June 12, 1999 · Saturday

Daniel graduated from high school tonight, the first of my grandchildren to finish. We sat in the bleachers of a football stadium in a cold wind, a thousand folding chairs on the grass below us, and when they said his name Paul stood up and cried, which he will deny.

At the party afterward I gave Daniel George's watch. George wore it from 1950 until October of 1993. It runs two minutes fast and always has. I told Daniel not to have it fixed; his grandfather liked to be early.

He goes to the university in the fall to study engineering. At the party one of Gwen's cousins asked him what he wants to be. He said, "Late, probably." He is his grandfather's grandson in many ways, but not in that one.

May 30, 1999 · Sunday

The peonies are open. So now, as I promised a year ago, their story.

Before the war we lived next door to Mrs. Haugen, a Norwegian widow who kept chickens and did not like children, especially me, because I climbed her fence. My mother had one peony, a pink one, bought as a bare root the year before I was born. It was the only thing she grew in Seattle. She did not have time for a garden, she said, but she had time for one flower.

The week we left, Mrs. Haugen came to our back door, the first time in eight years, with a spade. She said, "The new people will not care for it." And she dug up my mother's peony and carried it across the fence into her own yard. My mother stood on the back step with her hands in her apron and watched and didn't say a word.

In October of 1945, when we came back with twenty-five dollars each and nowhere to live, Mrs. Haugen was still there, behind a new fence. She met my mother on the sidewalk. She said nothing about the war, nothing at all. She said, "Your flower did well. Come in November and we will divide it." And in November she dug it up and cut it in half with the spade and gave my mother half, wrapped in newspaper.

My mother moved that half to three rented houses, and then to the house my brother Sam bought in 1951 in his own name, because in this state my father could not own land then. When my mother died in 1978, I brought divisions here. Now there are eleven plants along the south wall, and a twelfth in Joanne's yard.

I don't know what Mrs. Haugen thought of us. I never knew. She never said anything kind in words. But in 1942 she dug up a Japanese woman's flower and kept it alive for three years, in plain sight of the street. I would like her to be remembered by more than a peony. But a peony is not a small thing to be remembered by.

April 10, 1999 · Saturday

Every night on the news, the families from Kosovo. Walking along the roads and crowding at the borders with what they can carry: bundles, suitcases, a grandmother pushed in a wheelbarrow.

It is not the same as what happened to us. I want to be careful to say so. They have lost far more than we did, and there is shooting, and we had none of that. But I know the look of a mother counting her children at the edge of a crowd. I know the look of a man who has just sold everything for nothing and is trying to stand up straight about it.

Joanne and I took two bags of coats and blankets to the church that is collecting them. The woman at the table asked if we wanted a receipt for our taxes. I said no thank you. I have a receipt from 1942 already.

A week from Monday this page will be a year old. Emily says "anniversary" is the wrong word for a web page. I have decided it is the right one.

March 21, 1999 · Sunday

Ohigan, the spring equinox. My mother always visited the family graves at the equinox; she said that at Higan the other shore is closest to this one. I took George daffodils from the yard and cleaned the moss off his stone with an old toothbrush and told him the news. The news is mostly peas. Planted, late again.

The peony shoots are up along the south wall, red as ever. Soon.

February 20, 1999 · Saturday

I spoke yesterday. There were sixty-two eighth graders in the school library and it was very warm. I said what I have written here, more or less, and at the end I held up the tag, and the room went quiet in a way I recognized from my own family.

Then the questions. A boy in the back asked, "Why didn't you just fight back?" His teacher began to say something and I stopped her, because it is a fair question, and a better one than most grown people ask. I told him I was twelve. I told him my parents were not allowed to be citizens and had no vote to lose. And I told him we did fight, in our way: a few in the courts, many in the Army, and forty years later in Congress, where we asked for an apology and got one.

A girl asked whether we got money. I said yes. The law was signed in 1988, and beginning in 1990 each of us still living received twenty thousand dollars and a letter of apology signed by the President. The letter says that money and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories. I agree with that sentence. I told them what I did with mine: most of it into savings for the grandchildren's schooling, some to the church, and a new roof, which Emily says was very unromantic of me. It doesn't leak.

A small girl in the front row asked, "Are you still mad?" I told her: I am not angry. I have not forgotten. Those are two different things, and you are allowed to hold both of them at once. She wrote it down. I watched her write it down.

February 10, 1999 · Wednesday

A teacher at a middle school here in the city wrote to me through this page. She has read the installments. She asked whether I would come and speak to her eighth graders on the nineteenth, the Day of Remembrance. That is the day in 1942 that the President signed the order.

I said yes before I thought about it, the way you say yes to a second helping. Now I have thought about it. I have never spoken in front of anything larger than a church committee. I have written my notes on index cards, in pencil, and rewritten them, and put them in order, and shuffled them, and put them in order again.

I have decided to bring my tag. I found it in my mother's sewing box after she died, folded into a tin of buttons. She kept it thirty-six years without once mentioning it. I don't know why she kept it. I don't know why I have.

January 1, 1999 · Friday

Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu. Happy New Year.

The house was full today. Paul and Gwen and Daniel, Joanne and Mark and the girls, and Sam on the telephone from Spokane for a whole half hour, which for Sam is a speech. I made ozoni, the New Year's soup with mochi in it, and the black beans, kuromame, so that we will all work hard and stay healthy, and the herring roe, for many descendants, which Mark pointed out was working. Daniel ate six pieces of mochi. I said a small prayer after the fifth.

Before we ate, Paul handed around copies of all six camp installments, which he had printed at his office and stapled at the corner. He gave one to everybody at the table, even Lily, who is nine and read hers under the table during grace. I did not know he had done it. I didn't know what to say, so I said, "You used the company's paper," and he said, "Mom," and that was all either of us needed to say.