When Things Get Personal

I just got off the phone with my son. He's the handsome little boy you see below (Taken when he was here last Christmas).

His English has deteriorated, as it always does when he's away for a few months. This time, it will be at least seven months. He tries his best, but sometimes words escape him. He doesn't know the word "Earthquake." But he says "Daddy, all day long it's jishin, jishin, jishin." Jishin is the Japanese word for earthquake.

Tai-chan is rapidly growing old. He's too old for his age. He's too young for divorced parents and too young to be torn across the Pacific twice a year for a few stolen weeks in Montreal. Then back to the gulag. Yes, I might be prejudiced, but I lived there for five years. I know what the gulag is.

Yet never a complaint escapes his mouth. He just reacts. Whenever "bad" things happen, in whatever form they might take, be it being wrenched away from a peaceful summer in Montreal only to be back in the penal servitude that is school in Japan, he just seems to swallow it.

But in the conversation tonight, he asked, out of the blue, if "everything in California was okay." Because somehow he knew that there were tsunami warnings on for California.

Of course, I told him, everything in California is okay . . .