The first day of September dawns over Misawa. I'm fresh out of the shower after our last weekend mid watch, cleaned and breakfasted, and here to prattle away.
I woke up yesterday at three o'clock yesterday afternoon, the first time I've sawn that much lumber since I don't know when. Felt pretty darned good. I made my way down to the kitchen for some peaches and a glass of juice, and tried to work out the crossword, but I hardly put a dent in it. Just wasn't coming. Didn't have any trouble when I helped one of the airmen with it later on, when I was supposed to be working; the answers bubbled up without much effort at all.
I wouldn't want you to think that your Fighting Forces of Freedom do nothing but spend their time on duty watching television and solving crossword puzzles. We did, this weekend, but it was a strangely quiet set of watches. We had even expected to be somewhat busy, but it didn't work out that way, so there we were, cocked and ready to go off, but the world didn't need us to save it. After we ran all the training drills we had, it was all we could do to stay awake.
That wasn't a sort of coded message about expecting to be busy, by the way. The bad guys aren't being any more malevolent than their code of doom normally demands, or not that I know of, anyway. And anyway, Fox News doesn't tell us why when they bump the Terror Alert up to Panic!
Getting back to the weekend mids, though; we trained, we solved every crossword puzzle within our collective grasp, we even had a GI party, which means everybody cleaned, swept and mopped their part of the ops floor until their mothers would've been proud ... and somehow even all that didn't fill enough time to keep us all from turning into bobble-headed dolls before the sun peeked over the horizon. I'm talking about a long set of weekend mid watches.
But it's over and I'm home until Wednesday night. There's beer in the fridge, I still haven't opened all the books I got in the mail last week, and Tim's off from school today, this being Labor Day, so maybe we can squeeze in a watergun fight before the rain starts pouring down.
By the way, how does it figure that I stood a mid watch, Barb's got class tonight, but Tim's school is closed for the day ... so the only person in the family who doesn't work gets Labor Day off. I'm puzzled.
Now I've really gone over to the dark side. I bought a lawn mower. A real one. 4.0 hp gas engine, 27" wide deck, four wheels, makes a VRRRRRNNN noise like a '78 Ford LTD with a hole in the exhaust. A power tool with an attitude.
It was time. I'd been holding out because the lawn around our quarters is pretty small, but it takes about an hour to cut it with the weed whacker, and ends up looking like a hayfield after the crop's been cut and brought in. And I knew where I could buy a second-hand lawn mower at a stupid cheap price. Sooner or later, I would succumb; I should have done it months ago.
So right after supper we went up the street, I handed over twenty bucks, and we went home pushing a big old Lawn Boy. Tim wanted to mow then lawn right then -- can that attitude possibly last? (Answer: No. He used to be crazy for the weed whacker, too. Used to be.) It had just enough gas to roar to life for about two minutes, though, and Barb had the car. "We can walk to the gas station," Tim said hopefully.
Now, that's just wrong. When my brother and I were boys, we did not beg to mow the lawn, and if we volunteered to fetch gasoline, it was a way to get the keys to the truck for a drive to the corner store. Tim is going about this boy mowing the lawn thing all wrong. We'll have to work on this together.
As I mowed the lawn in the morning, it occurred to me that I hadn't got behind a power mower like this since about 1984. The only time I ever had a yard to mow, I used a push-mower, and here's why: A power mower sucks. You'll get no wistful reminiscing from me about afternoons spent in the yard, the roar of a Tecumseh, the smell of fresh-cut grass. Okay, the grass smell is pretty good, when somebody else is cutting.
And you know what? I didn't get the yard mowed any faster than I did with the weed-whacker. It looked a little nicer, except where I tried to push the mower up the crazy stair-step landscaping in front and behind the building, and mowed the grass right down to the dirt. So there. Electric is better. Yah. Okay. Glad we settled that.
None of this makes any difference to Tim. He pouted when he came home from school and found out I mowed the lawn.
The garage has my car. I took it in for the inspection that the Japanese require every two years, and of course whenever you show your car to a mechanic, he can find round about five-hundred bucks worth of repairs that have to be made pretty much right away.
I know that. I wasn't surprised. Oh, I was perhaps just a tad annoyed because these very necessary repairs followed on the heels of last week's very necessary repairs, which I had done after the pre-inspection revealed broken bushiwoggles and loose fraginators, but somehow failed to detect the big hole in the rear-view mirror which, as you may have noticed on many other cars (but the fershlugginer mechanic did not), hangs from a metal bracket so far out from the door that you have to step around it when walking past.
The garage called to tell us about this and other deficiencies on Wednesday afternoon. I haven't seen my car since.
