Asakiyume mita

Today it was the laundry basket's secret code that I felt tempted to decipher:



It's like writing you see in a dream and then struggle to write down as you wake up.

I went for a walk in the woods on New Year's Day with wakanomori--our destination was a beaver pond. It was late: we had to walk briskly to get there and back before dark. On our way we met an older man coming in the opposite direction. He had a polished, painted walking stick. I admired it, and he said he'd painted it himself--the moose, the man in the kayak, the dark pines--all things that were important to him. And at the top, the colors of a coral or king snake, because, he said, he loved snakes. He had beautiful eyes and an accent that reminded Wakanomori of Dorset farmers. He allowed as to how there were a lot of people on the trails that day--but for us, he was the first. (We met several others after that. On our way back, Wakanomori said, "I wonder how many more humans we'll encounter." I gave him a sidelong look. "Your disguise is slipping," I said.)

The mist was rising by that point:

We went to a lookout above the Quabbin Reservoir to face east for the first day of the new year. The first light, many minutes before sunrise, lit up a crack in the baleful sky.



As it grew lighter, the waning gibbous moon glowed brighter.



Wakanomori turned his back on the colors to admire the moon.



The sun was as discreet as a Heian lady, just the hems of her brightness peeking from beneath the clouds' screens.



There was evidence fairies had been at the lookout earlier, enjoying takeout.



I posted that picture on Instagram, and amaebi said she had her doubts about whether the L&Ms were part of the takeout. wakanomori agreed: he thinks fairies probably roll their own. amaebi suggested sweet clover and Corsican mint, which I told her was a combination I could be induced to try.

Come find me
smoking sweet clover and mint
at the lookout point

Readers here will know I sometimes refer to Wakanomori, and some may even have been mutual friends on LJ, back on the day.

Well now he has a Dreamwidth journal

Here's to 2006 in 2022, Waka!

We didn't actually ride in a tuk-tuk until we were heading back to the airport on our last day in Leticia, but I thought I'd share these very short videos Wakanomori took because it'll let you see the streets of Leticia and how dominated they are by motorcycles (and secondarily: tuk-tuks).

We saw whole families on one motorcycle: a mom and two schoolkids she just picked up from school,* plus a baby asleep on her shoulder. Most people ride astride, but we saw some passengers sitting sidesaddle. We also saw lots of people carrying home big bottles of water**--the water-cooler water bottles.

Here's a photo of evening motorcycle rush hour, as seen from our open-air eatery:



*A lot about Leticia reminded me of Timor-Leste, and one thing was that there aren't enough school buildings for the students, so kids do school in shifts: some kids go in the morning and some in the afternoon. We went walking one day at around noon and happened to pass a school where parents were picking up kids, and it's quite evident again at sunset that another group of students have been let out.

**The tapwater isn't drinkable in Leticia or in the other municipality we visited, Puerto Nariño. But Leticia is building a water purification plant, so maybe one day? And Gustavo Petro, former guerrilla fighter and new president of Colombia, has promised to invest in the countryside, so maybe for Puerto Nariño, too, one day.

None of this is the rainforest-and-river content you might be expecting from a trip to the Amazon, but I really love, love, love knowing, as best I can, ordinary daily life in the places I visit, and this is part of that.

Part one (40 seconds)



Part two, featuring the roundabout (36 seconds)

One of the luxuries we have maintained is a landline. It's a great way of keeping spam off your cell phone, and it's always charged. Not only have we kept the landline, we've kept a corded phone, which means we don't need any wireless capability for it, which means it doesn't stop working if we lose wifi or power.

For the longest time we had a Panasonic corded phone, but eventually it failed. When Wakanomori went to get a replacement, the only thing that was available was a Panasonic knock-off:

~~The pashaphone~~

I somehow took it into my head that it was made for the Russian market--I think because of the name, though really that should have inclined me to Turkey?--and in fact a complete stranger on the internet started reminiscing with me about late Soviet caller-ID phones when he saw my tweet about it

But in fact the Pashaphone doesn't appear to have any connection with Russia.

