Going Back (Thursday, June 18)

Michele and Zaydeh picked me up not long after and I spent the day being exhausted with Oren and Michele and Mo (my cousin). They took me out to dinner and I met their nice friends Ed and Marsha and ate a hamburger and wished my life were better. That night I sat in a king size bed and watched ABC programming until I passed out in front of the TV – waking up just in time to run to the airport for my guaranteed flight.

I flew from Seattle to Vancouver to Tokyo to Osaka that day, but it didn’t feel as long as it was. I watched movies, ate more pizza, and enjoyed the last bits of circulated air conditioning before going back to Japan. Unfortunately I had missed my two days of elementary schooled, leaving me with a lot of guilt and a completely screwed up school schedule. It would have to wait.
From Osaka, I managed to catch the last trains up to Tango and to Natanya’s area. I didn’t have the energy left to drive home, so I slept on her floor and didn’t wake up for 13 hours.

I spent the weekend in my house catching up on laundry because the weather was hot and sunny for the first time in weeks. I spent some time with Natanya and Kate, but left their company early on Sunday to go home and feel miserable.

When it comes to the condo and owing money undeservedly, it could be the end of the world if I let it. But I won’t. I can deal with those things because they don’t matter. But not having my grandmother still weighs heavily on me, and I feel like there’s nothing to do but let it crush me until … until it doesn’t, I guess. I’m sad most of the time, but I know it’s going to get better. And I know that my next trip to Seattle will be one way, and under better circumstances. At least I hope so.

I Hate Delta

I spent 21 hours at Sea-Tac Airport before I gave up on Delta Airlines completely. I was still flying on Kevin’s buddy pass and was optimistic about hopping a flight back to Atlanta so I could fly business class back to sweet Tokyo and get home in time to teach two days of elementary school.
Delta overbooked every single flight that week by at least 3-10 people. The people who gave up their seats were put at the top of the standby list and moved to the next flight. As were the next group of people, and the next, and the next. This left me eternally at position 24 on the standby list – I never saw the inside of a plane. I slept in the airport, hoping that the early morning flight would be able to take me to Atlanta even though I had already missed my flight to Tokyo. I would have to spend the night in Atlanta and wait for the Friday morning flight back instead. Whatever, I reasoned, I just needed to get out of Seattle.
I spent that night on a bench, freezing and sobbing. I didn’t want to call family to pick me up because I didn’t have the energy to be driven somewhere else, driven back, and have to go through security again. But it felt like I was never going to get out of that terminal, so I didn’t know what else to do.
After finally telling my family that I was stuck at the airport and having the remnants of my optimism completely crushed by the lack of empathy from the staff and the situation itself, my dad helped me buy a new plane ticket with a different airline for the next day. I booked a hotel room and left the airport, having gotten nowhere at all in all that time.

The Rest of It (Saturday June 13-Monday June 15)

I spent the weekend in Seattle after the funeral was over. It was nice spending more time with Megan and seeing Laura’s best friend Graham again. It was also really good to spend a lot of time with Zaydeh, who was taking this worse than anyone.

Zaydeh seems so forlorn without Bubbeh around. He’s just about deaf and he’s been that way since I can remember, but without my grandmother around the house he’s having a lot of trouble hearing the phone or doorbell ring.

He took us to see the apartment they had put a payment on in a brand new, very nice retirement community near Seattle Center. It was one of the nicest apartments I’ve ever seen, but knowing it would just be Zaydeh in it, it was too big. He thought so too, and has since canceled his lease on it and is planning to move into a smaller apartment at some point, but not soon. I felt better knowing that Zaydeh would be staying in their condo with all of his things, and walking up to Pike Place Market every morning for fruits and coffee. This, however, meant that Megan and I would not be moving into the condo in July after all. This too was fairly crushing news.

The condo was never ours, and we had done nothing to earn it, but it was the one thing that was fairly solid about my move back to the US. Having a place to live immediately – finding a job and applying to grad schools would come afterwards. Now I will have to do everything all at once, which is a bit stressful. Still, I suppose I counted a lot of chickens before they’d hatched.

Laura’s friend Graham is doing very well on Capitol Hill. We met him and his girlfriend for breakfast (making me realise that I’ve gone almost 2 years without eating a proper breakfast). Although I’m not nearly as close with Graham as my sister, it will be nice to know someone in the city! Also worth mentioning, his cat Leland is adorable.

I spent an entire day with Megan around her neighbourhood in Queen Anne. It’s a residential area primarily with a lot of cute, small houses. Seattle is not afraid of colours either! Purple houses, pink houses, mint green houses. It was really beautiful. I met her roommates Nick and Jonathan and we watched some TV while I battled off my daily jet lag fatigue.

I ate two slices of pizza (one slice too many) and Megan and I walked around her area and talked about the places we’d like to move into in July. We also talked about the general futility of knowing what we want out of our ‘careers’ and how little furniture we own.

Megan and her roommate, Jonathan.

