22 April 2008

Bubbles

Something momentous is going to happen today, so big and significant that nothing at all happened across the alley from our Headquarters. Nothing at all.
 
Of course, the weather may have been a factor, and kept the smokers pinned against the side of the building to maximize their coverage from the rain. The weather will be a factor in the election; odd to think that the sky’s caprice in bringing the storm on Election Day, or not, could alter the course of this great nation, and hence the world.
 
It made me think of the old childhood rhyme, intended to stimulate logical thinking:
 
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
 
If nails were rain, and horses elections, it would be perfect. But you can substitute anything- corn that could feed the hungry going into our fuel tanks, for example, and the troubling realization the agri-fuels business has been kept alive all these years because the great state of Kansas, awash in cheap corn, happened to be early in the Presidential primary season.
 
Corn is no longer cheap, and we have passed by the chance to grow things that do not rob the living of the chance to go on doing so, even as we drive our scenic byways muttering about the cost.
 
Want of a nail and all that. I watched the circular impact of the drops on the puddles with their oily sheen and wondered how the true believers were doing.
 
The Candidate’s people are all spread across Pennsylvania in a last ditch fight to pull a double-digit win out of the Keystone State, and level the playing field in the last desperate race to the Convention. A great victory could put things away, one way or another, but it is shaping up to be close, which is to say that this misery will go on, even as the rain.
 
When I got back upstairs and dispensed with a couple supplicants for money I don’t have, I returned to the e-mail queues, professional and private, that dominate my life.
 
One of them caught my eye immediately, flagged between two reports on the Chinese weapons headed for Zimbabwe. We all know what they are for, and none of us are doing a thing about it, any more than we have done in Darfur. Zim was the marvel of productivity just a wink ago, which is an illustrative demonstration of public policy run amok.
 
The note was from Robin, who said that I did not know her, but that she was writing on behalf of her mother, who was responding to a snail-mail I sent.
 
I immediately wrote back to correct her misapprehension. I told her I did know her, though the last time we had met had been in then-rural Southeastern Michigan, and she had been a toddler with bright dark eyes and jet-black hair.
 
She was with her parents at the gentleman’s estate of a flamboyant man in the auto design trade. My Dad worked for him, and Robin’s dad worked for mine. It was all grown-up stuff, and those of us in the rising generation occupied ourselves with running down the grassy hill to the pond that occupied the center of the back forty, blissfully free of anything productive except neatly-mown Kentucky bluegrass.
 
I punched the button across fifty years and then called the number Robin had provided. A bright voice answered, and I asked for B. She responded politely that I was speaking to her.
 
The phone is a marvelous thing. Like radio, we use our imaginations to fill in the bits we cannot see. The woman I spoke to in my mind was young and lithe and wore a crisp summer dress. A little girl clung to her leg, and a young handsome man with a coal-black crew-cut and narrow tie stood next to her in the bright Michigan afternoon.
 
I was looking for information about her young husband, who had given me a remarkable blade when I was a kid. I was hoping that he had left some stories behind. He has been in his grave for nearly two decades now, and regrettably had been uncommunicative to B about what he did for Army Counterintelligence in Tokyo. He had been there when the Korean War broke out, and Asia tipped on its axis.
 
B did remember me well, which broke the ice. She about my folks, who are well, I responded, and we chatted a bit about family things, since there was little concrete to go on, since all she recalled was that he had a lot of girlfriends, and had his headquarters in Fukuoka, the port city on the Inland Sea across from Pusan, Korea.
 
The Pusan Perimeter is where the ROKs and their American allies had been pinned down by the rampaging northerners in 1951. With the Tsushima Straits contested, it was the port from which arms and personnel flooded across the water to stem the tide.
 
B said they had married later, though some of the girlfriends still show up. One of them sends flowers to Alan’s grave even now. They had been in the same internment camp in the War, when her school name was Bubbles.
 
That clearly was not suitable for a mother and wife of a rising executive, and later, Bubbles became B. We talked for a while about what it was like to be an enemy alien, even if you were in elementary school.
 
B promised to get in touch with some other alumni who had served the Army in the Occupation, and see if they were willing to talk about their experiences. She said the her camp reunion group was quite active, and two hundred people had gathered just the previous weekend.
 
She said they were not bitter for the complete disruption of their American lives. I thanked her for her time, and told her I would be grateful for her help.
 
Did I mention that Bubbles was Japanese-American? I guess that is important to the story, like shoes and nails.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com