yfritz's Journal

yfritz's Profile | Weight History

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30 December 2022

This post is for my dear Russian friend Irina (@IceHeart). My cousin brought me the sweets. The streets are lined with camellia in Tokyo this month.
Photo: Japanese confection served with green tea and Camellia.

(72 comments)

26 December 2022

I averaged nearly 20,000 steps a day last week. Those steps were executed as I chaperoned my father on his trip to Kyoto. He could hardly ambulate without assistance and the trip was ambitious at the very least. Together we walked the treacherous footpaths of the temples and imperial villas in the ancient city.

Graveled paths and uneven stone steps rendered wheelchairs utterly useless. An imperial guard tsk-tsked as my father stumbled on the imperial moss. There was a tiny, pretentious stone bridge (of course), a naked bridge without rails, basically a stone slab over the pond too narrow for us to walk hand in hand. Miraculously he managed to cross the bridge without falling into the imperial koi pond. Chaperoning was all exhausting. I was getting irritated, irritated by the guard’s smug impatience and my father’s overconfidence. Plus my father was talking too loudly, bragging about his past glory, which included pathetic name dropping, etc, etc, stuff nobody cares about. I stopped being mortified by his narcissism years ago but I do loathe anything that disturbs soundscape, so I tersely told him to hush. My father is a parvenu who is not used to being told off. He was already in a foul mood anyway, now that I fueled his snit, a tantrum was to ensue.

We returned to our car and he was verbally abusive to our chauffeur. This is how his tantrums begin usually. Silently I composed an apology note to the chauffeur which I was going to send via WhatsApp later. The chauffeur was some sort of a saint, he slowed the car and announced to us that we were approaching the Shinto sanctuary my late mother adored. It was not included in our itinerary but I told him, “drop me here.” I left my father in the car and started walking towards the sanctuary alone, which infuriated him even more but I did not care. I needed my mother. How did she put up with dad for so many years? He is a monster, and that is a euphemism. He prevented me from attending my mother’s funeral out of spite (trivia: Jimi Hendrix’s dad did exactly the same and Jimi never forgave him). My father is capable of doing anything out of spite. I’ve been heartbroken for 7 years now, still haven’t forgiven myself for not attending my mother’s funeral. Forgiveness is such a vapid concept anyway, I couldn’t care less, but I desperately want my mother to know that I loved her more than anyone in this world. Adjacent to the shrine there is a primeval grove named “Forest of Atonement.” Mother often talked about the stream that runs through the grove. She wanted to bring me here. The stream was small and quiet, its bed as crimson as she described. The dusk started to descend. Mother receded towards the twilight that was erasing the vermilion Torii gate.

The chauffeur called. He informed me that my father decided to visit another place my mother liked, some obscure museum, and he took off all by himself, refusing the chauffeur’s assistance. “I can’t find your father,” said he. I was not concerned. “He will be okay, he is always okay,” I reassured him. Sure enough, my father emerged, his gait unsteadier than ever, appearing a little shook up. “I fell down,” he stammered. “I thought I broke my glasses.” The fall humbled him. He was quiet rest of the day and content with sightseeing without exiting the car. I watched him pressing his forehead against the car window, sometimes craning his neck trying to get a better view of the city, his mouth wide open like a child. Occasionally he mumbled to himself, “oh I see the streets Grandpa liked,” “I called my wife from that tower a week before she died, and she told me about the tiny garden over there.” He was tracing the paths that were loved by those who once cared about him. No, I and my father will never get along, but I discovered that maybe, maybe I do care about him after all, and that I will visit Kyoto again sometime in the near future, to trace the stone steps we walked, to reconnect with him, to try to hear his loud obnoxious voice traveling between the imperial pines.

Photo: Tadasu no Mori (糺の森) “Forest of Atonement” Kyoto, Japan

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15 December 2022

My father has a pedometer app now. Yesterday he registered >6,000 steps.
Until recently he was ventilator dependent and wheelchair bound due to a near fatal illness, and it is still difficult for him to ambulate. I assisted him to Somei Cemetery in Tokyo yesterday, where the cremains of my mother and brother were interred alongside those of many other ancestral members. It is an old cemetery and the cobbled passages between the plots are quite uneven, but my father managed to navigate the area without falling. He was very pleased with this accomplishment and he started singing most innocently. We do not get along but I do secretly admire his tenacity to overcome obstacles in any given situations.
My father is a survivor of the Great Tokyo Air Raid (1945); during the chaos of the firebombing, he was separated from his mother and fell into the Sumida River where countless bodies were floating. He was a young child then. I don’t know if the memory of the night haunts him or not, rather, it seems that he recollects the inferno as the testament to his own resilience.

Wooden pails at a cemetery florist (Somei Cemetery, Tokyo)

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10 December 2022

There are a few unexpected rewards that come with the improved fitness. I’ve grown less and less reclusive, decided to continue my involvement with the Red Cross for awhile and signed up for the “Sound the Alarm” event today. With the firefighters we canvassed the community, raised fire safety awareness, and even installed quite a few smoke detectors. Oh I also walked a good number of steps.
Happy holidays everyone. And maybe check the batteries of your smoke alarms. Mine was dead😱 (replaced now👍🏼)

(114 comments)

05 December 2022

Crap bike journal

I stayed at my friend’s house in Petersburg VA last week. “There’s a voodoo woman next door and she nosy as hell,” she warned me. I never saw the said priestess but I did meet the nosy pit bull behind her rotted fence. “Voodoo Chile,” I thought. It was a rough neighborhood and I managed to get my bike pump stolen. I was also without my helmet and water bottle because I forgot to bring them. Didn’t bother with breakfast either. I decided that the deficiency suited me well. The modern luxuries always make me feel somewhat discomfited on the Civil War trails anyway.

The battlefield elicits my tendency to disarrange contexts. The swish-swish-swish of the pedal strokes betray the contemporary decadence, echoing incongruously between the haunting trees that witnessed the Siege. Pines drop their skinny branches that get caught in my bike wheels then go click-click-click to mock me and threaten to destroy a few spokes, forcing the wheels to slide to a hard stop, subjecting my overequipped, overprotected, overnourished existence to the critical eyes of the famished Confederates crawling out of the trenches to seek answers, risking life and limb to seek the honey from a flower named Blue.

Siege of Petersburg (June 1864 - March 1865)
“A careful study of the 44th Virginia Infantry Regiment revealed a shockingly high desertion rate of nearly 30 percent”

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