La famille flopsaut

A while ago one of the people I know on Facebook started a thread by recounting a cross-cultural moment that happened to friends of his in-laws some years ago.

It seems this couple, French, were out in the country (state unspecified) and stopped at a stand where rabbits were for sale. There was quite the conversation between this couple and the one selling the rabbits, because the Americans were selling them for pets while the French folk were thinking in terms of dinner. Once the truth became apparent, “they all stopped talking and just stared at one another.”

(Actually—I never heard whether they ended up buying a rabbit. I suspect not, though. At least not on this occasion.)

This triggered a tale of my own—or, more precisely, of a friend of mine. Which of course I shared.

Because Leilah, children’s librarian at Oregon City Public Library, was in the market for a pet for her family, so she telephoned a breeder of French lop rabbits. There was the expected discussion of when the latest litter would be old enough, price, etc. Then the woman asked, “And would you like it dressed?”

Well, Leilah (I did mention the part about being a children’s librarian, right?) pictured Peter Rabbit and got a little confused. After a bit they got it straightened out and she eventually picked up the bunny without the little coat and trousers, but alive.

After a big guffaw on the Facebook thread, I called Leilah just by way of checking that I’d got the story more or less right. That’s when I discovered there was a further chapter.

Because it seems that around the time the unclothed but nonetheless adorable bunny made its appearance in her household, Leilah got a call from her Seattle cousin. And in the course of that conversation, she announced that she’d just acquired a rabbit.

Alice said, “So did we.”

Leilah: “Ours is a French lop. What’s yours?”

Alice: (Pause) “A diesel…”

Seriously, I cannot make this stuff up. Happy Friday!

Debasing the coinage

As of Monday, The Military Channel became “American Heroes Channel”. Apparently parent company Discovery Communications thought the change will broaden its current appeal, although its target is still males aged 25-54 who aren’t burdened with particularly high expectations or maybe even with active cerebral cortexes.

I suppose that makes it less of a reach to air such crap as “Who Was Jesus?”, “Myth Hunters: The Hunt for the Book of Spells” and “The Devil’s Triangle”, which bear no relationship whatsoever to anything particularly military.

Although, I grant you, TMC didn’t have a high barrier to entry. One of their mainstays used to be shows hosted by R. Lee Ermey, whose undistinguished 11-year career as a Marine provided the backdrop to some acting gigs. As near as I could tell, Ermey played one character—the bullying gunnery sergeant—which he carried through for his work for TMC. He also had one method of delivering his lines: screaming.

In its announcement of the name change, Discovery intoned, “…American Heroes Channel explores compelling and uplifting true stories of the bold men and women who have distinguished themselves by their actions… These stories bridge the connection between lessons of past and legends of today, and demonstrate – for all generations –how courage and conviction shape the future.”

Oh, what a crock.

What they are doing is further devaluing the coinage of the concept of heroism, a process which has been well underway for some time in all media. Basically, their idea is that anyone who makes it out the other end of a sticky situation is a hero.

If I sit through any of their programming, I think I'll qualify..

I am the rainmaker

As you may know, California is in the throes of a major drought—worst and longest spell of dryness since…well, that depends on your source. But last year the state received less rain than in any year since achieving statehood in 1850, and this past January was the driest on record.

This is serious business for the most populous state in the country, with a huge economic investment in agriculture. Not to mention housing developments and all those swimming pools.

Serious enough that Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation to provide $687 million in drought relief and President Barack Obama has promised $183 million for relief as well. Plus—churches have been praying up a storm (so to speak) and native tribes have been dancing for clouds, too.

But apparently if you want it to rain around here, you just put on a technology conference in San Francisco that I’m going to attend. Because that involves me walking the seven or so blocks from the CalTrain terminus to Moscone Center, and back again. And this, in turn, sparks gully-washers. It does.

Back in November, I went to the Salesforce.com user conference (called DreamForce). There had not been a drop of rain in the entire Bay Area for months. I dressed in business casual, since my intention was networking, and I did not bother with an umbrella.

(Look, I grew up in LA. I don’t think I ever owned an umbrella until I lived in a country with monsoons, and I just never got down with carrying them. When I lived in the UK I stowed umbrellas in my desk at work, my car, my briefcase and my gym bag, and I hung one on the door knob on the front door to my flat. I’d still hare out into pissing-down rain without an umbrella because it just wasn’t in my genetic make up to remember to actually, you know, pick it up.)

It was beginning to shower when I boarded the train in Mountain View, but I thought, “Oh, SF has its own micro-climate; it won’t be raining there. I’ll be fine.”

What an idiot. It poured.

By the time I got to registration at Moscone East, I looked like Tammy Faye Bakker after the fall. (I’d put on mascara and all, on account of that networking thing.) My hair was dripping and my clothes stuck to my body. I was completely icky.

