So long, Tennessee

2020 was a year that jumped the tracks in so many ways. An example of this was our inability to say a proper goodbye to our friends and acquaintances before we left Tennessee in early July. Almost eight months have passed since we returned to Japan. Time has granted some perspective. I am grateful for the time we spent in the Tri-Star state because we all had so many good experiences to take with us. Here are some thoughts and "nice memory" snapshots. 

What I learned? I had two and a half years to work and live in my native workplace culture and get reacquainted with North America. It was a reality check and a personal reboot. I was, in effect, no longer an expat in the social sense because I was re-immersed in the media, sports, food, entertainment and many cultural touchstones I grew up with. To be sure, Tennessee is geographically and psychologically far from my native soil in the Great White North. But I reveled in the civility and friendliness of the people I met. In the age of Trump, I avoided political discussions—that served me well. As a Canadian chameleon I could soak up most everything about the local culture, sample the Southern way of life, and enjoy many shared social touchstones. Yet I never hesitated to play the “I’m a foreigner” card to extricate myself when necessary. More than anything else, I found that I had much more in common with my American co-workers and friends than not. In many ways, I felt the closest to home than I have since I left Canada in 1996 to work overseas.

The Rising Family’s™ experience? I think Naomi enjoyed it. She had her own friends from the Japanese expatriate community as support, along with many local friends. Language was never an issue. Driving everywhere was new to her. She stared down the challenges that came. Strong lady!

The Rising Daughters™ blossomed. The language bedrock they established in India was strengthened and layered with social fertilizer from Tennessee. School was important, of course. Both daughters made good friends. They benefited way beyond English fluency in the Williamson County schools. They maintained mental ties to Japan through many Saturdays spent at the Japanese School of Middle Tennessee. That meant six days a week at school, but ultimately worth it, as we have found out since our return to Yokohama. Their time in Nolensville will benefit them for the rest of their lives.

The snapshots:

I saw for myself the South I had read about in Pat Conroy and John Berendt novels, but in a modern context.

Tennessee’s nickname is the Volunteer State. I always felt I’d contributed to the greater good after a few shifts at local food banks around Christmastime and following the tornado that hit in March 2020.

We rented a large, beautiful house. Depending on the season, our backyard was visited by deer, birds, occasional flocks of turkeys, random neighborhood dogs on a jailbreak, rabbits, and our foes, groundhogs.

I learned that southerners take their lawns and gardening seriously.

Our immediate neighborhood was in reality very diverse, with people coming from Tennessee, them Yankee states up north, Egypt, Ghana, India and -- hell yes -- Alabama!

And music. Oh the music! Sun Studios and Graceland in Memphis; the Johnny Cash museum; and constant local reminders that Nashville is The Music City. Along with live music enjoyed on Music Row downtown, I also went to concerts I will never forget (Weezer, The Pixies, Cowboy Junkies, and the blues at BB King’s Club).

Medical care. I saw world-class medical care in action thanks to the Vanderbilt University Medical center.

The food. Memphis wet BBQ versus Nashville dry rub? Biscuits at the Loveless Café? Tastebuds won, but the loser was my waistline, which grew to epic new proportions.

Iced tea is appropriate for all meals and you start drinking it immediately after you’re born. I’m partial to “half and half.”

Our favorite restaurant: Vinh-Long, a Vietnamese-Japanese restaurant in east Nashville that captured our hearts. Unassuming vibe, friendly and family-run, cash-only. Somehow this is the place that worked for us all, particularly on the way home from our frequent excursions to the Nashville Flea Market. Spring rolls and Vietnamese coffee, shrimp tempura and pho for the ladies.

I learned this at Publix and Kroger: it’s is not a shopping cart! It is a “buggy.”

Motorcycle trips on lonely back highways only 5 minutes from our house. The pinnacle of my motorcycle journeys was a Natchez Trace  return trip over one weekend. But seeing small towns in Tennessee and Mississippi was unforgettable.

Ya’ll is singular. All ya’ll is plural.

So long, Tennessee, and thank you.

End

COVID chronicle - Five

It’s the first month of the New Year. Still mid-winter. The tough times over the past 11 months anchor the shroud of pain and fear still hanging over many people. (My arbitrary “start” of the impact of COVID is March 2020.) Plenty of unknowns about the direction the COVID pandemic could take would normally trigger more gloom. What awful things will come next? But I, for one, am so tired of considering what ifs? that I’ve turned off the worry circuits in my brain and have just moved on.

So, after this post, no more coronavirus claptrap for a bit. But let’s encapsulate this moment in time, shall we?

Courtesy of National Geographic online

As of January 31, per National Geographic…
Worldwide: 103 million confirmed cases; 2.2 million reported deaths
U.S.: 26 million cases; 440,000 deaths
Canada: 779,000 cases; 20,000 deaths
Japan: 388,000 cases; 6,000 deaths

Those are the tragic figures, which I am certain will be reviewed and revised once the medical and social carnage finally ends. Even at this juncture, it's been thorny to keep track of all the disruptions caused by this human cost. It’s affected everyone where the virus has sunk its spikes into society. We’ve had nearly a year of adjusting to great unknowns and reacting to events with our socially distant thought processes fueled by social media. We all perceive that, like 9-11, our lives will be changed permanently by the experience.

