I don't know how many people remember Pigpen from the "Peanuts" cartoon series produced by Charles Schultz, but that's what I am beginning to feel like, not with a cloud of dust and dirt over me, but a cloud of severe weather. I have been chronicling our passage through the US so everyone knows that we have had sunny weather, blizzard weather, ice storms, torrential rain. We arrived in Ohio driving through rain that was occasionally so hard that it obscured vision through the windshield even with the wipers going at full blast. We got here around 5, showered, looked at what food options were available without having to drive too far, ended up at a place called Rockne's and sat down and watched the weather deteriorate even further. Rockne's is a "sports bar" so there are TVs all over the place, which while we were sitting there broke in to the sports broadcasting to say there was a tornado warning for the very county where I was at that moment sitting.
That also comes back to the problem with eating on a long road trip. The options for eating that are in any way close to the road your motel or hotel is on are not haute cuisine and I would not expect that. But they also push large, large portions; big desserts with ersatz ingredients, breaded meat or giant portions of meat on a bun. It begins to feel like the movie "Wall-E" where everyone got too big to even sit up. I love food--I love eating--I love cooking--I raised sons who make their own cheese and one is a professional chef. At this point, after four days eating American road trip food, I don't even want to eat anything.
On an entirely different note, my husband and I met with four men in Iowa City who were so enthusiastic about receiving grandfather's goods that we came away feeling very good about the donation and the future of the material. We also found out that someone had written a book about my husband's mother, available only in Japanese, that we were unaware of before. After all of the back and forth with these men, my comment to my husband was that we always think of ourselves as pretty ordinary people but the stratum of society that we live in is extraordinary. One of the men we met with is from Denmark and his specialty is Chinese Buddhism but he has branched out to other areas of Asian studies. I told him that my husband and I were friends with a fellow who is a Buddhist priest and scholar at Harvard. It turns out that the people who are tops in the field are so few that he knew this guy as well, though perhaps not as well as we did since his interest was entirely scholarly. The visit to IU was supposed to be about just grandfather's goods but they have a serious interest in anything my mother-in-law left, including all those obi and whatever kimono or personal items I still have. Then, as our dinner party was breaking up, I mentioned something about my father-in-law helping to write Japan's constitution post WWII. That shocked and froze everyone and they all said, "What?" My husband explained that his father had gone to Japan after the war with the US Army to be part of MacArthur's occupation team. While he certainly had an interest in doing that, his primary purpose was to try to find his wife, who had been repatriated to Japan with the Japanese embassy staff from DC following Pearl Harbor.
During his time in Japan that lasted from 1945 to the fall of 1950, he carried out many assigned tasks both for the US government and for MacArthur, including helping to write MacArthur's history of the Pacific war, a book that was then suppressed for thirty or so years until MacArthur's death. As it turns out, we have one of the few copies of that book that were published in the 50's but that's a whole different story. Anyway, my father-in-law was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate concentrating in World History from Harvard and a very learned fellow who spoke multiple languages. Curiously he did not speak Japanese until after Pearl Harbor (Greek, Latin, French, Spanish), but was trained by the US government once they decided that he was neither too old (he was 34 before they allowed him to enlist), nor too dangerous (his first wife was a German national that he met doing graduate work in Switzerland and his second wife was not only a Japanese national but one who chose to return to Japan during the war), to become part of the US Army. He went through the China-Burma theater working mainly as a propagandist but also as an interpreter if any prisoners were taken.
So MacArthur, who had multiple personality and ego issues but was no one's fool, recommended my husband's father as one of the Americans the Japanese should use to help with their constitution. The Japanese were more than happy to accept the recommendation because the family were samurai and well regarded in Japan. The involvement of my father-in-law came up very recently in modern Japan because of Prime Minister Abe's militaristic stance. My husband's younger brother currently lives in Tokyo and was appalled that Japan might begin to rearm and reassert after decades of constitutionally mandated pacifism, so he wrote a long editorial for one of the bigger Japanese newspapers.
What I have written here sounds very cut and dried but my husband's parents' and grandparents' marriages were practically historic and major romantic events that would fit any romance novel scenario. Even my own maternal grandparents' marriage was charming but from a far more American viewpoint, similar to the Broadway play, "Abie's Irish Rose".
So even though we think of ourselves as normal people, everyday Americans, we have a different context to our understanding of history and people.
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