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By Root 1026 0

of us. With Wednesday parades came Wednesday tourists who walked our streets, peered in our windows, and sometimes even came in and sat down in our living room. Mother would find them running their fingers across the spines of books on our shelves or lifting a frame to look closer at a photograph of my grandfather in his Navy uniform walking with Eleanor Roosevelt in Trinidad. Sometimes they would be nice, and sometimes Mother would even talk to them a bit, asking where they were from as she gently led them back out to the porch. Some, however, were not so malleable. When we would ask the most unpleasant visitors to leave, they would stomp out, muttering something about their tax dollars paying for the house. It was good for a laugh—and good training, too, for years later, when John and I were staying in a private home during a retreat on Nantucket for senators and I arrived back in our room to find a fully dressed man who, mistaking the house for his guest cottage, had stretched out on our bed, his shoes neatly tucked under the footboard, his jacket hung on the desk chair. I simply tiptoed in, retrieved my book, and went downstairs to the parlor to read there until the man’s nap was over. Our host was terrifically embarrassed, but it honestly didn’t bother me at all. At least the sleeping man hadn’t yelled at me. I figure I have those tourists in Annapolis to thank for my mellowness that day.

Life inside the yard, as the Naval Academy grounds are called, was idyllic.

And we imagined life on the parade field at Annapolis was just like life in any other American neighborhood. Jay played Little League again, and warm summer nights would find all of us piled in the Ford station wagon and then in the bleachers of a dusty field to watch Jay pitch and hit. When we got to Annapolis, he heard about a terrific Pony League team, but he would have to try out for it. The coach was an Annapolis native in the construction business, and the tryouts and practices were in a large field his business owned. Jay showed up to try out and found out there weren’t really any places. Last year’s team had returned in full. The coach asked for his name and phone number in case the situation changed, which was probably his nice way of shuffling Jay off the field. He even started to write it down.

“Jay,” my brother said, waiting to say and, he knew, spell his last name.

“Jay.” The coach wrote.

“Anania,” Jay said. “A - N—”

The coach looked up. “Are you Vince Anania’s boy?”

This man was a few years younger than Dad and had watched Dad when he was a midshipman. It wasn’t just that Dad had been a great athlete, which was true enough. It was that Dad had been great to the boys who hung out at the sides of the practice field every day. He’d learned their names and teased them about their girlfriends. And he’d made a friend and admirer of a boy who would later grow up and own a construction company. The end of the story tells itself—though that won’t stop me. Jay made the team, and the coach was not disappointed, not by the boy on the field or by the man in the bleachers.

By the next year, it was time for orders again. And again it was Japan. So in the late summer of 1963, we were headed back to Atsugi Naval Air Station, where Dad had been stationed when we were two, three, and four. But now we were twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and this time Dad had command of a squadron, VU-5. We had changed, and so had Japan. The oxcarts that had slowed our travel in 1953 and the bicycles that had clogged the roads in 1958 had been replaced by kamikaze trucks. There were still benjo ditches and expanses of rice paddies, but Japan was becoming Westernized. Beautiful kimonos gave way to pleated skirts and shirtwaist dresses on the streets of Tokyo. Shopkeepers still watered the dirt in front of their small storefronts. But A Hard Day’s Night played at a movie theater on the Ginza in Tokyo. It was the Japan of the early 1960s, a Japan that existed for a few years, then disappeared. The awkward, forgettable teenage years of a country in transition as old traditions