Dear Mago,
We are going to have to return to Japan many times after the war is over, by sea and by air. First in the belly of a woman leaning over the ship’s railing, forced to regurgitate all the days it takes to travel by sea from San Francisco to Kyushu on a liner with only one smoke stack and two packs of Lucky Strikes. We’ll also return later in a four-propeller plane, and be forced to land on a coral reef because one of the engines has caught fire.
I can still recall the pleasant voice of the stewardess as I gaze out the oval window and watch the flames licking the wings – the closest I can get to the calm of an open hearth. I am focusing on the horizon to still the nauseating turbulence of travel, in the hope that it will give me a clue as to the time of day, of year. As we cross the International Date Line, I'd rather be back on the mainland with my friends, the up-and-coming global generation, watching the Howdy Doody show.
Mother Anne has caught sight of the island where we are headed. From the air, Wake Island looks like the cross section of an eyeball filled with a luminous emerald green liquid. The airstrip is at the inner end of the lagoon, the only place where the albatross ever lands – to lay her eggs. When the hatch door is opened there will be no refreshing breeze or fragrant leis to greet us here, just stifling humidity.
Did you ever hear the family anecdote about the girl’s pronounced lower lip: “if she doesn’t stop pouting we’re going to have to cut it off?” No wonder she’s surly, unsightly, maimed this girl with the bird. “Oh pooh, there she goes again, claiming to remember things that happened before she was born.” And then there was this other woman, whom father Kreigh tells us he has fallen love with, this other Girl with the Bird.
To be continued…
Your devoted granddaughter
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2 comments:
More factual details. Your mother and you in your homeostatic condition, together with your sugarrplumbro, left on a troop transport from Tacoma, Washington to Yokohama, and thence by train to Fukuoka, where you were later born, and Kitigata where you first lived, both on Kyushu.
Flames licking from the wings is dramatic, but not likely. I was in the cockpit in the captain's seat "flying the plane" when our no. 3 engine on our C-97 Boeing Stratocruiser blew its exhaust manifold. There was a slight bump. The Air Force pilot had me stand behind his seat while he and his co-pilot shut down the engine and feathered the prop. The navigator called Wake Island. We were just past the "point of no return" from Pearl Harbor to Wake Island so the Navy sent out an SA-16 Grumman Albatross amphibian to rescue us if we went into the drink. Then we began dumping excess fuel and I was allowed to return to the cabin, which I did with fanfare, causing blanched faces as I loudly announced "Mom, Dad, we lost an engine." No one in the passenger cabin had noticed, in part because our troop transport had fewer than an airliner's complement of windows. But everyone got a good look at the fuel streaming from the wing and, later, the reassuring "Gooney Bird" that escorted us to an unexpected 36 hour tropical vacation on a Pacific coral atol.
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