More molten metal

Then I thought about the parties mother Anne and father Kreigh used to throw in Kokura, just after the war. While I was too young to remember myself, I’ve seen pictures and heard stories about how they used to get together with ‘friends’ in the same occupational forces boat. When a lot of what you see is unbearable, people need diversion. So they got together whenever there was reason to celebrate, a holiday, a birthday or a baptism.

Birthdays. Lots of people are born every day and someone had to be born at a hospital midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki - of all places - on Hiroshima Day 1947 too, but why me? If I hadn’t ”happened to have” been christened four months later on Pearl Harbor Day, then the thought that I had been born and baptized to charge these two days with new meaning, at least for my parents, might never have occurred to me. Some burdens are too heavy to bear. Gotta let go.

Slow to be born, I hear tell that our father headed for all the potholes that still pitted the roads between Kokura and Fukuoka after the war. ”Your father, who was usually such a careful driver, seemed to think he could shake you into the world that way, but you wouldn’t have it,” said mother Anne, and so my delivery was chemically induced.

Back to PC parties in Kokura: of course they needed diversion, some light-hearted fun in the wake of the devastation of yet another world war and two atom bombs. Mother Anne tells of the curiosities that were brought to these parties, the molten metal objects that had been collected as ”souvenirs” from the pits and potholes of their surroundings. What mother Anne found particularly curious was the way the Japanese servants – Americans all had nannies, and cooks and ”boys” – always disappeared when these objects, these amorphous sculptures, were brought out to display and discuss. Why? It was said that they (the natives) must be superstitious, how else could such irrational behavior be explained. So many ways we have of defending ourselves against the lingering, invisible, unheard of, hence unspoken perils of war and subsequent preoccupation. The Zone is somewhere we mustn't go. Perhaps that's why, when we come too close, we risk being struck deaf and dumb.

To be continued…