Seeing it for the first time

We barely notice these things now, shoved them into the background long ago, can’t even remember or imagine not knowing the significance of them. But can you imagine seeing, for the first time, for the first 100 times, the sun? Or houseflies. Electrical plugs.  Running water.  Pockets.  Shoes.  Four-legged furry dogs. As your kid’s brain flickers up to a higher level, he encounters these objects for the first time; he’s amazed.  With a little effort, you can perceive what could make them fascinating.  The wrinkles of a recessed belly button.  The mystery of a brown-colored indent in an otherwise off-white and perfectly flat kitchen tile.  The flexibility and chewiness of a watchband, hanging like a chimp and wagging its tail.  Or the movable, bangable, plastic telephone complete with springy elastic cord.  Something that is not part of other things, but is its own self, with a distinct shape not connected to other things. A spoon.

We were at a friend’s house for a barbecue a few days ago when, as evening was settling, the wind picked up. I looked up and the tall tamarack trees were rocking, their leaves fluttering.  I had Isaac hanging on me in the crook of my left arm.  Isaac is 20 months old, not really talking yet, but he seemed to start understanding a lot more of our talk since he had an operation a few days earlier to remove fluid from his inner ears.

“Isaac: the wind,” I told him.  He perked up and tried to see what I was indicating.  How do you explain wind?

I pointed at a tree and superimposed my waving hand over a swaying cluster of branches. “Look: See how the wind is moving the trees.”

 “And I can feel it on my face.”  I flapped my hand near my face.

I waved my hand around.  I blew and used my lower lip to channel it toward my hair.  I blew his bangs up. “The wind is over there!”  I made a whooshing sound and waved my hand around some more.

“See?” I asked him.

He got it.

He shrieked and wriggled so I would set him down on the grass. He giggled and looked up at the trees and grasped in their direction and danced a few steps toward them.  Then he, too, started making a whooshing noise, more or less, and laughing.

 

The next day, Isaac was sitting at our dining room table, spooning puréed zucchini into his mouth, haltingly but with a respectable degree of accuracy.  With him preoccupied, I turned back to the book I was reading.  Isaac stopped eating and stuck his chubby finger into the cover photograph, then looked at me with a questioning look.  Was it perhaps a doggy?  If not, then surely a horsey?  It was neither. The book is Hiroshima by John Hersey, and the cover photo is of a giant mushroom cloud rising from an atomic fireball.

“Uh,” I said to Isaac. “It’s like the wind.”

I made a whooshing sound, lamely.

 

At the Novitiate, the motherless Kataoka children were inconsolable.  Father Cieslik worked hard to keep them distracted.  He put riddles to them.  He asked, “What is the cleverest animal in the world?,” and after the thirteen-year-old girl had guessed the ape, the elephant, the horse, he said, “No, it must be the hippopotamus,” because in Japanese that animal is kaba, the reverse of baka, stupid.  He told Bible stories, beginning, in the order of things, with the Creation.  He showed them a scrapbook of snapshots taken in Europe.  Nevertheless, they cried most of the time for their mother.

Several days later, Father Cieslik started hunting for the children’s family.  First, he learned through the police that an uncle had been to the authorities in Kure, a city not far away, to inquire for the children. After that, he heard that an older brother had been trying to trace them through the post office in Ujina, a suburb of Hiroshima. Still later, he heard that the mother was alive and was on Goto Island, off Nagasaki.  And at last, by keeping a check on the Ujina post office, he got in touch with the brother and returned the children to their mother.

 

–May 2005 and 1946