Warming Up - Exercise 6

To Visit Japan, A Childhood Dream

One of my earliest childhood memories is of a wooden trunk in the basement that contained my parents' mementos.  The trunk was off limits to us kids, although occasionally Mom or Dad would open it while we were in the basement and would show us some of the things in it.

My special memories of the contents of that trunk were all connected to items my father brought back from ports he visited during his days in the Merchant Marines during and in the year after World War II.  And the most important of those for me were a  kimono and fan from Japan.  I had never seen such a colorful, decorative, or soft piece of clothing as that kimono.  And it opened up a door in my curiosity that demanded I learn as much as possible about Japan and the people who lived there.

When I started school, I discovered there were a few books in the school library about Japan.  I read them all, starting with the shelves that were identified as appropriate for first graders and then continuing up the graded shelves.  By the third grade, I had finished all the available books, all the way up through those on the sixth grade shelf.

The dream of someone else also contributed to my dream.  Miss Ingram, the music teacher in our elementary school, was dedicated to igniting interest in music among her students.  Each year she organized two musical productions, operettas, in which we students starred, one for the third and fourth graders and one for the fifth and sixth graders.  The sixth grade production when I reached that age had Around the World in 60 Minutes as its theme. One piece included was the Gilbert and Sullivan tune "Three Little Girls From School Are We."  I will never forget wearing the purple silk kimono from the basement trunk in that production.  And my curiosity about Japan got a little more of a boost when Miss Ingram taught the three of us who sang the song how to open our fans one-handed with the flick of the wrist.  Until then, I had had to use both hands to pull the two wooden ends apart carefully to expose the painted scene of Japan on the delicately folded paper between the wooden handles.  By then, my dream had grown from learning as much as possible about Japan to visiting Japan.

In the following ten years, my Japan dream took a back seat to the shorter-term goals of finding and keeping best friends, passing tests, getting good grades, growing up, getting boys to notice me, getting my parents to stop noticing everything I did, and getting away from their limits and the small town I had felt I was stuck in.  Eventually I did made it away from the midwest, all the way to San Francisco where I ended up in a Masters Degree program in Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).  My acceptance into that program was the switch that turned my dream of visiting Japan back on.

There weren't many jobs in Japan when I completed my training, so I chose Iran as my first overseas experience.  While there, I continued to dream of visiting Japan.  At the end of that two-and-a-half year-experience, I finally made it to Japan, my final stop in a two-week, multi-country trip home.  Four days in India, then four in Thailand, four in Indonesia, a day back in Thailand, and finally, four days in Tokyo.  Four days when my jaw ached the whole time because of the ear-to-ear grin that I couldn't stop.  I was in Japan!  And I loved everything I saw.

By accomplishing my dream, I learned that having a dream, and working steadily to accomplish it, made problems and disappointments, both small and large, almost disappear.

The Big Lesson

The most important lesson of this experience wasn't obvious to me until years later when my parents, my husband, and I were crossing the mall in Washington, DC.  A middle-aged Japanese man approached my father to ask for directions.  After pointing out the way, my father joined us and commented that fifty years earlier, while he was in the Pacific in the Merchant Marines, he would never have imagined that he would one day be speaking to someone from Japan in the capital of our country.

Hearing that comment made me realize how much it meant that my parents never discouraged me from my dream of going to Japan, a dream that began so shortly after the end of World War II.  It would have been easy to understand had either of my parents tried to dissuade me from my interest in our former enemy.  Instead, they encouraged the spark of interest with the hope that it would lead to other interests and a love for learning. They were right.