Blast from the past

So, I'm a real sucker for Christmas (holiday, if you prefer) craft fairs (or, if you're in the UK, fayres). Actually, I really love craft fairs, full stop; but Christmas ones are kind of like Courvoisier VSOP—you take the good & distill it down to the fabulous.

& by "fabulous", I don't necessarily mean "high quality". It's just that you see such a range of stuff & have real opportunities for picturing what a house would look like with some quantity of the items installed.

I'm big on picturing the mise en scene.

So one fair was at the Woodinville Community Center. Woodinville is home to several wineries & presents itself rather self-consciously as faux Napa. The crafts were all Christmas ornaments (no tschatschkes for Hanukkah here), & the place was utterly crammed with them. With all the women (this appears to be an activity for the XX-chromosome set exclusively), some already in Santa sweaters, milling through the very narrow passages, I was feeling a bit claustrophobic & I whizzed through in less than the time it took me to check out the 7 Cedars casino last week.

The other fair was at Blaine Memorial Methodist Church, which turns out to be a predominantly Japanese congregation. The neighborhood is old & working class, narrow streets with little houses lining them.

I got there about 15 minutes before the advertised opening, to find the church lot filled, middle-aged men directing traffic, & cars parked on both sides of streets radiating out from the church (leaving but a single lane for traffic). There was a queue of about 150 people waiting already.

I joined them & realized that there were very few hakujin there, & I was the only redhead.

Now here's the flashback: I went straight to the days when I used to babysit for our friends the Dyos, parents Sansei who ran a landscape architecture business. (They lived in the house where the Greene Brothers of early 20th Century craftsman architecture fame resided. It wasn't nearly as impressive as the houses they built for clients. But it had a huge back yard they used for the plants & equipment for their business.)

If the night out was a Saturday, I stayed over & went with them to their church in Little Tokyo, where I'd be the only non-Asian. Mrs. Dyo would introduce me with a completely straight face as, "this is my daughter by my first marriage."

The Dyos also used to host a mochi making party the weekend between Christmas & New Year's in that capacious back yard. The Japanese-American community in the Greater LA area would be there to make the traditional rice cakes (which I never learned to like) for the coming year. There'd be huge towers of rice steaming over wood-burning stoves (each family brought their own rice for processing). The men would stoke the fires & also run these, well, rice smashing hopper jobbers that ground the cooked rice into a steaming paste for being made into the cakes.

This mechanization was a break with tradition, of course. The traditional way was to have two men with wooden mallets the size of sledgehammers rhythmically pound the rice on a wooden stand with a depression in it; after each blow a woman with really fast reflexes would reach in & sort of turn the blob of rice around for an even pounding.

I know that because one year they actually did a few batches that way; but modernity was winning out over custom.

Anyhow, when the blob was the right consistency, a man would rush it over to long, paper-covered tables sprinkled with cornstarch. Women gathered around the tables gossiping & shaping the rice into little round flat cakes with pat-pat-pats. Every once in a while they would insert a center of bean curd & wrap the rice around it. But those hands just flew, along with the conversation & the laughter.

Lunch was soup: you picked out noodles from a pot, put them in a bowl with chicken pieces & seaweed & then covered it all with broth ladled out from huge vats. Man, that was wonderful soup, although at the time I wasn't sure about the seaweed.

(About 10 years ago I was lunching with colleagues at a Japanese restaurant on a miserable, cold, wet day in Fairfax, huddled over a bowl of udon. In the midst of yapping about the project we were working on I suddenly looked down at the soup & proclaimed, "When I was ten years old I'd never have believed I'd be saying this, but this soup needs more seaweed.")

The Dyos moved out of the Greene house in the 70s, & it's now a nursing home. Mr. Dyo died shortly thereafter of an unexpected heart attack & I'm afraid to stop by their house when I visit Pasadena because I don't want to find that my mother-by-her-first-marriage is also gone.

All this came back to me standing in that queue, listening to the banter going on around me. I wonder if there's a mochi-making tradition around here?

Oh—the fair? Eh—well, I spent about 20 minutes going through it & didn’t buy anything. (Although I did agonize a bit over some gift boxes that were really interesting.) But we’re really early in the holiday fair season, so there will be opportunities aplenty.