a mountain range.



Kyoto embodies the best of Japan -- a deep reverence for tradition interlaced with freshness and vitality; a startling juxtaposition of nature's stillness and the steady urban buzz; a cultural character that is rich, unique, and always surprising.



I should not have worried about Kyoto disappointing me. Coming back was like coming home, not just in the familiarity of the winding streets (a maze I long ago committed to memory) but because the rhythm of the place was once the rhythm of my life, the way an old song always takes us back to ourselves. I felt this way as my students and I entered Fushimi-Inari and as we made the steep climb up to Kyomizu-dera, but more than ever I felt myself coming home in the fervent embraces of old friends, in an icy beer and a bowl of edamame, in a smokey bar at three a.m., and in the well-worn, quiet comfort of friendship that time cannot fade.

Ask My Kids IV: The Holocaust

Once again, my kids amaze me with their awesome grasp of history, culture, and the human experience. Today's feature: Hitler.

(This is the real deal, in all its raw and unedited glory.)

Hitler was a very cruel person who killed a whole lot of people which were Jewish, he also made them slaves it didn't matter how old you were he would make them work in open land and he would have his soldiers wip them if they did not work fast or if they said anything back to them. The reason he chose to pick the Jews instead of any other culture was because he did not like Jesus, and Jesus was Jewish, he also didn't like God because he herd from many people that God owned the world and that was what he was trying to do.

Fair enough.

Gathering 'Round the Hearth

I like to travel pretty much anywhere. I'm into going new places, meeting new people, and seeing things I would never, ever see at home. Normally, I make it my goal to visit one new place every year. This summer, I'm adding four new places to my "Been There" list: London, Dublin, Seattle, and Hawaii. And yet, somehow, I always end up back here. I even got surprisingly pissed off at my boss the other day when she implied that I was kind of a leaf in the wind who may not be around long. I raised my voice to her. (Good thing I'm in a union. Shit.)

At first I wasn't sure why I got so upset. After all, I consider myself a Citizen of the World, and I detest the idea of being tied down anywhere by anything. But lately, that seems to be changing, and I can only think of one little reason why...




This is my nephew, Aaron. As I'm writing this, he's four and a half days old.

I am smitten with him. He is perfect.


The truth is that the farther I travel from home and the more people I meet, the more I like my family. Of course, over the years in my travels I've met lots of fantastic people I adore, but taking people for granted is much easier when you grow up fighting them for the bathroom. Now that I'm old(er) and wise(r) I've realized how rare cool families are. I have three siblings who rock, two gorgeous sisters-in-law, two parents who are still in love with each other, five aunts, three uncles, three living grandparents, four kick-ass cousins, a dog-nephew, a cat-nephew, and now, finally, a real nephew. Everybody's stable; everybody gets along. Even the dog and the cat. We even know and love my brothers' families-in-law.



Brother #2 entertains his niece by pretending his weight clips are earrings. She digs it.

The amazing thing Nephew's coming has done is give us all an excuse to spend more time together, especially my brothers and sister and I. We're all grown-ups with pretty demanding lives. Brother #1 is an engineer who schmoozed his way to the top of his company inside a few years, which means more money and less free time to spend it. Brother #2, in addition to working to support the Wife and the Little Guy, is a law student. Sister is a historian, and her projects take her all over the country to dig in the dirt and polish dusty things. I currently teach at my alma mater and hang my hat about fifteen minutes from the homestead, so I see the Parents pretty regularly, but when the Siblings come back to town, the party is on.


My cat-nephew, Guinness, takes a snooze in the bouncer seat. We've tried to explain to him that it's for the REAL baby, but he just gives us a confused look.

When they arrive, I'm sitting on the living room floor, restringing my little Epiphone. I have to do this at my mom's house because I need to borrow her tuner... and because I inevitably ask for her help at some point. I set the guitar down to exchange the customary greeting hugs and to gather up the little bundle of Aaron. Within minutes, one of the brothers picks up my guitar, finishes restringing it, and starts strumming. The other slips down the hall and returns a few minutes later with our mother's sacred Gibson, a guitar we were hardly allowed to touch until we were teenagers.

Over the course of the evening, the baby and the guitars are passed steadily around the living room. The brothers play around, poking fun at each other and putting on thick country drawls to croon "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" while their wives laugh and roll their eyes. My sister, who in her own words "wields a guitar like a drunken polecat wields an abacus", attempts to play a song she has dubbed "Mostly Only D" on account of the fact that it mostly has only one chord -- D. Every other line, the chord shifts to an A, and she predictably flubs the rhythm each time. She gives up before long, trades me the guitar for the nephew, then sits and improvises flawless harmonies to everything I play.

With some coaxing, we finally convince Mom to sing, which is what we've been hoping for all evening. She acts shy and embarrassed, but eventually she starts playing "All the Pretty Horses". If you don't have a mother who sang you lullabies, and this lullaby in particular, then I'm sorry. You've missed out. We all lose track of the time as she reaches back across years (and -- it makes me feel so old! -- decades) and pulls forward all the songs she sang to us in our childhood -- a handful of Joni Mitchell melodies, old campfire tunes and folk songs, and my father's favorite: "Kisses Sweeter than Wine".

Every day, the world is getting smaller. I want to see and experience a lot of it. At the same time, maybe it's not such a bad thing to be a little bit tied down here...