Hello, and welcome to another Wednesday Musings From The Spirit of New Earth. Today, I’d like to share a backstory about my parents, since this is a time of year to bring closure to many, many things in our lives.
So my parents were born in Berkeley, California. Their parents were from Honshu, Japan. And I don’t know much about my mom’s parents. They remain kind of mysterious in my life. Although my mom’s mother, I really liked her.
She was a really nice woman, but I don’t know much about her. I know she used to babysit me when I was really young. My dad’s parents, his mom was an aristocrat and his dad was a farmer, and they decided to get married, which was kind of crossing the cultural boundaries there in Japan, just like in India.
And for some reason, they fled to America. Don’t know the story behind all that for, you know, japanese people, they don’t share much of their history and their background. So my parents were born in the earlier part of the 20th century, I think in 1910 and 1914, they were born.
My mom was a little bit older than my dad. I feel like I’ve been very lucky to have been born with parents that were. Very loving, very kind and wanted the best for me, although we grew up sort of in a lower middle class environment.
And so my dad had to work many menial jobs to raise the family. My mom didn’t work until perhaps she was in her early fifty? S and she got a job at the Oakland post office as a clerk. That was, I believe, her first job.
She mostly stayed home and took care of the family and dad had to work a lot. I remember dad would go to sleep about 930 and get up at four very early every day. He was very dedicated to his jobs. So my parents tried to raise me Methodist, although me being the rebel, me being kind of like the outcast back sheep of the family, so to speak.
A little bit like a renegade little kid with too much energy for my mom. My mom used to say, you give me a pain in the neck. And hopefully that was just figuratively and not actually. But if I did physically cause pain in your neck, mom, I apologize. I didn’t mean to be such a pain in the butt with you. So I was a bit of an unmanageable kid because I had all this energy. I guess I was hyperactive, but maybe not in the sense of today, but I just had a lot of energy.
And I remember I used to get up really early to go to elementary school. I grew up in Berkeley for the first seven years of which I experienced many traumas from scurvy to polio to a car accident to near death experiences. And I remember I didn’t eat any junk food till I was five. And I felt really guilty because I went to the store with like a dime I had in my pocket and bought candy. And I thought, oh, okay, my diet is not natural anymore.
I broke the code. But my mom tried to raise me all on natural foods. And actually they had me go to a chiropractor, probably because of my auto accident when I was seven, thinking that my spine needed a lot of work.
So they’re a little bit avant garde. They were into Whole Foods chiropractics. So that was shunned upon back in those days, late 40s, early 50s, and being born after the war. And I’m sure my parents, too, experienced prejudice against the Japanese people. And what stories I heard was my grandparents and my parents had to go to camp, I think, in Utah, but I heard they only had to go for a couple weeks. So they weren’t in there for pretty much the whole time that the Japanese were in internment camps.
They never talked about that. Another one of those things. Japanese people don’t do talk about those kind of things. But anyway, I feel very lucky that I was raised by loving parents. They really wanted me to know that they loved them, that they loved me, and they did their best physically to care for me eating really good, healthy foods and me doing my sports.
So that’s where I got my energy. I released my energy through basically sports, basketball, baseball, football, and. Dad was not necessarily a disciplinarian, but he, I believe, for much of his life, wanted me to convert to the church.
Of course, I didn’t want to do that. And in my early days, I became sort of like a little semi hippie kind of a guy, and that upset him. Mom didn’t say much, but I’m sure she didn’t, like, see me with long hair.
Actually, I looked like an Indian. I looked like a native Indian, had a headband on, a little bit long hair, and wore cut offs and t shirts. That was my clothing back in those days, but anyway.
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