Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [23]
Mother became such friends with one shopkeeper that when we left Iwakuni in 1960, she gave him a number of prized American items, including—for his daughters—the dress clothes Nancy and I had outgrown. The family came to see us off, and in a gesture of appreciation, the daughters were wearing some of what we had given them. You would think that with a father who would dance in a pink bikini nothing would embarrass us, but let me assure you that Nancy and I wanted to melt into the sidewalk when the girls arrived wearing, as sundresses, our white cotton slips.
Mother would drive us everywhere in search of Japan for us and, for her and the Red Door, more antiques. She would pile Jay, Nancy, and me into the backseat of a terrifically ugly two-tone flesh and white station wagon and compete for road space with bicycles and oxcarts. During our sojourns and treasure hunts, we would drive by women squatting in the rice paddies, wearing flat straw hats, their kimonos pulled up around their thighs as they worked. We’d see silk drying in the fields after being dyed, huge banners of blues and reds billowing from enormous racks. Crowded into the rear-facing seat, we watched a lot of Japan through that back window. Jay would spot Japanese children playing in the streets and yell to them, “Baseball, ne?” Baseball was enormously popular in Japan, and the children would always scream back, “Baseball! Baseball!” and wave excitedly and chase the car a few hundred feet. Jay was just beginning to do something our parents had taught us. He was reaching out and making connections with everyone around him, even those children we only passed on a dusty road, using as connective tissue what they had in common.
My mother would sit and talk with a Japanese farmer, or the Admiral’s wife, or the maid Toyo-san, and her demeanor was never different. She once told me that if I could talk about the news, about soap operas (when in the States, of course), and about sports, there were very few people with whom I could not have a conversation. It has turned out to be true.
My father didn’t even need that. He would reach for the hands of strangers. He would corral teenagers at a table and ask them what they liked. He would tell the nurses in the clinic how pretty they were. Every little girl he passed he’d say, “Could she be? Well, she must be. Here’s a princess. Imagine that, a princess, right here in the mall!” He would chat with cashiers as if he knew them, complimenting them on their hair or their eyes or the speed with which they worked. By the time they left, my father would know the life stories of the family in the next lane at the bowling alley. Why not pass the time with the cashier? You’re not doing anything anyway. Why not make friends with the bowling family? Hey, we were a bowling family, too.
My father was doing something most of us do or want to do—reaching for connections. Now, he was, and still is, an extreme example. And, probably as a consequence, so am I. I’m not likely to change either, because the connections I have made have enriched and sustained me; they have strengthened me by holding me up when I needed it, and they have strengthened me by letting me hold up my end when it was needed. My life is immeasurably better because I know that although we may say grace differently, or not know how to say it all, we still