中止 Cancelled

It's more than wet. It poured all yesterday, got very heavy last night, and rain has kept falling without a letup all day today. Unfortunate, because today was supposed to be the big undokai athletic meet. Teams from the four villages that run along the coast here--Sajima, Ashina, Akiya, and Kuruwa--were supposed to compete at various events that make up the usual undokai. Races--sprints, relays--and other events.  I don't know about the other villages, but we in Akiya even had t-shirts prepared for the big day, with logos, one in Japanese on the front, and one in English on the back. But the downpour soaked the school grounds, and so we'll have to wait until next year to see if M is very good at throwing small balls into an elevated basket and m very good at eating bread hanging on a string, and running in the relay. (I was supposed to run the three-legged race with m but we couldn't agree to do it.)

The front logo

And the one on the back

Homework

 

I'm taking today off. I can't pretend that it's not exhausting, making the long commute, being in the office and concentrating on various things with the big event--the upcoming operation--hanging over my head. I don't know how other people handle it, but I'm finding it hard to go more than two or three days without a break. So, instead of rushing out in the morning while everyone else is just finishing breakfast, I got to hang around, and watch M get m's free-spirited curly hair under control, and send her off to school.

 

Watching her upload that fairly heavy schoolbag with all its attachments on her skinny frame had me in stitches. She's off to pick up her friend at her house, and then they continue picking up other friends until they have a whole posse of kids making the 1k trek to the school. There aren't a lot of sidewalks in this area, but most of it is down backstreets, and the pack of kids definitely is more visible than if she were alone. 

I think I'll spend the day just staying healthy, maybe take a long walk down the coast. I don't know how long the recuperation will take before I can do yard work, and we figured it would be best to get the heavy stuff done now. So last weekend, I shoveled a ton of dirt we'd ordered from the pile where they dumped it in the yard (below) to the vegetable garden area to start preparing for next spring (though we might try to do a few winter vegetables, like broccoli or something).

Bright spots

 The end of the summer put on some spectacular sunset displays. I didn't get home in time to see a lot of them, but the ones I did see--on weekends and holidays--were amazing. These are all shot from our front window. The one above is shot with a friend's 200mm lens, since I don't have one.

 

This one (above) is on one of the two days they call--as I've mentioned before--"Diamond Fuji" days, when--on its way across the horizon--the sun sets just behind the crown of the mountain.  If you look straight out our window facing the sea this angle is at about 45 degrees to the right. In mid winter the sun sets straight out the window; mid summer probably 60 degrees to the right.

  

This last one is an example of a tumor seen on a  PET CT scan, almost exactly the way my tumor looked when they first showed it to me. The bright spot is where the radioactive tracer has collected at the tumor. I met with the surgeon yesterday, and we've decided to have the surgery on October 18th. The MRI of my head and the CT of my insides have shown that there isn't any spread, so I'm very thankful for that. They're going to have to take out the middle lobe of my right lung, but the lung capacity tests were good, and the doc said I may lose as little as 10 percent of my capacity. I don't have much time to make a difference, I guess, but I'm going to start trying to up my breathing capacity before the operation. 

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.