Shifting gears

Haven't posted in a while, been busy - been a good year and a bad year, everything going on politically and environmentally aside.  Traveled a lot, lost my kitty and my grandma, have a new kitty now, very settled in our living situation, making new friends, preparing to bid farewell to DINK in two years... 

Still doing my various projects, violin is coming along, cooking some new things, almost met my reading goal for the year - one more book.  I'm kind of cheating, it's a graphic novel, but I know I can finish it before the end of the year.  Finished Trevor Noah's book for my work group book club, and it made me think about writing down memories more.  The times I have written down my memories, I end up remembering them so much more.  Various studies have shown that snapping lots of photos ends up reducing your memory of an experience, so all the more reason to start documenting and thinking about things more, rather than whipping through one moment to the next.  My work requires so much fast absorption of information, cleaning the slate mentally, and then moving on to the next encounter that I feel like I'm getting dumber in some ways.  

Anyhow, I am going to shift the tone of the blog to random memories and detailing them a bit.  Might not be the most exciting thing for people other than me but not exactly trying to go wild here.  I do plan to do a cocktails + cat + metal song reaction series on YouTube, to expand my horizons on metal music.  I already like power metal, alt rock, heavy rock, symphonic metal, some funk metal, industrial metal, progressive metal, neoclassical metal, gothic metal, and gothic symphonic metal (don't know why this is its own genre but apparently gothic and symphonic alone were not sufficient), so time to explore some bands I haven't heard yet.  Plan is to learn the lyrics, drink a couple cocktails, play with the kitty, and see how I like them.  But that is for another site -

First memory to pull out of the dusty file cabinets...

I guess a few that Grandma passed along.  I didn't experience these first hand of course, I just heard them firsthand.  She was born in 1928, on a farm in Utah, to Japanese immigrants.  Her father came over first in early 1900, before the ban on Japanese immigrants, but he was able to bring his bride over, who was 18 years younger than him I believe.  Grandma was the youngest of eight children.  When she was five years old, she became very ill, possibly with appendicitis.  They could not afford a fancy doctor or visit a hospital, so they went to their local doctor who told them to feed her nothing but milk for the entire next year and they followed the instructions to the letter.  I can only imagine how hard that would be only drinking milk for a year, though Grandma laughed thinking about it.  They were fortunate, that their family was very skilled at farming and they had a tight-knit community of other Japanese immigrants to depend on in the depression.  

I knew the side of the story that led to my mom, Grandma leaving the farm to go to San Francisco and get a college education, against the wishes of her parents.  They wanted her to marry a good local Japanese boy.  She ended up marrying a Caucasian mostly German-descended bus driver.  It was a rocky marriage that would have ended in divorce if it had been an acceptable option at the time, and I've heard many stories about the difficult relationship and the stress it brought my mom.  

What I did not hear enough about was the time before leaving for San Francisco - I imagine it was the less exciting time for Grandma.  A place where she and her brothers and sisters were constantly harassed verbally as "Japs" and "squinty eyed" and "Nips."  They got one pair of shoes until they grew out of them, and they wore them into the ground and had to fill in the holes with cardboard and such.  Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was the perfect docile Japanese wife - never yelling at him or contradicting him, always just taking care of him after he would scream at her and the family and drink himself into a stupor.  Being farmers, they made their own alcohol - bringing traditional sake brewing techniques from Japan.  One time Grandma went down when her parents were out and she and one or a couple of her siblings got drunk on the sake - it was their first time drinking, so inevitably they all threw up.  It's hard to picture my Grandma tending chickens, cows, corn fields, horses - holding sacks of DDT and shaking it along the rows of crops.  Fortunately for her, when she was old enough to really help in the fields, the child labor laws went into effect, so she ended up being the spoiled one of the bunch.  She remembered her sisters would come with some treats from town and Grandma would always be the one to divvy them up into 'equal' portions - she would give one to Manny, then one to herself, one to Helen, then one to herself, and her sisters always looked uncertain at the end when Grandma somehow ended up with more candy, but it had seemed so correct the way Grandma had done it!  

Despite coming from a big family, Grandma was never much of a people person, and over time she became less and less interested in socializing and going out, and that always seemed the tragic thing to me - she could have enjoyed herself so much more in her later years, but she preferred to stay inside with her cats, watch television (I won't name the particular news channel she adored...), and maybe watch the birds and other urban wildlife that would come to her door.  When she lived in Pinole, where I now work, she used to tend raspberry and blackberry plants in the back and every summer when we visited on the weekends she would have plastic containers filled with them - she also always stocked butterscotch candies, Hershey kisses, Andes mints, and jelly beans.  After she quit smoking her place lightened up, but everything had a yellow hue to it from the smoke.  My sister and I would only get to watch cable TV at her place, or VHS videos.  She didn't have many VHS tapes, but one of the ones we watched over and over at her place was "Gay Purr-ee" - one of Warner Brother's early attempts to compete with Disney in animated films.  It featured the voice of Judy Garland, recorded in 1962, seven years before her fatal overdose on barbiturates.  It was a pretty dark cartoon, about a beautiful country cat Musette who wants to visit Paris, and when she gets there is welcomed unknowingly into essentially a brothel where the madame grooms her to be a mail order bride.  Meanwhile her country boyfriend John Tom comes to the city to find her, gets shipped off with a small cat named Robespierre, and they strike gold in the Yukon gold rush.  They manage to return just in time to save her from being sent to her future husband.  There's a particularly dark part in the movie where she is so disillusioned with Paris that she contemplates throwing herself into the river Seine - 

Anyhow, there was a brief improvement in Grandma's general day to day when she started doing oil painting classes, some of her paintings were really quite impressive!  Only two years or so after, when she had lost interest after being sick a few times and not having much strength or motivation, she would look at them and say how she could barely believe she had made something so good.  Life was hard on her in a lot of ways, and she was a fighter for a good portion of it - I rather wish I had known more about her fighting days, and not through my mom's warped filter of an unhappy childhood.  She always treated me and my sister very well, and was a perfect Grandma as far as Grandmas go - but as a person there are a lot of gaps for me to piece together eventually.  

Next entry will probably be more uplifting!  Maybe more descriptive.  We'll see where this goes.