A third world slum in my living room, another divided family dilemma, twenty minutes in geta, lest t

Monday evening for this whiteman in Olde Nagoyaland. The humidity is around 85%. It's a wet, murky sweat bath of a life over here. The laundry won't dry. It's been hanging up in the living room since yesterday evening, making our living space look like a a third world slum. It's been raining pretty much incessantly since we got back from our 6 day whirlwind trip to Southern California three weeks ago, which kind of adds to the post-travel malaise. Six days flies by pretty quick, and there was a lot of family and mortality-oriented stuff to take in...I think it will take some time before I'm able to sort through it. Split families have their challenges, and anyone that comes from a divided family, knows that it's difficult working a balance. You're always caught between factions. It seems nearly impossible to do right by everyone...and no matter what, somebody is going to rain down on you. Go to one side, slight the other. No matter what, someone is always going to perceive an imbalance, where none was intended.

It was that way with my Mum and Gramma, up until the very end. They were constantly at odds...and living separately on two floors of the old maternal home on 7th ave., in Kitsilano, Vancouver. The air was so thick with conflict in that place that it would sting your eyes, and as years passed, it became this horrible, untenable stand-off. The only thing that brought that to an end was Mum's premature demise, at the age of 64. Peace was never made. Bridges never mended. Bitter and dug in until the last. If there was ever a house that would be a prime candidate for an angry haunting, that place would be it. Flying dishes and furniture, slamming doors, numbing cold, bleeding walls...it would all be there. In spades. Had they not been trucked up under the same roof for so long, things may (or may not) have been different. The whys and wherefores of that situation are an epic story for another day. Whose fault was it? A little of both, for certain.

Here in Japan, they have a proverb that addresses the quandary of what the best proximity for a daughter to live from her mother is. It goes something like this...if either party makes a fresh pot of soup, the ideal distance would be such that the hot soup could be carried in a pot to the other's house, and upon arrival, be neither too hot, nor too cold - but just the right temperature to eat. I'm guessing that the soup would have been carried by hand, not hot rod...so, at an average Japanese lady's walking speed, in kimono and geta, with a pot of hot soup in tow...I figure maybe...20 minutes away? Bringing this into the 21st century, and throwing automobiles into the mix...I dunno. How far can you drive in 20 minutes? That would be about the right distance to maintain peace in the family. Needless to say, the soup pot in the Kitsilano house would only need to travel about 4 meters vertically or horizontally, meaning that it was bound to be absolutely scalding hot. Hence....

After having relocated to my self-imposed exile here on Planet Japan back in the early 90's, I'd make a point of visiting the family homestead in Vancouver a couple of times a year. The Kitsilano house was always special to me. The first place that we stayed when Mum and I came out from Los Angeles in 1970, and the refuge we took when my Mum's second marriage fell apart in the early 80's. I always felt safe there...and Gramma was the best to us kids. We loved spending time at her house, as we were growing up; it was a refuge from the often less than marvelous situation at the house that Mum and Step Father had borrowed money to buy up in Kerrisdale, the goings on at which would fill a small tome. I was particularly close to Gramma...and I thought she was the greatest. This was not an opinion that dear old Mum shared, however...and the push and pull...the jealousy...the constant tug of war...it went on from the time I was a toddler, and just got worse and worse as time went on. Jealousy is a horrible thing.

Finally, Mum viewed any time spent fraternising with Gramma as betrayal. Gramma would, in turn, play the 'innocent victim', pretending not to know why Mum was so hateful and divisive...but behind the scenes she'd play into it by meddling, and needling her about trivial things, which in turn aggravated Mum's already volatile personality, and increasingly alcohol fueled psychosis.

I'd fly in from Japan, desperately needing a break. In the days before the inter-webs, the only way to get a shot of cultural familiarity was to hop a plane, and touch base with your peeps. See friends, go to movies, eat 'real food', go shopping for clothes that fit...do all the things that you couldn't do on Planet Japan back in those days. Extended stays over here could be very alienating, lonely stretches, punctuated with binge drinking, marathon parties, and and all manner of madness and chaos with whichever group of other gaijin, or J-native no-goodniks that you'd managed to fall in with. Jobs here payed well in those days, though, so a couple of trips a year was do-able...and mandatory for one's mental health. Usually, I'd be on the cheapest flight - a backtrack flight from Nagoya to Seoul, a 6 hour layover at the horrible old Kimpo Airport, then an 11 hour flight to Vancouver. The 'Discombobulator'. Regardless, I'd be over-the moon to be home for a couple of weeks. After three relatively pleasant days (everyone is always on their best behaviour the first three days), with jet lag still lingering, and 10 days left, I would already be going out of my mind...running up and down the stairs, trying to work a balance that was, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Upstairs, Gramma would beckon me to join her for a cup of her awful old lady coffee, where she would drag out wrinkled sales slips and reciepts, bunched up in a paperclip, and point out figures circled in red pen. "Look at this...and this...and this. You know where these are from, don't you?" "No, Gramma..."

"Look...the beer and wine store...this one on Broadway...and this one, over on 4th avenue. Look how much money she spent on wine. Look at the dates!"

"Oh, God, Gramma...where did you get these?"... "I have my ways. Old Grandmother knows a thing or two - don't you kid yourself. She drinks too damn much! And those cigarettes! Nothing but trouble! She'll be crying when she has lung cancer. No damned good!"

She'd been downstairs rummaging through Mum's kitchen garbage as soon as Mum had left the house...87 years old, three hip replacements...and stooped over, meticulously sorting through the assorted rubbish to get her hands on these sales slips. She'd then tally up all the money that Mum spent on booze or smokes in her weathered, re-purposed old notebook. This was a problem. I felt sorry for my Mum. It would drive anyone over the edge. Yet, at the same time, it was becoming obvious that her drinking WAS becoming more problematic...and that it was playing into her inability to have normal, healthy relationships with anyone in the family. She'd get paranoid and skittish...vacillating between happy and outgoing, and bi-polar hysterical.

By the end of the first week, I'd be counting the days until I'd be on the plane, and back to my disintegrating first marriage, and all the other insanity and madness that constituted my daily life in the then not quite so Olde Nagoyaland of the mid-late 90's. Needless to say, the trips to Canada became less and less frequent...until I basically stopped going altogether in 1998. Aside from a brief stop over for an alcohol fueled afternoon on the way to a family wedding in California, back in 2003, I wouldn't return for 9 years. I refused to spend thousands of dollars to put myself in the middle of that war. I loved both of them, but could spend time with neither. I would instead spend that time fighting some entirely different demons back in Japan (another story for another entry). Time passed, and though I kept in touch with both of them intermittently by old fashioned log-distance telephone calls, a gulf started to form.

Finally, I think it was in January or February, 2007 that my Mum phoned me and informed me that she had been diagnosed with a rare, inoperable form of lung cancer...and that the oncologist had given her three months to live. At that point, my moratorium on visiting the house in Kitsilano had to be lifted...

(to be continued...)