Asakiyume mita

Asa-no-ha moyō

My third kid, Little Springtime, was born in Japan. Friends there gave us baby clothes for her that had this pattern on it. We were told that traditionally, this was a protective pattern that will keep babies safe.



I thought I'd like to make a quilt with this pattern for my arriving-in-April grandchild, so I wanted to find it online so I'd be sure to get it right. But I didn't know the name for the pattern. Imagine my amusement when I found out it's 麻の葉文様, asa-no-ha moyō. "Moyō" means "pattern"; "ha" means "leaf"; and asa (麻; also read "ma") means .... drumroll please... cannabis! (but also hemp or flax; all these things are related). In fact 麻 is the first character in the compound 麻薬, mayaku, which means "narcotic."

Japan is very strict with regard to drugs. It's something universities here have to counsel students who are going over on an exchange year about: certain ADHD medications are prohibited--Adderall, for example--and certain things that are over-the-counter medications in the United States are also prohibited (e.g., Nyquil). And let's not even talk about cannabis possession.

But in olden times, people knew another truth ;-)

A father's face

My dad frequently buys ham at the deli in his local Hannafords, so he's a familiar face there. One middle-aged woman behind the counter is always friendly to him. Yesterday, when he was there, she said,

"Do you know why I like you so much?"

"Is it that we know each other from somewhere else?" he asked.

"No--it's that you remind me of my father." She gestured to her chin to indicate my dad's beard. It turned out her father passed away two years ago. She and my dad got to talking more. "You've inherited his friendly ways," my dad said to her. It turns out she's from Iraq.

Sometimes people are angels in our lives, and I feel like he was one for her and she was one for him.

It snowed!

I knocked the snow off the clothesline and it fell all at once, from the entire length of the clothesline, a rope of snow hitting the ground.

I'm back from my dad's house, but while I was there, I found a tiny nature preserve that has been set up across the street from my high school. It's on low-lying land unsuitable for development: a land conservancy has bought it and made it into a preserve, so high school students can learn about wetlands and local people can go for walks.

Because it's a wetland, there are sections with plank walkways to keep you above the water. For one of them, the beams are laid out lengthwise, and when you walk on them, it's musical, like a marimba (you have to turn your sound up to hear; it's a not-great 10-second phone video):



The creator signed it:


The other walkways have the planks laid out crosswise--they don't give the same music (but are fine for walking on!)


I saw an odd but funny and entertaining movie on Netflix, Army of Thieves (2021). In it, a young German bank clerk who has been mastering safecracking in his spare time is recruited to break into a series of bank vaults designed by a master locksmith and themed on Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung operas. (The vaults are named Reingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.) For each vault, the guy tells the story of that opera, and the music plays in the background, and then you get an image of all the gears and tumblers moving as he goes into a trance, listening to the clicks and slides and whirs. So cool! And the rest of the gang are hilarious characters. I feel like sartorias would enjoy it.

Weirdly, the movie is a prequel to a zombie film, Army of the Dead. This film is not a zombie film at all! Is this a thing that happens often? A prequel that's a totally different genre from the original film? The only way zombies figure in Army of Thieves is that you hear news stories about this zombie outbreak in Nevada, and sometimes the hero has bad dreams about zombies. I think he's the only carryover from one film to the other...

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass.

The girl is herself, but the vision gets grim, as she sees her own death. That was one of the striking things about the visions of Kibeho for the rest of the world--that they predicted the genocide of 1995. But even though the play does go there--not to the genocide, but to that prophecy--it's not an oh-my-gosh-they-predicted-the-future thing, not at all. It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries. It made me think about how hard it is, actually, to accommodate that intrusion. Krishna may be able to fit the whole universe in his throat but we mortal types have a harder time with that stuff.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the play is based on historical fact. Our Lady of Kibeho is an approved Marian apparition.

* * *

In totally other news, my dad sometimes reminisces, when we're on the phone together, and some of those reminiscences can be wonderful. Even really brief ones. He was talking about a friend of his from high school: the friend lived in East Lexington and my dad lived more in the center of Lexington. They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot... "We'd sit there, smoking Parliaments," he said. That detail. My dad as a teenager, smoking Parliament cigarettes.

Okay folks, that's it for tonight. I just wanted to post *something* because it's been more than a week.