Clean and beautiful life feeling
written on June 18, 2001 @ noonish

I had this long, involved dream this morning about a vicious fight with my parents over, of all things, their having read a diary of mine when I was in my teens. My aunt was in the dream, and she was the catalyst for the fight. We were out at a museum in New York City, and we were all getting angrier and angrier, not really listening to each other. I think we all suspected how stupid and pointless it was to be arguing over something that happened (or didn't happen; now that I'm awake I know that my mother, for all her faults, would never have done such a thing) fifteen years ago, but my mother and I were both so upset we were yelling and in tears. Finally I'd had enough, and I wrote out a note and left it with Dad, and I disappeared into the city.

I'm not worked up about it today. I think my brain is just shaking loose some residual stuff, and every now and then I'm going to have a family-related nightmare. As long as they're not frequent.

~*~*~*~

I spent a good part of one of the days in Japan at an onsen with Mary Ellen, my oldest friend. She and I have known each other since we were six. Her two-year job with the Japanese government ends in July, when she moves back to North America. She and I suspect our kids will be roughly the same ages. I think we both quietly hope that they'll know each other.

The onsen is the raison d'étre[1] for a beautiful hotel about half an hour by train outside Sendai. My parents stayed there when they visited Mary Ellen a few months ago.

After a week and a half in Japan, of not knowing more than a half dozen words of the language, of feeling slightly lost and overwhelmed, I was ready to go home. But the onsen recharged my batteries. Beautifully elegant and simple decor, deeply Japanese. Long meditative corridors, an indoor boardwalk over white river rock. Paper sliding doors into rooms or clearings: waist-deep pools of steaming water. Peaceful and satisfying.

Mary Ellen and I talked of our families and our marriages and our shared histories, of what it's like to be in Japan, of what it means to be Japanese.

Where depression is deeply embedded in North American culture, she suggested, denial is deep in the Japanese. Mostly they deal with problems here by pretending they don't exist. It leads people to have a much more positive outlook, but it also means that some big problems get ignored until they're truly massive and undeniable.

We sat in the steaming mineral water, soaking up the air and the rocks and the trees and moss, and listening river down below. Mary Ellen grumped about some trash in the river, held in place by fallen boughs. I said, "It's nice if you look the other way."

"That's very Japanese," she said.

~*~*~*~

[1] I looked up "raison" in the French-English dictionary because, heaven help me, I haven't used my six years (six years!) of French enough lately to remember off the top of my head whether it took an accent mark anywhere. (I did remember that it was feminine.) In The Collins Paperback French Dictionary, the fourth idiomatic expression using "raison" is "se faire une raison[:] to learn to live with it". I'd never known that before. In French, to learn to live with something is to make oneself a reason for it. The most resilient people I know live this way; how fascinating that it's codified in a language. I wonder whether that phrase contributes to the national health as much as the red wine.

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