Posts from — December 2005

Yoshiko and Greg at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens
It’s getting cold, so very cold, here. I dug my slippers out of the back of the closet and found my gloves today. Of course, nothing Greg wore last winter is going to fit again, so we’ve been buying new winter clothes, and still have some buying to do. if you are a college student wondering how you can make a fortune in this crowded world, I recommend you get into the baby clothing racket. Parents are suckers. Grandmas are even bigger suckers.

Today I had my first-ever “Ningen Dokku” (human drydock), a full body checkup with a full lab workup, ekg, lung, hearing and vision exams, upper G.I, lower G.I., and even the dreaded side-to-side G.I. in which I chugged half a liter of pencil shavings in dishsoap and was spun in 3 dimensions on a swiveling table.

I found out that I am exactly 195.2 cm tall, that my heart rhythm and blood pressure are “normal”, and in fact every parameter that they could report on the spot (laboratory test results will come later) I fall within the parameters of normal, which somehow seems odd to me.

The only thing that came unexpectedly was when the whole thing was over, the consultation doctor gave me all the good news, but then he was hemming and hawing and I knew there was something else, something awful or ominous. I waited and waited for him to spit it out, but he kept going on about systolic and diastolic and all that.

So I just stopped him and told him to give it to me straight, I could take it. After all, I had a truly awful disease as a child and had always expected more medical calamities.

He scanned over the charts and printouts, drew in a long breath, and the room grew so silent so that I could feel my thoughts reflecting off the walls as he composed his explanation.

And then he just said it, in words so simple it could not be mistaken, but words so chilling that my marrow froze, and I saw it, written in my own blood across the sky:
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Yesterday I took Greg to the park, and it started snowing. He was amused by it, but once I buckled him back into his childseat to go home, he got quiet and his nose started to turn red. He saw snow last year, but he wasn’t even one year old then, so he understands it better now. Today it snowed pretty hard, so that cold air is coming in from China. We read a Richard Scarry book that includes a snow scene, and when we got to that page, Greg pointed out the door to show he knows what snow is all about.

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This roasted sweet potato (yaki-imo) vendor in downtown kyoto has customers lined up outside his tiny shop. Japanese sweet potatoes (called satsuma imo before roasting) are purple on the outside.

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Last week Jeffrey Friedl invited me to go hiking with him, his mother-in-law and friend Katsunori Shimada. We went up to the top of Daimonji-yama, and then down to the place where the fires are lit. the day was quite hazy, so there wasn’t much view out over the city, but the mountain trails provided plenty of close-up scenery. When we got to the “Hidokoro” where the kanji “dai” ( 大 ) is lit every August 16, there were several people picnicing there at each fire platform.

while I deal with some malicious bots.