Looking at the blog, my last entry was on January 15th. It’s hard to write about life ashore when there isn’t too much excitement to describe without getting into personal details. The year is still young but the first 90 days was combined with sadness, joy and anxiety. The sadness is my mother passed away on January 16th; the joy is the birth of my second grandson on March 8th along with my stepson in Samoa granted an immigration visa two days later to come to the United States to be reunited with his mother and the anxiety of waiting for a decision on relocating to Hawaii instead of Oregon.
Shore time did not bring much joy to me or the family. The day after I posted the last blog I got sad news that my mother had passed away. She was 77 years old and was battling Alzheimer’s for the past three years. It was painful to see my mother decline and the strain on my father to care for her. My mother and father were married for 55 years but known each other for sixty years. She came to America for the first time in 1958 as a “Japanese war bride.” My mother grew up in wartime Japan. Her older brother was inducted into the Japanese merchant marines while her older sister was drafted to work in a munitions factory. They were 15 and 14 respectively at the time. Her father was drafted into the Imperial Army at age 37 but discharged because he was a widower with five children. Regardless of who started the war or politics behind it, my mother had to care for the family at age of ten. This includes ensuring all family members were mustered after they ran to the air raid shelters and caves of Numazu when American bombers attacked the Japanese coastal city.
She seldom shared her experiences of a pre-adolescent during World War Two. My brother wrote and read the eulogy at mother’s memorial service. He talked of an instant where after entering a shelter to hide from an air raid, her youngest infant brother was missing. She ran out of the shelter as the bombs begin to fall and found him crying on the road. She picked him up but it was too late to return to the shelter as the entrances were closed. Finding a deep hole, she held on to her him while hearing the bombs fall along with screams of death for those that were less fortunate to be in the open. When the raid had stopped, there were body parts scattered around as well as pieces of remains hanging in lifeless trees that withstood the attack. She and her brother had survived and many of those remains belonged to her friends and their families. My mother painted a picture of war that was not a glory movie or Fox News coverage of the Iraq War.
One of the first things that disappear during war is food. When the war is over, currency is meaningless as the wealthiest man in her town stood at a train station and offered valueless cash for a few pieces of potatoes. Potatoes that were stolen from farm fields where the train stopped at its shortened final destination because the rails and bridges were bombed out. People crowded unto trains and if the seating compartment were full, they climbed onto the roofs and squatted to avoid electric lines or see below the smoke of wood burning exhausts.
I miss my mother and we conversed always in Japanese. When I was ten years old it fell upon me to take her and my brother from what is now Moreno Valley, California to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Her English was limited so I had to interpret to get the right tickets and lodging during our transit. Until my youngest brother called to inform me that she had departed, I always thought mom would be there even with the incoherent stage she was in. My memories of her are fond and like any normal parent-child relationships we had our moments. Of course there are regrets as well but hindsight is always perfect vision. I recall the last time I had a normal visit with my mother was in 2005 when the Ka’imimoana had its dockside winter maintenance in San Diego. In 2006 we had a mini family reunion in Hawaii and noticed things were changing a little. Afterwards it struck her like a quick storm and she succumb to Alzheimer’s next year. The last time I saw her alive, I gave her a big hug and told her in Japanese that I love her but I do not think she recalled who I was as she didn’t respond. RIP Mom, you left your legacy with us and I love you and miss you terribly.
So the year started off on a sad note but the office was consumed again with the Newport move. By this time opponents were hanging on to threads and to whatever pieces that had any strength. The political machines had rolled everyone over and all logic was thrown out the window. I had requested for a transfer to Honolulu, Hawaii for reasons that you already know. But months had passed without a decision. The family and I were getting impatient and at times resigned that we were going to be living in Newport. Then on March 10th I received a phone call from the Branch Chief as the ship was pulling away from the fuel pier at Pearl Harbor. The transfers were approved and in June the family and I are going to be moving to Hawaii! We like Seattle despite the weather but Puget Sound has been home for the past 14 years and this is the first place where the wife had her American experience. She had made friends and got into the pace of college life. I still shake my head in disdain whenever I recall the theatrics of “quality of life” being a major contributor to the Newport relocation when in reality it was not. Newport is a cute town and if people like small town life, then this is the place to go. The people are friendly and we call to mind the time we bought tuna there for two dollars a pound. The fisherman who literally sold it off the boat would filet the fish the way “L” liked it and gave her plenty of fish heads as well!
Just like the birth of my first grandson three years ago, I was on the ship though not at sea with the birth of my second. I was informed by text message and then a few hours later came the first photos! The boy looks like his mother. I am going to make a trek to Spokane to meet him and visit my daughter, her husband and oldest grandson before we move again.
Here I am back at sea. Oh the anxiety is still there but it is political this time over the budget. With the Sendai Earthquake and tsunami last week, our ship was diverted to conduct rescue missions of scientists in Laysan Island and Kure. However the Kure evacuation was focused on logistics. The first evacuation at Laysan took the science group out after it was determined that the island was not habitable after the tsunami struck it. According to a scientist I spoke with, there were many birds killed when the waves struck. The height of the tsunami was about six feet. By the way they talked they seem to be glad that we picked them up. We dropped them off at Midway and a Coast Guard C-130 came to take them back to Honolulu.
Thursday (March 17) morning we departed Midway and set sail for the International Date Line then to Wake Island after that. The transit is about four and a half days. We crossed the date line last night around midnight. So that puts me at missing Friday, March 18th altogether! I have to find out how I am to claim that on my time card. I need to get paid and I am at work but it was coincidence that we crossed the date line at midnight on the 17th and skipped to early morning hours of the 19th. I’ve done this more than once not only in NOAA with the Ka’imimoana and the Hi’ialakai two years ago going back to Hawaii but as a GI Brat. At that time we were` returning from Japan to the United States when my father transferred back to the “states.” I saw 1969 twice, once landing at Wake Island and then final touchdown on the mainland at Travis Air Force Base, California near San Francisco, or Sacramento.
Clock changed again tonight to Wake Island Time and the jump ahead in date. I’m pretty tired after solving issues we had with the Thermosalinograph. My mind is tired and I want to finish this chapter in a book I am reading. Tomorrow night, the gym for an hour!
Goodnight from west of the International Date Line in the Pacific, approximately 300 nautical miles southwest of Midway and about 750 nautical miles northeast of Wake Island.
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