It does, however have a connection with China--namely, it's made there. The whole thing is really light. In fact, it weighs about as much as the pink eraser whose tip you can see poking into the photo over to the right of the number 9. It feels like a child's toy phone.

Well, the problem with a corded phone is that sometimes you stretch the cord further than it can easily go and pull the phone off the counter and onto the floor. I've done that a couple of times already since it came to live with us, and something rattled loose inside the poor baby, so Wakanomori took it apart to see what it was....

... and we discovered a small slab of stone stuck in the phone that apparently serves no purpose other than to give it a little weight. It says 恭禧 (Gōng xǐ)--congratulations! As in, I suppose, "Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a pashaphone!"



How many devices come with little talismans inside them, wishing us well? Not many! But there should be lots! This is a trend to be imitated--quick, alert the business schools!

One day last summer, I attempted to bring an injured catbird to a wildlife rehabilitation center. Sadly, the bird died in transit, but on the way, I discovered the existence of the Willard House and Clock Museum.



The plaque outside the house contains this thought-provoking statement:

"The realization that time could be spent rather than passed marks a profound change in the way Americans think--and work."

How magical: a whole museum of clocks! I resolved to go as soon as conditions permitted it.

This week they permitted it, and Wakanomori and I went. Our docent, Sarah Mullen, was a fountain of knowledge--literally any question we asked her, she had information on. Including how the original Willards got their land: Apparently the son of an important Nipmuc man wanted his son to have a European education and sent him to school in the Boston area. When the term ended, the school asked for six pieces of silver, and when the boy couldn't pay, the school extracted 300 acres of land from the father. Some of that land was then sold to the grandfather Willard, whose four grandsons (Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron) became the clockmaking Willards. Ah, the colonists. Covering themselves in glory, as usual.

(Interestingly, Grafton, MA, where the Willard House and Clock Museum is located, has land that has remained continuously in the hands of the Nipmuc people.)

The clocks though! Benjamin, the oldest brother, was the least skilled clockmaker, and he limited himself standing clocks. These are less difficult to make because there's more space for all the moving parts.

The face of a Benjamin Willard clock


Cool clockmaking fact: all the gears 'n' stuff inside the clock are called "the movement." The person who makes "the movement" is different from the person who makes the case, who's different from the person who provides the ornamentation and so on. The clockmaker makes the movement, sometimes out of wood, sometimes out of brass (maybe other metals too, but Sarah only mentioned brass).

Simon was the clever brother. He patented a method of fitting all the movement of a standing clock into a clock that could hang on a wall ("It looks like a banjo," Sarah said). He got a patent for this, and these clocks go by the name of "patent timepiece".

Simon Willard's patent timepiece


I asked why they were called "timepieces," and Sarah told me that technically a thing is only a clock if it chimes the hours! And in fact, something can lack a face and numbers, but if it chimes the hours, it's a clock--but if it doesn't chime the hours, it's a timepiece.

Most wall clocks--er, timepieces--had to be wound once a day, whereas the standing clocks only needed to be wound once a week. Here's Sarah setting the time on one.



Aaron Willard made some of the clocks I thought were prettiest. The thing that looks like a smiling peach is not the sun but the moon. The continents rotate up to cover various parts of its face in alignment with the phases of the moon:



Loved the 18th-cent. nomenclature for the places--Barbary, Tartary, and the Great Sea:





( more pictures )

And the house itself was fascinating--a table laid with heavy pewter cutlery; a desk with reading glasses and a tiny book of psalms, a device for rotating a joint as it hangs over the fire, so it will be evenly cooked, a bread oven beside the main fire ... It was a great way to spend an afternoon.

This remarkable movie, Kiku to Isamu, is about the lives of biracial siblings, older sister Kiku and younger brother Isamu, being raised by their frail grandmother deep in the Japanese countryside. It was made in 1959 and is an amazingly clear-eyed, unsentimental depiction of Japanese prejudice--that also contains a stinging indictment of American racism. People keep telling the old granny that she should see about getting the kids adopted through a program that brings the offspring of Japanese women and American servicemen back to the United States, but one kindly neighbor says,

You think it will all be fine if they go to America, but I read the papers. The discrimination between white and black is terrible in America. People say blacks stink and spit on them. It happens even among the soldiers here on the bases.

