Roma Therapy

The temperature dropped 10 degrees (C) between yesterday and today, so it just could be that summer's over. The hottest summer since the weather bureau was established, says the weather bureau. We were able to make it through, however, without using any air conditioning--except for the one day that we got back from Colorado (the switch in humidity was impossible to handle). M said the days got hot, and the blinds came down to hide the sun and the view. But the evening and night breezes coming off the sea were just enough to sleep comfortably, so it was amazingly suffer-free. Not so some of the garden, and the vegetation in the hills around us has also had a hard time and is less green than usual. We did do well with cucumbers, goya, peppers and shishito; not so well with zucchini and eggplant.We did very well with tomatoes, a blessing since we do love our tomato sauce. For a while there, we'd get one of these harvests (above) every day or so, and we were able to freeze a lot. More than anything, our first-year garden taught us a lot about what not to do and that should go into lessons for next year. (Failing at zucchini, according to some, is like not being able to tie your shoelaces.) But damn, these Roma tomatoes are good!

M's slowly increasing her aromatherapy massage clients. So far, once they come to the salon at the house, they seem to want to come back, so that's a good sign, isn't it? She also goes out on call to various places, hotels, spas, etc.  I'm sure she thinks it's slow going, but I'm surprised at how quickly she's established herself. It's been a lot of hard work, but the results are good. As I'm writing, she has a client in the salon now.

Ever since seeing those glowing isotopes floating in my right lung on the image of the doctor's computer, I'm very conscious of what's going on inside me, though there's little I can do about it at the moment. Cut the alcohol intake. Walk more. Get in shape. Sleep well. Learn patience. Eat tomatoes.
I'm not sure about the last one, but it's the easiest one to do.

This really sucks

Last Friday I was told I've got lung cancer. On Saturday, I got nailed by a jellyfish. Both things really sucked, but the weekend got much better after that. We even managed to see the emperor and empress do their peculiar stiff wave from their motorcade a few meters away.

First things first. Everybody told me that jellyfish season was over. It is September, after all, so I put away the anti-jellyfish cream and put on my swim suit, stepped thigh deep into the ocean and dove forward . . . right into strands of jellyfish strings. Luckily, though, it was just those thin detached strings that hit my face arms and legs. (I guess the jellyfish are hanging out a bit longer with the warm water of this very hot year.) That ended my swim, as I had to go pour on some vinegar to try to control the rash. It still itches a bit, but it's manageable and disappearing fast.

Which is how I hope the lung cancer turns out. It hasn't been fun waiting for the final diagnosis. They told me the day of my annual check in August up that there was a spot on my right lung--both in the x-ray and the CT scan, but then I had to go back a week later to get a broncoscopy--which was inconclusive--and then wait another week to get a PET CT scan and then another week for the final conclusion. It was almost a relief to get to this point, since I was unable to control my imagination from envisioning everything under the sun.

Right now, it's stage 1, about 3 centimeters in diameter. I'm undergoing more tests to see if it has spread. Had a CT scan of my innards, and it looks like those are clean. Will have an MRI on my head next week to see if there's any movement up there before meeting the surgeon and planning the next step.

embarrassing photos

Y-chan took a lot of photos at last week's festival that made mine look pretty lame by comparison, so I'm going to swallow my pride, along with the last bits of the marinaded octopus that Y bought and that we have feasted upon since, and show some of them. That's the mikoshi girl (above) all dressed and ready for bear(ing) the portable shrine around the village.

That's her doing her job, just before she started shouting at the kid next to her to quit goofing around and help carry the mikoshi.

And m again, this time lugging the shrine through the surf (though it looks as if the adult is doing most of the work). I'll forgive the kids here since a lot of them were just barely holding their heads out of the waves.

And finally Y's shot of the adult shrine in the water. At this point, as I mentioned, these guys are completely out of it, but that doesn't stop them from rocking the heavy shrine up and down in the water so frantically that they're always just a hair from losing it . . . but they never do.

akiya matsuri

So why am I showing you this photo of a little truck full of drummers with an accompanying flute player, or should I say flautist, and a fine array of tissue paper flowers? Bear with me a moment. It was a busy day.

It started out with M's mom, and Y,  K, and Y2,  M's friends, who stayed the night in order to make the trip to the Nagai fishing port's morning market, which--if you remember a previous post--takes place on the 2nd Saturday of each month. M had to take little m to the start of the local festival (in which m was going to get her start at carrying the mikoshi, the portable shrine around the neighborhood). So I drove M's mom, and Y and K down the coast to the port only to find that the incredibly nasty wind and rain of the night before (which had almost aborted my bike ride from the station to the house) had stopped the fishing boats from doing any damage to the society of fishes. In other words, the market was shuttered, and we had to make do with the regular fresh fish store--where we ended up buying 7 sardines, 4 kamasu, 8 sea urchins, 12 big hamaguri clams, 6 scallops, 1 steamed octopus and 7 lunch packs of octopus rice, plus cucumbers, etc., blah, blah, blah, at a price slightly higher than we would have paid at the market.