And just as I finally got more or less dried out walking through the expo, I was drenched again running back to the train station.

And that was the one day of rain we got in months.

But I saw A Pattern developing when, two weeks ago I heard weather guessers predicting a storm headed our way last week. “Oh, of course there is,” I said. “I’m going to the RSA Conference.”

Well, so it happened. Nothing until Wednesday, the first day I was headed up there; but quite a good rainfall on the day. This time, however, I did take an umbrella with me, which got some serious use. Walking both to and from the expo, it was just chucking it down. (And it continued through the night.)

It rained a little on Thursday, when I went back up to meet a friend for breakfast and make another round of the expo. And then it rained again heavily on Friday and some on Saturday.

I have to say that it was lovely watching it come down after months and months of relentlessly unremitting cloudless skies. And I love listening to the drops splatting against the skylight and kitchen window. It just makes me feel like there’s a natural kind of wash/rinse cycle going on for us all.

Especially in the Valley they call Silicon, where all the cars kick up more dust than you can imagine.

The rain has indeed been refreshing (although locals grumble about it; I’ve noticed that they take anything less than sheer cloudless perfection personally, as though someone’s abrogated their “But I’m living in California” contract). Although everyone’s warning that it hasn’t made a dent in the drought and grim days are still ahead.

Yep—long ways to go. But it’s rain, for crying out loud. Actual rain, enough to wash some of the grime off the car and the dust from my brain. The Stevens Creek Reservoir (one of my walking areas) has gone from this (mid-February):

To this (Saturday):

Yes, you could still walk across the reservoir, but this time at least you’d get your ankles wet. Baby steps, you know?

I'm really glad for several days of rain in a dry, dusty landscape. And I’m happy to do my bit along with the churches and tribes to bring it about. I’ll check the Moscone calendar to see if there are any other conferences of interest coming up.

My fellow Californians—you're welcome.

More gratitude: Making mochi

Thinking about the Dyo family, here’s another thing I recall from my childhood.

Every year on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, the Dyos hosted a huge mochi-making event for the Japanese-American community of Los Angeles. Their backyard, which was also the base for their landscaping business, was the perfect size for such an industrial-scale operation.

(If you don’t know mochi—it’s basically steamed rice ground up into a paste and shaped into little cakes, dusted with cornstarch. Sometimes it’s wrapped around sweet bean paste.)

(And apparently MSFT Word spellchecker does not know mochi because it keeps autocorrecting to mocha. Turkey.)

Scores of families from all over the area brought rice to be steamed over bonfires in barrels, and then smashed up and made into mochi to last through the next year. The deal was the men managed the steaming and smashing, the women made all the cakes around huge paper-covered tables sprinkled liberally with corn starch.

There was also udon—broth, noodles, chicken, chopped scallions and seaweed to be assembled as you pleased and slurped up. (And galvanized metal tubs full of sodas in bottles, which was a huge treat for me because we never had soda in our house, ever. Oh—and you needed a bottle opener to get the caps off the sodas. And of course you had to look out for the dinosaurs and primordial ooze because this was so long ago.) I was kind of suspicious about those seaweed sheets, but they turned out to be okay.

The kids basically ran wild throughout the back yard, which was part plant nursery, part equipment lot.

The first year we went they were just shifting from the old method of two men rhythmically pounding the rice in alternating strokes with wooden mallets, but they had a couple of demos. The men would go smack-smack; then, while they were raising the mallets, a woman would reach in really quickly with a couple of rice paddles and kind of flip the rice mush around so that the next strokes would squash a different part.

She was really, really fast. The whole thing was like some finely-tuned machine operating.

But most of the rice went from the steamer baskets to gas-powered rice grinders (yes, actual rice grinders). They had several going, and men tended them, running each batch of rice through several times to get it to the right state of smashedness.

When that state was achieved, the basket of paste would be hurried over to one of the tables, the name of the family whose rice it was announced, and the women would start pinching off little balls of it, rolling them in the cornstarch and patting them into little round bite-sized cakes.

Everyone worked at a speed of knots, but in both operations—male and female—there was a robust continuo of chatter, gossip, joking and camaraderie, in a mixture of English and Japanese. Occasionally, as I hovered at one of the tables, producing the most pathetic misshapen mochi ever to emerge to face the light of day, there was enough English for me to get the gist of it. But there was a whole lot of laughter, which warmed that December day.

(And no, I am not exaggerating about how awful my little cakes were. Someone would surreptitiously take one of my products and give it a few pats and rolls while it was still warm enough to be malleable, and make it presentable. I have the same problem making onigiri—I just don’t seem to be able to get it compact enough.)

