Kōan Fragments of Childhood

My father died in 1963, shortly before my ninth birthday. Unusual experiences with him have stuck in memory throughout my life. Life-Kōans, so to speak. This one is about his last words to me.

*    * *

“Ya know, I had this, uh, thing a few days ago.”

Sitting in the car. His car, the silver Cadillac. With the big neck pillow. Cuz he had a wipplash.

“I thought…I thought…”

He is talking. That tone again. Bzzzz. The space between his two front teeth. I have the gap, too.

It’s dark. It’s his visiting day. In Long Beach.

“I thought…I thought…I thought I was gonna die…”

The ceiling of the car. Grey, too. Soft grey cloth.

“But it wasn’t bad. You don’t have to be afraid.”

What is he talking about. Why is he saying this. Mommy said they found him a coupla days ago. In the bathroom. On the toilet. Passed out, she said.

“I really thought I was gonna die, like grandpa last year. But it’s not bad. You don’t have to be afraid.”

The end of March. 1963.

It’s April 1. The phone rings. I run. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s your uncle. Can I talk to your mother?”

“Mommy, it’s Uncle Tom!”

Uncle Tom never calls us.

Mommy talking on the phone. Stands tall in her straight skirt. Blue and green plaid. Blue is her good color, cuz it matches her eyes, Conny said. The skirt is wool. Called Mow Hair.

“Yes?” she says.

Then she is quiet.

The living room on Calderwood Street is white. Cream white, mommy called it. The sun is shining.

Mommy’s eyes get funny. And her mouth turns down. And then she talks funny. Gags. Like a something’s stuck in her throat.

“I thought…you were going to say that,” she chokes. She looks at the ground.

Then I don’t remember. But then she tells me: “Your father was hiking in Altadena. The ranger saw him.” She keeps choking. “He saw him keel over. But when the ranger got to him…” She is crying. “He was dead.”

Mommy is crying. Mommy never cries.

Then I don’t remember. Until the ceremony downtown, where Daddy had his practice. He lies there. In the dark, wooden casket. I know it is a casket, cuz grandpa was in a casket, too. Only grandpa’s was silver. Not wood.

But daddy has make-up on. And lipstick.

Is that Daddy?

Then I don’t remember.

I turned ten. I wanted Daddy there. When you’re ten, you’re a pre-teen!

They took me to a doctor. A lady doctor. A psychiatrist. I knew about psychiatrists. Daddy tried to be one. She asked me some questions.

Later Mommy told me I stopped laughing. That’s why she took me to the doctor.

The rest I don’t remember.

*    * *

What was the ‘thing’ you had then, Daddy?

Could I believe my cousin when she whispered to me, “They found some pills in his jacket pocket.” What pills?

My cousin’s mother went before the medical board in LA and told them, “My brother did not commit suicide!” Did she really do that? Why? Or did my memory make it up?

My father, born in 1921, was a Nisei — a second generation Japanese-American. His father emigrated from Japan after the 1858 Harris Treaty opened the way for Japanese workers to migrate to America. His mother was a ‘picture bride’, ordered by my grandfather from the catalog of a Nakōdo matchmaker. They were all interned during the Second World War. During the war, a sponsor somehow found my father and gave him a scholarship to complete his medical studies at Washington University. He did a residency in psychiatry, but his trial analysis ended in a personal breakdown. Thus obligated to abandon that field, he performed a second residency in dermatology and established his practice as the first Japanese-American dermatologist in Little Tokyo (downtown Los Angeles). His office was located at 312 First St., a building which still stands today.

My mother, born in 1925, was a Southern belle — tall, blond, blue-eyed. Her family tree was traceable back to John Harding, our English ancestor from Brackley, born in 1600. The daughter of a country doctor, she survived becoming an orphan at age nine and earned a bachelor’s degree at Randolph Macon Women’s College in Virginia. She worked as a social worker, then as executive secretary. Later, in her second marriage, she went back to college, obtained a teacher’s certificate and taught English as a second language until heart problems forced her to retire at 55.

My parents met after the war at a Quaker ‘interracial reintegration’ program in New York City. I think they married ideals they projected on to each other, never really recognizing or knowing the complex persons they were. After four years of marriage, I was born in 1953. A year later, they divorced.

Apparently, they had joint custody of me, for I spent weekdays with my mother in Long Beach and weekends with my father in Altadena.

Members of both of their families were opposed to this ‘mixed marriage’ (then called ‘miscegenation’), which was illegal in many U.S. states until the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. Because of this opposition, and also due to more personal reasons, my father’s death meant the estrangement between my mother and my father’s family. I didn’t see them for ten years.

*    * *

We were probably in his Cadillac. We spent a lot of time there together. It was Los Angeles. Everyone everywhere in their cars. His was silver.

How long did it take a Japanese-American who grew up as son of sharecroppers and did time in an internment camp (1941-1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066 — if you don’t know, look it up!) to make enough money to buy a silver Cadillac?

This was a question his daughter didn’t think about until she was a whole lot older.

What she did think: Why can’t mommy and daddy live together? It’s called divorce. But so what? Can’t they live together anyway, like everyone else?

It was 1963 when he died. She was nine years old. Up till then, most of her life had been spent in the 1950s. It was important to be like the other kids at school.

And once daddy came to where she lived, and he fought with mommy, and I tried to stand between them, to protect mommy.

Why couldn’t it be like at Susie’s?