The Nice Thing About Counting Stars

"In the hot summers of the 30's, we would

sit on the steps and sing for hours. We

even counted the stars in the sky and it

was always beautiful."

So my mother begins

writing her life down, Jackie Onassis

thinking in the car behind dark glasses.

She recalls the luxury

of growing up – she and her sisters

buying jelly bismarcks on Sundays

and eating them in the back seat

of their father's Packard

parked on the drive.

Pretending they were going

Somewhere, and they were.

Not knowing years later they would

be headed for just such an exotic place.

Somewhere far from Fresno, their white stone house

on F Street, the blackboard in the kitchen

where they learned math,

long division, remainders,

what is left

after you divide something.

"When Executive Order 9066 came telling

all Japanese-Americans to leave their

houses, we cleared out of Fresno real

fast. They gave us three days. I remember

carrying a washboard to the camp. I don't

know how it got in my hands. Someone must

have told me – Here, take this."

They were given three days to move

what had taken them years to acquire –

sewing machines, refrigerators, pianos, expensive fishing

rods from Italy. A war was on – Japs

had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Burmashave signs littered the highways:

SLAP

THE JAP

"Take only what you can carry."

My mother's family left the Packard

And with it left Sundays in the back seat.

Others waked away from acres of land,

Drugstores, photo albums.

I think of turtles.

How they carry their whole lives

on their backs. My neighbor Jimmi

told me one night how they

make turtle soup down south.

A huge sea turtle – take a sledge hammer

to the massive shell, wedge it open

with one simple, solid blow

till the turtle can feel

no home above him, till everything

is taken away

and there is nothing

he will carry away from this moment.

My parents had three days

to relocate.

"Take only what you can carry."

One simple, solid blow –

They felt no home above them.

"We were sent to Jerome, Arkansas.

Arriving there, I wondered how long

We would be fenced in."

The nice thing about counting stars is

you can do it just about anywhere.

Even in a relocation camp

miles from home, even in Jerome, Arkansas

where a barbed wire fence crisscrosses itself

making stars of its own – but nothing

worth counting, nothing worth singing to.

My father remembers only two things:

washing dishes in the mess hall each morning

beside George Kaminishi and

listening to Bing Crosby sing "White Christmas."

on the radio in the barracks late at night.

One morning, George looked up from a greasy skillet

at my dad and said Yosh, you're a happy-go-lucky guy.

What do you want to do with your life?

It was the first time he realized he had a life

to do things with. He was fifteen. He didn't know.

It was only later that Dad found out George

had colon cancer and had no life to do things with.

And when Bing sang "White Christmas" late at night

Dad could only think, He's not singing to me he's

singing to white people.

My mother meanwhile was in a different camp

and hadn't met my father. At night, she'd lie

in bed and think about the old family car

back in the driveway – were the windows smashed

and broken into, the thing driven away by thieves?

Or was the grass a foot tall now, erasing the

Goodyear tires that were so shiny and new?

There was a hole in the week where Sunday

used to be, and she wanted jelly bismarcks

more than ever.

"Somehow we adjusted. There were weekly

dances for the young. Dad sent away

for a huge rice paper umbrella of vivid colors,

and Peg and I hugged it during stormy

days."