I’ve never developed a taste for mochi, even though it’s basically just squashed rice, and I like rice fine. But udon, now…

Back when I was working with a lot of sales teams for a data networking hardware manufacturer, one of the account managers came to town and took one of my colleagues and me out to lunch. It was a miserable, rainy cold day in Northern Virginia, and we went to a Japanese restaurant, where I ordered a nice bowl of steamy udon. We were deep in a discussion of the project in hand, and slurping our soup. I was in the middle of saying something pithy (no doubt) when I flashed back to the mochi-making days, interrupted myself and proclaimed:

“You know, when I was ten years old I’d never have imagined I’d be saying this, but this soup needs more seaweed.”

Maybe I should give mochi another try.

Gratitude Monday: Hinamatsuri and history

One of our closest family friends when I was growing up was the Dyo (pronounced "Jo") family. Ken, the father, ran a landscaping business with his brother; and the two families lived with the grandparents in a house built by the famous Pasadena architects the Greene brothers for their own residence.

Ken and his wife Mikko (Mitsuko) were sansei, third-generation. They were Scout leaders and PTA supporters, but they also carried on Japanese traditions for their three sons and daughter.

One of those was Hinamatsuri, Girls’ Day, celebrated on 3 March.

On Girls’ Day, the females of the family set out an elaborate multi-tiered platform of exquisite dolls representing the Imperial court. Emperor and Empress at the top, then court ladies, musicians and various layers of courtiers, furnishings, equipment, etc. There are also little dishes of food, and flowers.

A girl starts out getting one or two dolls and builds her collection as she grows; or it can be handed down from mother to daughter.

(This is from the Japan Foundation is not nearly as elaborate as the one I remember at the Dyos'. But it gives you an idea)

On the day, girls and women are invited over for tea and to admire the display. (No—you do not play with these dolls. They’re strictly for viewing pleasure.) You dress up in your best outfit, sing some songs, play some games and basically bond.

(BTW—if you’re wondering, Boys’ Day is 5 May. You hang out carp flags and do outdoor kinds of things with your posse.)

Somewhere in the bottom of a box there’s a photo of me dressed in a yukata (summer kimono), trying with no success whatsoever to look graceful in a situation where I was afraid I was going to break something or someone every time I moved. It was such an exotic environment, so completely different from anything I’d ever encounter in my own family, or even in the Dyos' everyday life.

(For one thing, it was a, you know, party. I don’t recall ever seeing a party in my family house until I was old enough to throw them.)

I was reminded of Mrs. Dyo recently because George Takei has been publicizing a musical he’s written and produced called Allegiance. It’s about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

I don’t know Mr. Dyo’s history, but Mrs. Dyo (Mitsuko Fukui, then) and her family were rounded up early in 1942, spent time in Santa Anita racetrack before being sent to the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. They had maybe a day or two to close out their business (a funeral home), pack what they most valued in the world into one or two suitcases per person and assemble to be shipped off to prison for an indeterminate sentence.

You know—they were guilty of the crime of being of Japanese ancestry. Of visibly having that ancestry.

I remember overhearing Mrs. Dyo talking to my mother about Heart Mountain, and saying that the snow blew sideways, and it was colder than she could believe. I had no notion of what that even meant (since I’d never seen snow except the fake stuff on TV and photos of it somewhere not Los Angeles County), and I could not imagine how cold it could possibly be until I experienced a Korean winter. Much less going through it with only the few clothes you’d brought from LA and living in tar-paper covered barracks.

After the war, when the Fukuis returned to their home, it had been completely trashed by the intervening residents. They had to begin anew, literally.

So I’m guessing that Mrs. Dyo built up her Hinamatsuri collection over the years after the war. I had no idea what that might have represented to her at the time; I wish I could ask her about it now, but she died in 2007, aged 84. I hope Naomi, her daughter, carries on the tradition; I know it has to be a gigantic palaver to take the dolls and display out of storage, set them up (taking up at least as much room as a Christmas tree), do all the food stuff for a day, and then dismantle and store again. But I hope those beautiful, symbolic dolls are being appreciated.

One more memory—I occasionally used to baby sit for the Dyos of a Saturday. I’d spend the night and they took me to church (Methodist, if I recall) in Little Tokyo. With a completely straight face, Mrs. Dyo would introduce me thusly: “This is my daughter by my first marriage.”

Even in sixth grade I was taller than she was; and then there was the matter of the red hair. But she took such delight in that kind of thing. I think that was the first time I’d ever seen someone’s eyes actually twinkle.

Anyhow, today is Girls’ Day, and I’m grateful for knowing the Dyo family when I was growing up, for being introduced to exotic (to me) cultures, for receiving (even in a small way) that human connection to major historical events, and for being considered part of an alternate family.