On the last day in Seattle, my mother and I visited Zaydeh’s. Zaydeh drove Laura to the airport and my mother and I rested in the condo for a bit. I had a phone call from someone I’d never heard of and called her back. It turned out it was a debt collector trying to phone me to tell me that I owe $1400 in membership payments to Bally’s Total Fitness in Los Angeles. A gym membership I had cancelled thirteen months ago. Apparently the contract I had signed was good for 36 months, regardless of cancellation. What a crock. After a good twenty minutes of hyperventilating and talking to one of the ladies at the agency who told me “I could settle at $750”, I decided my life was officially bleak. No grandmother, no place to live, and now I have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a service I did not require nor use. America is awful.

Dejected, I went to the airport with my mom. Her flight was 4 hours earlier than mine but I didn’t want to do anything or talk to anyone, so it seemed like a good place to feel disgruntled until my flights back to Japan. As it turned out, Sea-Tac Airport is the best place to feel disgruntled as I would soon find out flying standby on Delta Airlines.

The Funeral

Dressed in black, we met Zaydeh for breakfast at the hotel. Zaydeh smiled at seeing us in such unusual garb and commented, “Who decided on this colour anyway?” He had a point. I was one of very few people at the actual funeral who were all in black.
Breakfast was awful. I was smiling too much, trying to make everyone feel better. My sister was quiet, my mother was sad, and Zaydeh was distraught. He couldn’t believe he was burying his wife of 64 years – and neither could we. Those two had always been a formidable unit of teasing, cooking, and never-ending affection. The question began to rise in my mind, “What are you supposed to do when your family is broken?”
Sitting between my sister and my eleven-year-old cousin, Mo, I felt ridiculous. “I can’t believe I’m at my grandmother’s funeral. I’ve never been to a funeral and now I’m at her’s! Impossible.” In the past few years all of my four grandparents have been teetering into poorer health, but I never thought that Bubbeh would be the first to go.
My grandmother, being an unwavering defender of the women’s liberation, was honoured by a female canter in a purple suit. The canter, as it turned out, was the first women ever to perform a ceremony in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery where Bubbeh was buried. Breaking the moulds even after life. The canter led us in Yiddish folk songs and in prayers. We followed the pallbearers to the gravesite beneath a magnificent old tree. The tree reminded me so much of Bubbeh, it almost surged with her spirit. I immediately identified it as “The Bubbeh Tree” and I feel confident that it was a place she would have picked out herself, though my grandparents had never reserved their final resting places – optimists well into their mid 80’s. We took turns shoveling earth onto her grave and returned to Elliot Bay for her reception.

At the reception, I felt like I didn’t want to be around people anymore. I had no appetite, though the platters in front of me looked delicious (Bubbeh would not have held back – she was a champion eater). I took a glass of wine and sat out on the steps, looking out at the bay, thinking of how unfair it was for God to take someone we all needed so, so much. Bubbeh said, “God will never let the world end so long as there are ten good people in it.” But with her gone, we’re down to nine.
When I returned to the reception, people had begun telling stories about their times spent with Bubbeh. It was a gift that I was able to remember her through so many different people. She was kind, a good listener, never shied away from making friends with complete strangers, she could out-eat just about anyone, and she never sat down at the dinner table when she was cooking. She truly wanted to know everyone, and she wanted to understand people fully and without judgment. I hope that every one of us was able to take home a part of her spirit and that it makes us all better people in the future.

After everyone went home (“it’s like herding cats!”), I resisted the jet lag induced urge to nap for the next 19 hours and waited for Megan to get off work. Fortunately for me, her office was the next building over from my hotel. It was really nice to see her again – it had been nearly a year since she left Japan! But I was weighed down by grief and exhaustion and I don’t think I expressed my happiness as well as I could have. She took me and Laura out to a great happy hour place where we ate yam fries and tried local beers. It was nice having all of the funeral things over with and being able to relax a little bit, even though we were still very sad. Bubbeh had always known that food could cure just about anything; and I think she and yam fries would have been fast friends.

A Diversion

I thought that my next trip from Japan to the United States would be a one-way ticket representing the end of my JET Programme contract and my time spent in Japan as a teacher. Unfortunately, my first trip back to the US was not under any such circumstances.

My grandmother, known to us as Bubbeh, its Yiddish equivalent, passed away from lung cancer complicated by pneumonia on Sunday, June 7th at a hospital in Stony Brook, Long Island. She and Zaydeh, my grandfather, had once lived in Stony Brook for decades and had long since moved to Seattle to live across from Elliot Bay. The reason for their presence in Long Island was that it was the last spot on their long vacation to visit family and friends all over the world. They flew to Iceland, where they met my parents and explored glaciers and volcanoes. Afterwards, they flew back to London to visit with my parents a bit longer before boarding the Queen Mary and cruising back to New York in style. My grandparents have always been swanky folk. Only a short while after the Queen Mary docked in New York City and Bubbeh had met her older brother for martinis, did she fall ill.