So to get to work and back these last two nights, I hitched a ride, or I caught the bus, which loops through my neighborhood before heading north and incidentally stopping off at my place of employment. At six in the evening, it's loaded with kids headed for the north housing area. Full of pizza and cokes from the food court, they were really very forthcoming in the most vocal ways about themselves and everybody around them.
What is it about a group situation that makes people say things they wouldn't normally say? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't discuss the bus driver's butt in any case, but really, why would the subject come up at all, even if you were one of a busload of teenagers? I'm not complaining, mind you, just wondering.
I finished up all my training requirements for my latest certification; the evaluation should be scheduled for next week some time, and will I ever be glad to get that monkey off my back. But that's about all I did at work this week, and it was pretty dull and repetitious, so you don't want to hear about that.
I had nearly perfect sleeping weather today, overcast and cool, and when I woke up in the afternoon it was looking like it was thinking real hard about raining, and not stopping for at least three days. This is our third rainy season at Misawa (I still can't think of it as 'summer') and we've never had anything but rain, or at best low fog and drizzle, for the Misawa air show, which is scheduled for this Saturday and Sunday. Wet weather has been a part of the tradition of the air show for as long as anybody can remember, it seems ... sort of like it is for the fireworks on the fourth of July.
Other Big Events This Week: Tim got a haircut. I pass this along to you because he's awfully proud of it. It does look pretty good on him. He conferred closely with his barber -- he's got a favorite barber, and waits especially for her -- and has been experimenting with various hair gels, which he insists I examine both visually and manually. "Doesn't it feel natural?" he asked me, as he patted his carefully arranged coif. "Feels like gelled hair," I told him.
I never went for the wet look. I don't know anybody in our family who went for the wet look. It's not nature or nuture, so where did he get this?
And it's not just the wet look. Tim's become quite a clothes horse, very particular about what he wears and how carefully it's washed, pressed, and presented. His shirts and pants must hang just so. Colors must be carefully coordinated. Barb's like this sometimes, but for the most part, if it's clean and doesn't have any holes that would scare little children, she'll wear it. I'm not quite as particular about holes as she is.
His shirts usually reflect a sports theme, but his pants are the baggy sort. He used to try to wear them down off his butt, so that you could see just about all of his BVDs, which we're given to understand is the height of fashion, but we drew the line there. Big & baggy is okay, but nobody should have to look at his butt. He pouted about that for a while, but the compromise seems to be okay now.
Then there are the sneakers. They must be white. He cleans the scuffs off them after each basketball game and brushes on a new coat of whitener. For the money they cost, I'm not going to discourage this kind of tender loving care at all.
Lately, he's been experimenting with odor. "Sniff this," he said, shoving another brand of deodorant, maybe the second or third he's tried, under my nose, deodorant that, I pointed out with a screwed-up face, had just moments before been deep in his sweaty armpit. He seemed to think that my squeamishness was somehow unbecoming of a father and a military service man.
The image above is Chessie, the mascot of the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad. She was dreamed up, so to speak, in 1930 as part of a promotion for the road's new class of sleeper cars, and she's been an ever-present part of their corporate name ever since. You can still see the outline of a cat if you look in the center of the 'C' on the C&O's boxcars and locomotives. Why would I possibly think you're interested? I figure Chesapeake is the perfect name for the kitten. Am I right?
After a long day of being cooped up in the house because it's freaking raining again -- and I mean freaking raining, the kind of rain that somehow falls sideways so it gets up under your umbrella -- anyway, after a day of watching that out the windows, there's nothing quite like a full-blown rubber-band fight to get the blood moving.
First, there's the opening salvo, when I'm trying to figure out the crossword puzzle. Tim thinks this is the perfect time to work on his Dirty Harry impression and unload on me with his new twelve-shooter. I keep telling him he's wrong. I use lots of nonverbals.
Then there's the chase scene. I go for the frontal assault, Tim makes generous use of the tactical retreat. He's even got a bugle call for that, or what I like to call "squealing like a girl."
Finally, there's the mop-up. Tim tries to corner me, and I lead him into my ambush, then blast away as he tries to cover his butt with a pillow, or just curls up into a ball. And squeals like a girl.
Once I had cowed him into complete submission, a state he still doesn't realize he's in, it was back to staring out the windows at the rain. I predict a very wet winter.
Switching gears, there was a pretty cool story in today's Stars & Stripes, a former store manager and maybe ten others at an Army post in South Korea tunneled their way under the wall of the installation and used it to smuggle out about 62,000 cases of beer and liquor worth two million bucks.
