Skip to main content

Up to Me

I tiptoed toward the bunk bed and could see Osamu was fast asleep. He can't fake it. When he does try to fake sleep he smiles and giggles and his eyes open a lot to see if I'm looking.

Kenzo is a little more sophisticated. He does a pretty good fake sleep. I crept up next him on the top bunk and I think he was aware of my presence because I could tell he was doing his best to not move or smile and just act like he was truly sleeping. I whispered "Kenzo" and he didn't budge. He's getting better at this.

I waited about 20 seconds to see if he'd open his eyes. Nothing. He doesn't like taking naps and he is developing the patience to wait it out while fake sleeping. 

So then after another beat I whispered "onara-boo," which in Japanese just means fart with an onomatopoeic gas passing sound. He immediately started laughing and the jig was up.

With Osamu in sleepyland Kenzo came to my office and wrote the alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, all by himself in one of my notebooks. He needed help with lower-case q, and his j was backwards, but none of those things matter more than his confidence, which he is gaining daily.

I know he knows the sounds of the letters, so I wanted to see where he's at with assembling words. I asked him, "Hey bud, what animal says meow?" He grabbed his pen and notebook and turned around and got down on the floor of my office to write and even turned back to me with a verbal warning of, "Don't see papa."

A moment later he stood up and proudly showed me he wrote the word "cat" all by himself. He even sounded it out on his own. I praised him a ton and we did “dog” next and then I sent him on his way.

When Eri is away in the evenings at school I try to make dinner time and evening play as special as possible so the boys forget to miss mama. 

I turned on some music again tonight and the boys always love it. Tonight's selection was Bob Dylan's compilation album Biograph disc three, which opens with “Caribbean Wind”, an obscure song I really love. Once you get past the cheesy synthesized wind sounds the lyrics always capture me instantly.

She was the Rose of Sharon from Paradise Lost 
From the city of seven hills near the place of the cross

However it’s actually the second song on that album that affects me the most and I have no idea why. It’s called “Up to Me” and between the lyrics and Bob Dylan‘s voice and the instrumentation, even though I’ve heard that song 100 times, it never fails to make me feel a powerful combination of hope, nostalgia, and gratitude for my life.

If I’d thought about it I never would’ve done it, I guess I would’ve let it slide 
If I’d paid attention to what others were thinking, the heart inside me would’ve died 
But I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity 
Someone had to reach for the rising star, I guess it was up to me

I opened some sparkling wine and watched the boys clean up their toys and get ready for the bath.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not About Baseball

I stayed up past my bedtime again last night. I almost made it. I watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso and came to a good stopping point where I was satisfied with myself for enjoying some quiet TV time with my favorite show and even though it was after midnight, I was confident I could still get a pretty good night's sleep.  But no. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to just lay on the living room carpet and put on a movie. I saw the first seven or eight minutes of Goodfellas and then I woke up when the end credits were rolling with Sid Vicious' is cover of My Way . I brush my teeth and I can see the light of day already shining in through the bathroom window. "It’s almost the longest day of the year," I told myself, to at least rationalize why I'm brushing my teeth and crawling into bed at this hour. I was trying to minimize the mental anguish I regularly put on myself for not just going to bed like I should. I told Eri that I was thinking a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Overpriced Highball for the Big Guy

I keep falling asleep at my desk and waking up all groggy and surly in the middle of night, stumbling downstairs to brush my teeth without waking anyone, and slinking back up the steps and into bed. So I was the last one up again this morning, but I made up for it by quickly getting ready and taking the boys out on a Sunday morning walk to look for bugs. Kenzo has been particularly keen on capturing another lizard. He doesn't understand that lizard season is ending and those guys are becoming more and more rare. He got his hopes up when we came across a little one walking up some woodsy steps. After that we took a break. Eri's sister and her husband stopped by to grab the car seats that the boys just graduated from. Their little girl Emika is just now big enough to start using one and next spring she's gonna have a brand new baby brother or sister who will also need a car seat, so the timing worked out nice for all of us. Emika apparently loves Thomas the Tank Engine (who d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sendai vs. Tokushima

Osamu said he had to go pee, and I make it a habit to believe him most of the time. Another habit I have is taking him to go pee, much of the time.  When we came out of the restroom I decided it was time for a beer, so with Osamu holding my hand we waltzed over to the food concession and I was checking out the selection, and the prices. Seven hundred yen for a draft beer. I had a feeling. It was only 500 for a whiskey cocktail (whiskey with water on the rocks) but I wasn't about to be that much of a derelict this early with my four-year-old son in tow. The tickets were free, the seats aren't bad, might as well spend seven bucks on a beer. The problem was that the dude next to us with his little boy about the same age as Mumu-chan loudly and with braggadocio you don't often see in these parts ordered a Blue Hawaii snow cone for his kid. I heard this and panicked. Last weekend at Michinoku Park I got a Blue Hawaii snow cone for Osamu and he loved it.  I looked down at my l...
1 comment
Read more