washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

My old habit was to share a link or want to recommend the title or author of a book — my hasty efforts to have someone do what I was doing, to read what I was reading. It was a way that I wanted certain people, based on my fondness for them or the serendipity of us talking about something that resonated with some reading I’d recently done, to have them accompany me.

But, I’ve been doing less of that sudden suggestion that you ought to read/see this article or book. Instead, I’m slowing my impulse to toss writing off of the internet or from the library into one of my people’s laps or psyche by taking a couple of steps in between where: I digest what I’ve read so >> I can figure out what I feel, what is so remarkable or noteworthy that >> I want the people I care for and who I respect to dig into it with me. Well to dig into it on their own, and hopefully for us to dig in together at a later date. By reflecting on what affects me about certain writing, I gotta figure out how to write about it, and the sequence of sentences that takes someone else’s writing — be it fiction or nonfiction — for me to reveal how their written words open me up. How their writing is a fertilizer that affects how I bloom.

At times, I feel burdened (and bothered) to slow down in this way, but I’m beginning to notice how this deliberation helps me by helping my ideas, my words, my use of metaphors, and my associations to endure. I suppose, as Ben says, the act of writing is a way to have a greater-bigger-more impact. I’m considerate that bigger is not always better, but in terms of impact, after two decades of adulthood where I’ve been erratic and reluctant to deliberately impact the people around me, I’m entering a decade of having greater impact.

And yet, I recognize that there is something gracious and grateful in my impulses to share books, articles, and authors with the people I interact with as I did earlier this week after Wayne joined me for two hours on a webinar featuring Brandon Shimoda and his newest book, The Afterlife is Letting Go, published by City Lights Bookstore. I took John Tateishi‘s Redress: the inside story of Japanese American reparations (published in 2020), Laurence Ralph‘s Sito: an american teenager and the city that failed him (published in 2024), and I told him about Sandy Darity & Kirsten Mullen’s From Here to Equality: reparations for Black Americans in the 21st century (published first in 2021) when we met afterwards. There was so much history, emotion, and deep exchange in that zoom-based reading. With 120 people dropped in, a few of the statements that I transcribed were:

• “How do we memorialize an event that is still on-going?
  One way to answer it is to write a book.”
• “The story is much longer, and much shorter, than this.”
• “You go at something in different light, at different stages.
• “Is there such a thing as vague precision?” (Followed with the quip, “is that better than precise vagueness?”)
• “They’re out there wanting to be remembered.”
• “It is weird to be in a book.”
• “You can never repay.”
• “For you to put it in writing — you’ve brought it back to life.”
• “Every time somebody writes a book, I cannot believe it.”
• “Democracy is a bludgeon. Is a cudgel.”
• “Never stop talking.”
• “I don’t use the word take. He made this photo.”
• “I wasn’t a teacher anymore. We were just people in history.”
• “I keep saying I want to move on but every time I say that, I think I’m jinxing myself.”

It was in the waning minutes of the webinar that I put together that I’ll be able to see Shimoda speak in person next month. After a stirring, beautiful, evocative and transformational experience that in the earliest minutes felt as if I’d walked into a family reunion, a screen filled with thumbnails of multiple generations of issei, nisei, and sansei. As Shimoda read passages followed by rounds of exchange, both Q&A and personal reflection testimonials, I jotted down the names of new authors, poems and book titles so I may remember and seek them in the weeks and months ahead: Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey to Topaz; Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660; Kiku Hughes’ Displacement; Traci Kato-Kiriyama‘s “No Redress” poem; and, Heather Nagami‘s Hostile (and this review by Kenny Tanemura from 2006 in Rain Taxi. A few of the lines from Kato-Kiriyama’s “No Redress”:

Grandpa never got to stand at the bank, 3 inches taller with redress check in hand 

One foot in front of the other, feeling grounded 

Never got to deposit an apology in his savings account — 

Never got to wonder how he might spend this money: on new equipment for the nursery, or a new truck for himself, or college money for his grandchildren

All our relations, learn what we mean by chosen family — we are here not only to remember to remind the local docents that this place will never be a museum
This body will never forget

One reason I continue to read so much is because I am astounded by how many books have been published only recently but address timeless topics. Some part of me (the soothsayer) cannot comprehend how these books are only being published and written in the last decade. The writing and dogged efforts required to create a book is centuries old and yet still vibrant, a more nuanced, mature form of communication in this mobile web heyday of the web with our ever-shorter attention spans.

I frequently hear people telling me how I read more books than anybody else they know (which is a most subjective observation, as most observations are). I am softening into this recognition as I note how my effusiveness for books and stories inspires and intrigues other people; how some people may consider reading a book, not because of the book itself, but they are struck by my surge of emotions, and need to talk about a book, after I’ve read a stirring passage, paragraph, chapter, or plot. That the act of talking about a book breathes new life into the plot, story, characters, setting, and author.