For about a year, they managed to pass in and out of a military post undetected in one of the most high-tempo operations environments known to the U.S. military. Pretty gutsy, don't you think? And it turns out the only reason they got caught was the police received an anonymous tip. I'll bet that's one post commander who's going to find it pretty hard to sit down for a couple weeks.
Today's skies were heavily overcast but not actually raining, so I took a walk down to the flight line to see what a Misawa air show is supposed to look like. And you know what? It looks like every other festival I've been to in Japan, except there were several very large jet fighter planes parked alongside the food booths.
And they never moved. An awful lot of people came to the air show to see Air Force and Navy jets on static display. The Japanese put on a show with some jet trainers that flew through aerobatic stunts in formation, but the hulking military jets just sat there.
Wait, I take that back. An Air Force F-16 put on a show, a pretty interesting choice, when you consider that anybody who lives within five miles of Misawa can see F-16s in flight any day of the week.
But lots and lots of people were there anyway. I think they come for the burgers and pizza, and the planes are sort of window dressing. They were lined up twenty deep at the triple-wide booth that Anthony's Pizza had set up in a special corner of the flight line, and it looked like they were walking away carring at least two boxes each. It's hard to describe Anthony's pizza -- have you ever tried to make pizza yourself, and you used way too much cheddar cheese? And burned it? Like that, sort of.
Barb was there, too. She volunteered to help out at the booth that the animal shelter set up to raise a little money, selling baked goods. By the time she got there, they were sold out, so she had already gone home by the time I spotted the booth.
I hung around long enough to make sure I'd seen all the food booths, had a spring roll and kept my promise to try at least one weird food, squid on a stick. No, I lied, the spring roll was my new weird food, or at least it looked weird the way he made it and served it up. When it turned out to be an ordinary spring roll, I was pretty disappointed.
Squid on a stick is just never going to be something I'm going to ask for, unless a lot of beer is involved. It'd have to be pretty good beer, too. And free, probably.
We had our first cold snap yesterday, no frost yet but a freshening reminder to look for your trousers and a sweatshirt at the back of the dresser drawer.
A brief, sunshining afternoon gave me a chance to flip-flop down the street in shorts and a t-shirt, however, so I used a trip to return a book to the library as an excuse to get out and soak it up. After I've spent all night long in a cubicle farm, there's nothing quite as refreshing as a stroll with the sun on my face, even if there's a hint that summer's gone.
I could've been cutting some Z's, which would have made it easier to get through the mid watch I've got to stand tonight, but while I have the time and a comfy bed, today is the day that services chose to get into the newly-vacated quarters next door and, well, it sounds like they're completely gutting the place with bulldozers. And it seems that they put in a phone call to the 35th Fighter Wing before they came over here ... Gen Aikins? Good morning, Randy Nitroglycerine from Total Demolition and Chaos here. We'll be keeing Dave Okonski awake all morning with every instrument of destruction we currently hold in our inventory, but I was wondering if you could order all your jet fighters to circle the base, sort of background music, as it were? You were going to do that today anyway? What a pleasant surprise! Bombs away, general.
I'll be typing with my forehead a lot tonight. Shucks, it feels like I'm doing it already. Better cut this short.
Tonight we rehearsed the script for the planetarium show that we'll tape on Saturday. Most of the time, these scripts are only a little whacky, the way translations sometimes can be. He is a wonder the watch. Consequently with the periods, if I in the connection am found I and to write, of funny whole number come for the exterior does.* That kind of thing. The trick to geting around that is by reading it as many times as possible beforehand. Eventually we get over the giggles so that, on taping day, we sound like a whole family of Dean Martins reading straight lines for a Jerry Lewis celebration. Hay, Lay-deee!
Most of the scripts follow the same kind of thread: There are usually several characters with a few strands of a plot holding them together. One of them coincidentally knows an awful lot about constellations. He takes several minutes in the middle of the script to narrate a significant bit of Greek mythology, then the rest of the characters return to learn a few more constellations and wrap up any loose plot ends.
From the start, however, this latest script was different. The father, a blind man, was the astronomy major. His son was blind in one eye and, in his first lines of the script, explained that he hated his dad and thought his bad eye was his dad's fault. The kid had a serious attitude problem all through the story, contradicted his dad and called him names. To wrap up the story at the end, the boy's mother explained that, when the boy was born, his father was so distraught over learning that the boy was going blind in one eye that he gouged his own eyes out.
Cheery little story to tell the visiting children at the science museum, eh?
So we took a few liberties with the tone of the story, and completely cut out the King Lear bit. I don't know how it's going to sync with the Japanese program. I guess we could have done it straight, in the tone of a Vincent Price movie, to see just how creepy we could make the whole thing, but it's way too cleaned up for that now.
