Toshi Washizu "Coming Home" at "Poets 11" 2016
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2016-10-05

Viewed through the window of a bullet train heading south:
Mt. Fuji half-hidden, the snow-covered peak piercing the clouds.
The Pacific Coastal mountains of my hometown, Shizuoka, were
round and gentle, bamboo forests undulating in green waves.
At the cemetery in back of an old temple stood a familiar
tombstone. I poured spring water over my ancestors, offered yellow
chrysanthemums and burned incense in prayer.
“He’d get lost walking away from home, would fall on the street.
A few times would be taken by ambulance to a hospital.”
My siblings warned me of Big Brother’s Alzheimer’s. “He may not
recognize you.” Three years before, when I saw him last at our
niece’s wedding, he seemed hearty and robust at seventy-three.
Two months later, his wife died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
I approached Big Brother’s door through the bonsai garden
of pine and plum trees, once his pride and joy, now overgrown
with dried tall grass. “Oh, Toshi?” he said, standing at the doorway,
uncertain; thin and feeble, the loss of weight startling.
Slowly he seated himself at the kitchen table. From the heap of
food packages, pill bottles, yellowing newspapers and sundries he
pushed forward two mandarin oranges. “Eat. Do you want tea?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said, staring at the huge bandage on his
forehead, his food-stained beige sweater.
He pointed to a bundle of cards hung on the wall, large letters
describing his daily schedule.
“Someone’s coming to take me to the center today… many old
people there… talking funny… some screaming. You think they are
joking, but they are serious. I listen to them,” he said. Always a quiet
man, he was unusually talkative that day, perhaps a “good day.”
He recalled some twenty years before, when we soaked in a hot
spring deep in the mountains on the Izu Peninsula. “Big bubbles!
You farted,” he said, smiling for the first time.
Soon he led me to the family altar in the living room,
framed photos of his wife and young son prominently displayed.
I burned a candle and incense and prayed to his long-departed
beloveds. “My wife died… yesterday… My boy was only 27…
That’s life, isn’t it?” he muttered.
I held him in my arms and whispered, “You take care.”
“You take care, too,” he said, firmly this time.
A late-afternoon train left my hometown farther and farther
behind, deep orange persimmon glowing here and there on
darkening hillsides. What else could I do but carry their memories?
I kept looking back.