And when another neighbor says, "The seed is from over there and should be returned," the kindly neighbor says, "It's not as if they were pumpkins or something. With humans it's women who have the eggs." Whereupon the other retreats into well-I-don't-know-about-all-that-book-larnin'-type-stuff.

What's really remarkable about the film is that they don't cast some tiny, adorable little girl for Kiku. She's only eleven, but she's *big*. She's not only a girl, not only Black, not only poor--she's not even conventionally pretty (though she shines with beauty at moments). But she's *such* a complete, real person. She gives as good as she gets ... until it all gets to be too much. You believe in her 100 percent, and your heart breaks for her. (Isamu also is teased, and feels it, but he's smaller, thinner, cuter--and a boy. All of which makes things easier for him.)


(CW for suicide attempt, racism, family separation)

And then you stop and realize, the actress (Takahashi Emi) no doubt faced some of the very things that the character faced. Wakanomori found several articles about her. She did indeed have a hard time, but her love of acting gave her a path forward. You see some of that in the character of Kiku too. Here's a short clip of her performing, all while babysitting (notice the baby on her back?)



Here's an image of her as an adult:



It's a really good movie, and also a beautiful look at how daily life was lived in rural Japan in the period of Tonari no Totoro. As Wakanomori said, it's highly likely Miyazaki saw it.

Wakanomori does a lot of work with gōkan, a form of 19th-century illustrated fiction in Japan. They tend to be exciting stories--lots of revenge tales, with ghosts and so on--and the illustrations are just fabulous. Not only do they give you this amazing picture (literally) of 19th-century daily life (graffiti on the walls, a fortune-teller's booth, a traveller having his feet washed at an inn), but they also show you a whole lot about book publishing in Japan at that time (e.g., advertisements for the author's other books--or advertisements for the author's day-job products, such as medicines).

I love *so many* of the pictures (I really love the graffiti one, and there's one with a dog in it that starts out with the dog's footprints in the snow), but the one I want to share here is one with multiple people spying on a scene--it could be something from a spy-thriller parody:



The note in blue is Wakanomori's. The story is by Santo Kyōzan, who Waka tells me was the most prolific author of gōkan, and the art is by Utagawa Kunisada (known as Kunisada). It was published in 1823 (in Japan, that year was known as Bunsei 6).

Wakanomori went for a bike ride beneath high-tension wires and took this photo of the wires reflected in a little stream.



The water is rippling and moving, so the reflection is broken up. It looks ...



... like calligraphy



The very calligraphy that Waka spends his days deciphering and teaching--as in this example, an essay by an 18th-century female scholar, writing on the Kokinshū, an imperially commissioned poetry anthology of 10th-century Japan.



If I can get Waka to read me the water calligraphy, I will tell you what it says. He also took a video in which you can hear the wires singing their high-tension song, which may provide clues to the text.

One amusing thing I noticed earlier in the pandemic was that chairs were popping up in odd places. First an office chair appeared in the middle of the neighborhood common. A little later a metal chair with a vinyl cushion on the seat and for back support appeared wedged below the railway bridge. "I'd like to get my picture taken there when I'm just finishing a run," I thought--it would be just perfect because it's often right around that spot that I end a run, and I'm tired.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos of the chairs, so have some drawings from memory. Not to scale! The chairs are larger than they should be--and the office chair looks kind of like a monster.





And the most incongruously placed chair was a wooden chair perched atop the roof of what's called the Swift River Pavilion--Swift River because the school it's next to is called Swift River, and pavilion? I don't now: it's a roof supported by pillars, and underneath it are picnic tables and things. Sometimes little performances happen there.



Some of the chairs lingered longer than others. The one on the common was gone after a day or two, but the one by the railway bridge was there for over a month--but I never got my picture taken there!

So when I noticed that two chairs had appeared underneath the illuminated business sign at a busy (well, by B-town standards ... not that busy, really) T-junction, I vowed not to miss my chance. And the other evening Wakanomori obliged me. I still wish I could have sat in the other ones.