*Hats off to Pete-O.
This evening's base retreat ceremony was a much more formal affair that most. Usually, at four-thirty, a couple of cops drive into Risner Circle, post themselves at the pole, and wait until the appropriate music begins to play on the public address system before slowly lowering the flag, removing it from the staff, and driving off without much more fanfare than that.
Today, though, the flag hung at half-mast, three formations stood in the circle -- Army, Navy, and Air Force; the Marines were represented in the flag detail -- and a small canopy stood nearby the flag, where a Naval officer in white read quietly as I walked up. I couldn't hear what he was saying, even though there was only a little noise from the flight line.
The air was almost dead quiet; the flag hung limply from the staff. The Naval officer finished his inaudible invocation, the formations came to attention, and the flag detail approached the staff. Instead of the usual blaring recorded music, played over loudspeakers, a choir sang, first the Japanese national anthem, to respectfully recognize the host nation, then the Star Spangled Banner.
When the detail lowers a flag from half staff, it's customary to first raise it all the way to the top, in salute, then bring it slowly down. The flag reached the top about the same time that the choir finished with, "...the land of the free, and the home of the brave." We stood at present arms as they brought the flag down and folded it. Fighter aircraft flying round the pattern broke the stillness.
I walked back to my quarters down streets where children played on their bicycles and ran through playgrounds while their parents sat on the front stoops, swapping stories. Two years ago, I wouldn't have thought a scene like this would be possible. I was sure that everything about our way of life had changed so much that we'd be living in the same world that the Israelis and the Palestinians do, or the Russians and the Chechens, or the (PICK A PAIR OF ETHNO-RELIGIOUS GROUPS).
I don't feel that our world is unchanged. Hardly that. It's nothing short of miraculous that I can still walk down a street where children can play and people can carry on. Being able to carry on, however, makes it somewhat easy to put to the back of your mind the cataclysm that broke into our world two years ago.
Never forget.
The alarm clock woke me exactly at noon. I gave the snooze button a smack, then switched it off just to make sure it wouldn't be bothering me again. I knew Barb would check in about five or ten minutes to see if I was up, so I wasn't worried about oversleeping.
We went to Hachinohe at about two o'clock to tape the planetarium show. This is always quite a treat. They bring us in to their office, where we have a seat at a small coffee table, wedged into a corner beyond the blocks of desks. One of the office workers brings us drinks; today, it was iced tea. The first time, it was coffee. I don't drink coffee, but I drank it that day, with lots of sugar.
Two of the guys -- one of them is the museum director, I think -- went over the script with us, to see who would be playing what part. Since there were only three of us today, we ended up sort of doing a round robin. And today there was the question of cutting parts out of the script, the parts that had to do with son hating dad so much he wished his mom would divorce dad. Little things.
Last Saturday we went to the Hachinohe Children's Science Museum to record the English version of the monthly planetarium show, always a fun trip. This month, you'll recall, the script needed some rewriting to make it a bit more family-friendly. They asked about that while we were drinking the tea they brought us, and after a while we managed to get across that we'd made the changes they asked for, in both mangled English and Japanese -- we're kinda talented that way. At mangling, not necessarily at English or Japanese.
Thursday night was my last mid watch for a month. We had a pizza party to celebrate, which may have worked against us. It was a lot of fun, but we ordered the pizza as soon as we reported for work, so everybody had a big belly full of pizza by nine or ten o'clock. You have no idea how hard it is to stay awake all night long after you've filled yourself with all the greasy pizza you can eat.
Barb and I went out to the club for a long, leisurely dinner last night. They've reinvented the club once again by renaming the officer's club; it's now called Magnum's, a surf-and-turf place. Funny, but it looks exactly like dining room at the officer's club.
Even though we've arrived at that time of year when I have to grab a jacket on the way out the door to the post office, a hurricane is forming over Okinawa right now that's headed this way, so not only do we have the cool, fall weather, but the rainy season is dogging us right into winter. I can only imagine that we'll be in snow up to our noses this winter, which will satisfy the skiers and the old-timers who've been bragging up the Misawa winters so much that we can hardly wait for the ice age that will shut them up.
No, of course they wouldn't shut up. We could all end up tramping across the Bering Ice Bridge in a mass migration to escape the advance of a crushing ice sheet, and the old farts would be bragging every step of the way. This is nothin'! they'd bark. Why, back in the winter of '87 we had snow that made this look like a summer picnic! Slogged through it five miles uphill to work every day, no route bus back then ... blah de blah blah blah ... No question of who'd end up on the menu if we had to resort to cannibalism this winter.