Got home, ate the octopus rice and tracked down the progress of m's portable shrine. This year was a big one for Akiya: there were, I think, 5 of them--one for little kids, one for little bigger kids, one for teenage girls, one for teenage boys, and one for the adults. (Take my word for it. The teenage girls kicked ass. Made the teenage boys look like total wimps, and the adults look like they were playing catch up all day.) 

 

We caught up with m's shrine when they were taking a break. (The kids carry the mikoshi from 10 to 3 or 4 in the afternoon, so there are plenty of breaks for food and drink. I'm not sure the kids need it but the adults use all the break time to catch up on their lack of alcohol and conversation over the past year.) 

m was very proud that she was already hurting from hoisting the shrine palanquin on her shoulders.

See, she's already got the mix of arrogance, self-importance and cool that is so important for young women at festivals. (She doesn't quite have the callus yet, though, that shrine carrying fanatics get from hoisting the beams on their shoulders. I knew one guy who used to travel all over the country to the big festivals and whose permanent callus rose an inch or two out of his shoulder. I almost expected the growth to grow a head, and start talking, like the character in the movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising.)

But she quickly had to get back to her palanquin hoisting.

Which brings us back to the  photo at the beginning of this post. That little truck with the drummers and the flowers? Well, I helped make those flowers. 

Not really make them, to be honest. But two weeks ago, m and M went to the local fish union building--or to be more specific, house--and folded colored tissues and tied them to the colored rods. And last week, I and m went back to the union where we sat around on the tatami floor with other families and unfolded the tissues into those flowers, while listening to music from the quintessential Shonan beach band, the Southern All Stars. 

So I did my part, I guess, which made me feel less guilty about leaving M and m with the mikoshi, and going back to the house, where I stoked the barbecue and M's mom, Y, Y2 and K and I cooked the sardines, clams, etc. and emptied wine bottles for several hours until the shrine parade made its way around to our part of the village--in fact right down the beach in front of our house.

As always they end up taking the mikoshi into the sea . . .

 . . . before getting totally knackered and finishing up by carrying it back to the shrine. I've done this twice in my life when I much younger and it was the closest thing to doing drugs that I've ever experienced. The chanting, the physical strain and the repetition (not to mention the alcohol every 200 meters) just takes you to a different place. You can see it in the eyes of these guys. They have no idea where they are.

m caught on very quick, and we heard her chastising some of the boys who were goofing off to "quit playing around and do your part!" In a few years from now, I believe, she's going to be leading the teenage girl group in continuing to kick the ass of the other groups. She's got it in her eyes.

picnic chips

Found a recycling place in Yokohama, run by the city, where you can buy wood chips by the carload, so I've been there twice to pack the back of the van. I used it around the parking area stones, where it cut down on the weeds growing, so I got another load to spread around the picnic table on the beach side. This is where a small kind of bamboo has been really difficult to control, so we'll see if this helps. It's pretty nice under the feet, but we also have to see how the rainy season affects it.

I missed it

M was kind enough to show me this shot on the view window of our camera when I got home from work the other day. It had been a miserable morning; I had my rain gear on, but got completely soaked just taking it off in the station parking lot. I rode the train in damp mode, my sneakers squeaking when I got on the train, and I left a wet impression of my butt on the seat when I got off. But it had cleared up in the afternoon, and m played in the surf in the afternoon after school. And then the sunset was kind enough to illuminate Mt. Fuji, a rare sight in the haze of summer, and backlit Standing Rock and the picturesque pine. I forgave her for being able to appreciate this in person, partly because my ensemble had finally dried out by then, and partly because it was Friday night, I had a shochu buzz, and I knew I'd be there the next day if we were lucky enough to have another great sunset.

stuffed on a Saturday

This was one of those days when it feels like there's 34 hours in it, and it's only early afternoon.

We made it to the morning market at Nagai, a fishing village a few kilos down the coast. (It's the most reasonable morning market starting time I've every heard of: the gates open at 9:00am.) It's just a small area in the port, where the fishermen pile their morning catch, and the wives make a few rice dishes with squid and octopus. Awesome. We were a little late so we just got this crab, five uni (sea urchins), and two kamasu--a white meat fish that I don't know the name in English for.

After we finished shopping, we sat out on a sea wall overlooking the bay and ate our squid and octopus breakfast, then stopped at one of the unmanned vegetable stalls to buy some cucumber. Got home, dropped in a few more of the garden stones while M took m to her shigin (traditional Japanese poetry singing) practice. Started a fire and then broke up the uni shells to get the tasty bits out.

After the girls got home we grilled the fish. . . .

. . . . which we then ate with the raw urchin and rice.　Then M went shopping and m, her friend and I made some chocolate chip ice cream and stuck our faces in the ice cream maker and licked out every bit of it. And with that, I've just overloaded on the permissible limit on food mentions, so I won't continue on with how we gorged on the crab and pickled cucumbers later in the day.