Within 24 hours, friends and loved ones were coming out of the woodworks, racing to say their goodbyes.

I decided to fly back to the US to see my family and to say my goodbyes to Bubbeh, even though they would be a bit late. My schools were characteristically understanding, and they each gave me money for flowers, which they told me is the Japanese custom. I was really touched.
The funeral would be held on that Friday so I left on Thursday afternoon from Tokyo airport. My friend, Kevin, allowed me to use his family’s Delta buddy pass – enabling me a cheap fare from Tokyo to Seattle on standby. The first flight was a breeze – I even got to ride in business class! Unfortunately the flight was from Tokyo all the way to Atlanta, flying directly over Seattle and landing nowhere near it.

At the Atlanta airport I was on a very long list of standbys and was told that, “it didn’t look good.” As I sat, exhausted and unsure of what to do next, I saw my sister standing in line for boarding. Somehow she had found out my flight and booked herself on the same one. In the nick of time, I was put on the flight. It was a miracle. I sat next to an old man who was going to his son’s graduation from the University of Washington. He told me about his ex-wife who was in “lady’s prison” and his fiancée and that he had seen a few UFOs in his time in Georgia. Then he helped me with the in-flight trivia challenge and sure enough, we won a fair few games!

Laura and I met up with Oren and Michele (our uncle and aunt) and waited for my mother at the airport. Only my mother would bring two checked suitcases for a 5-day trip.

We checked into a hotel nearby Zaydeh’s apartment at Elliot Bay. It felt so wonderful to be back, but the reality of the situation was slowly starting to hit and I began to feel numb. Like I was watching myself on a TV screen. This wasn’t my life. The Sreebny women went out for a bowl of clam chowder that evening (at 10pm because the sun never sets in the Pacific Northwest, apparently) and fell asleep at different times, each one of us on our own jet lag.

Oe Yama and The Eight Person Date

Local Teachers Wander into Mist ; Camoflauge

This weekend I was invited by my friend, Yasuka, an employee of the Mineyama Town Hall, to join her in Amino for a konpa, or a group date. From what I understand, a konpa is a group of people (even amounts of single boys and girls) where they get together at a restaurant or bar and get to know one another. So, that’s what we did.

I took the train up to Amino from Mineyama so I would be able to drink (this would help me relax around perfect Japanese strangers). Yasuka brought her co-workers, Yumi and Yumi. The guys were pretty diverse… two of them worked at a bank, one works as a 4th grade teacher in Mineyama, and one was a jerk, though I did not hear what he did for a living.

Mostly the party was fun. We ate a lot of fried chicken and salad and drank a lot of cocktails. The two guys I talked two (and had to sit next to) were nice enough. Though, one of them smoked cigarettes into my hair all evening. Considering it was in Japanese, I think I held my own. Though there were times I had no idea what was going on and the jerk guy kept making fun of me in front of me, which wasn’t cool.

Four hours later we were all quite intoxicated. Kate and Natanya, champions of love and friendship, came to pick me up. After that I told ridiculous stories and passed out watching Gone with the Wind.

The next morning, after Kate made us eggs and told us that she did the dishes every morning because if she is ever found dead before she can get to them, she thinks people will judge her. Even though she’s dead!

We drove in the rain and mist to Oe Yama in Kaya and hiked up a good deal of it. The mist made the walk very interesting and we took a lot of fun pictures!

This Place is Death

We ended the day at Apple Farm with curry and sandwiches. We also talked about Octomom and how many children a crazy person should be allowed to pump into herself. Ridiculous. I made many poor arguments.

Then I came home and found out that my grandmother is most likely going to die, so that’s probably going to change the course of this week. Flying 7000 miles home when I’m leaving in less than 7 weeks for good? Absurd timing.

Track & Field Day

Track & Field Day

Every year the four junior high schools in the area, Honjo, Ine, Hioki and Yoro, battle it out in track and field competition. This year we gathered early in the morning (in the rain) for the 競技会, or kyogikai. It was raining fairly consistently, so there were tarps and tents set up to shelter our bags and bodies. However, the rain collected on the tents and would spill down at random intervals, soaking everything and everyone in its path.
Aside from that, the day was good in that I got out of the office! I also had an opportunity to see Mrs. Aimi, my JTE from last year. She told me that she’s very happy at her new school (Hioki) because the class sizes are tiny (the school population is 15) and she is much closer to home than she was working at Ine JHS. I was really thrilled to see that she’s enjoying her new job and that she’s doing well. This will probably be the last time I see her before leaving.

As always, the relay races were among the more exciting activities of the day. The students work really hard for about a month practicing their sprints and passing the baton to their friends.

In the end (as always), the biggest school took home first prize. Once again Ine JHS will house the trophy. It must seem unfair… the points seemed to correlate directly with the size of the school. Ine taking first place in most everything, followed by Yoro, Honjo and finally Hioko. Seems a bit less exciting when the same school always wins. Nonetheless, everyone really tried their best and we were all thrilled to go home out of the rain.