Okay, that was pretty lame. I'm not hitting on all eight this morning; Barb and I were out sort of late last night. We went to 007's, a local bar in GI Alley that the flight had reserved for a party to celebrate six or seven people who were getting or had already gotten married. After the party was over, we went to Figlio's for a beer, then to Forever's -- but on the way I realized that I'd better not have any more beers. I think I'd had maybe five all night. Doesn't take much for me to bury the needle these days.
So I got to bed late and woke up early when the kitten jumped all over my face; now something like that'll really drain your batteries. Barb put her out and we slid back into coma-like sleep for a couple more hours. I got up a little while ago, but I still haven't managed to wake up all the way; maybe I need a nap before lunch.
Okay, I feel better now, let's try again ...
Our party last night was in one of the original GI 'trick bars.' A unit of shift workers used to be called a 'trick,' and the tricks used to sort of claim a bar off-post as their home away from home, where they could go to hang out after standing a watch. You can spot these places pretty easily because they haven't changed much, if at all, since the 1980's.
007's might go back farther than that. It was built in your basic clubhouse style, plywood walls covered in places with cheap linoleum; both the plywood and the lino was covered in grafitti, and not the colorful kind you can find on some walls and subway cars in the city. This stuff was all done in thick, black marker and it was all limited to a vocabulary of about a dozen cuss words used to describe everybody who'd ever been there. The couches looked like they were picked off the curb ahead of the garbage truck. And remember tabletop video games? They had two or three of those, ringed with cigarette burns.
The ceiling and the walls behind the bar were covered with dollar bills, each obscured by a message in the same vocabulary as the grafitti, and each discolored a cancerous yellowish-brown by years of cigarette smoke. Everything in there smelled like an ashtray, including all of us after about three minutes.
There was a karaoke machine set up in one corner of the bar, and the hostess tried to get us going by singing a couple numbers. It took a little over an hour, but somebody finally took the bait and sang a tune I didn't recognize. Does anybody ever recognize a karaoke tune, or does the audience just play along?
I found out that two of the airmen at the party couldn't drink because they were under the legal age here in Japan of 20 years. One of them was pretty happy, though, because he would celebrate his birthday in November, which made him exactly one year older than (drum roll, please) my oldest son.
That didn't exactly sneak up on me, but it still made me laugh out loud to think of it.
This reminded me of another day I know is coming, the day that I meet the airman who was born after I enlisted in the Air Force, 4 February 1984. That person enlisted last year, probably in August or September after he graduated from high school and partied the summer away. That would mean he finished basic training in late September or October, and to make it to my command he would have gone through probably two or three months of tech school, which means he could be out there in the field right now. He may be right here at this station as I type these words, and I just haven't met him yet. And when I do, I'll bend over laughing, and he won't have the faintest idea why.
We stayed at the bar until nine o'clock, when the party broke up because there was another party starting at Forever's, a bar just down the alley. Barb and I stopped in to see who was there and say hi, but I was due to turn into a pumpkin soon, so we skipped out.
I went to Optometry today to see about getting a new pair of glasses, clutching a pair they issued me about a year ago but which I've never been able to wear because they make me feel drunk. That was about the best description I could give them. I could see clearly through them, but if I looked around or turned by head, I got double vision. Really weird. The tech couldn't explain that, and he was a little peeved that I waited more than a year to mention that the perscription was no good for me. Now I've got to make an appointment to get my eyes examined again. I hope he's not going to be the one who does the eye-blast test on me. "Nope, didn't get it, have to try again." BAM! "Hang on, you blinked." BAM! "Man, this is not your day..." BAM!
And now, The Rice Scandal!
According to NHK television news, inspectors in Japan are conducting DNA tests on so-called "premium" rice to make sure there isn't any rice-gouging going on. Has DNA testing become so cheap and easy that labs will test rice? "Bump the murder investigation! First, make sure this rice is fresh!"
There's a pretty good article in the New York Times about guys who get seriously into the hobby of flight simulators. One guy started with Microsoft's Flight Simulator and ended up with the cockpit of a 737 in his garage. I have at times felt a little self-conscious about my hobbies ("I collect spores, molds, and fungus"), but nothing I do would compare to this.
"Ah, dear, is that an airplane in the garage?"
"Not an airplane, honey, just the nose and cockpit of a Boeing 737-200 airliner. The avionics are a little dated, though, so I'm going to buy a few parts to upgrade it to a 737-700."
"Sure. Okay."
As I sometimes point out when the subject of weird hobbies comes up -- some guys golf. Although, in this case, I'm thinking that maybe golf isn't quite as weird as this.