Beyond the human suffering, there’s historic economic decay. And how will this lost year affect the development of following generations? Then, there’s the impact of the nailbiter U.S. presidential election that –let’s face it – affects the entire world. Also, factor in the death of George Floyd, which has sparked bitter racial debate in the U.S., raised voices of dissent, and energized grassroots movements seeking racial justice even beyond their shores. Society has changed.

People have changed how they interact with their families, their neighborhoods, at the (for the lucky, virtual) office, and in nearly every other facet of life. COVID has undoubtedly engineered drastic shifts that will have lasting consequences even after the pandemic ends. This is where I think we are now.

But, where are we going? Somehow 2021 feels like we are on firmer ground. I’m encouraged by the sprouts of determination to quell the virus by the new Democratic administration in Washington. Efforts in Canada and Japan to roll out vaccines continue. The constant barrage of crap has tranquilized us so long that anything resembling a way out of this is a mental life ring. Spring is nowhere near sprung yet there are conspicuous buds of hope!

I’ve got a couple of posts coming up in which I’ll offer a proper goodbye to Nashville and a zesty hello again to Yokohama (round two).

###

Thankfully over. 2020 in rearview.

From March 2020 onward, so many awful things happened to so many and yielded so little to celebrate. The positive take is that things can only get better. 

I won’t add anything further to the billions of words dumping on last year.
Yet the show goes on. Here’s a few photos from us, the (gratefully) Treading Water Family™.

January 

Marina won third place in the county public speaking contest sponsored by the 4H Club. Proud!
I also saw my first Nashville Predators game (vs. Toronto Maple Leafs). Leafs won.

 

February

Dad was paddling in Kenepuru Sound, South Island, New Zealand. Jealous!

March 

My ladies lazily lolling in lassitude. Near Cancun. Wonderful! 

Yet…foreshadowing of the ordeal ahead. 

April
Already restless, our family hikes started in earnest. Still scared but bored!
Birthday in quarantine.


May
Hikes continue. Fall Creek Falls. Invigorating!
Motorcycles…social distancing on wheels. I escaped for day tours with likeminded work buddies.


June
Horseback riding locally. Countrified!
The Rising Daughters™ bid goodbye to their schools and their friends. Not the way we wanted to say goodbye. Sad but safe!


July
We packed up. Said so long to our neighbors and a fond farewell to Nashville. Reflective!


August
Moving (back) to our house. Assembling new furniture. “Helvete” means hell in Swedish. Vexing!


September
Hola! Hamster aboard: “Cotton” a.k.a “El Presidente” joins us. Cute!


October
Costco hot dogs…comfort food goes global. Viva U.S.A!


November
M.’s class doing a socially distanced “Happi” dance instead of Sports Day. Twistin’ yet distant!


December
We tried hard to be festive & merry. But we were satisfied with safe & healthy…

COVID chronicle – Four

Move it or lose it
COVID-19’s less virulent cousin is cabin fever. No on-site office work and no school taking place concocted a monotony cocktail for the Rising Family™. Self-quarantine broke us fast. I noted in an earlier post that we lasted about one week under lockdown at home and were soon going out for long drives. At first, it was a guilty pleasure. We would get in the SUV and scuttle out for a night cruise. Full disclosure: we never left the car. We’d simply drive around at night on the local two-lane highways, rolling down the windows when it was warm enough. That was our gateway drug. Soon, our driving routine became daylight rides spent gawking at the magnificent houses in some of the pricier areas of town followed by a trip to the Dairy Queen drive-thru. Next thing we knew, we hit the downward slide to craving, needing to get out and walk around. We soon graduated to become hiking renegades.

State Park Slam
As infection rates rose quickly during the onset of the pandemic at peak times state parks closed, but we found a few city parks that, for whatever reason, remained open. 

Courtesy of Yahoo!News

By late March we were seeking out trails in nearby parks to get some exercise, fresh air, and eyeball greenery to raise morale. While society was buttoned down and social gatherings were a non-starter for most people we knew, we kept our spirits up by hiking. We weren’t unique. Plenty of families were out there too, enjoying the spring skies and walking the trails. 

Most folks used common sense like maintaining six feet of social distance and pausing to let others pass on a trail. 

With so many city and state parks available, we took day trips nearly every weekend for the remainder our time in Nashville. This satisfied the desire for movement and cleared the head.

There were some unwritten rules for these excursions:
- Bring your own drinks and snacks. This reduced interactions with other hikers. And the snack shacks weren’t open, only the trails.
- Exercise due diligence. We exchanged intel with likeminded neighbors about fun parks and researched our destination, then printed out maps of the trails we were doing. Many bathrooms were closed so bio breaks had to be thought out in advance.
- Sanitation regimen. We rigorously enforced of hand washing, use of hand sanitizer, and masks at all times, especially at gas stations and drive-thru restaurant food pickups.
- Socialize wisely. Many fellow hikers were friendly; others clearly wanted to keep their distance. Most other spelunkers at least offered a greeting. Some were more skittish. You began to recognize what type people they were fairly quickly and went along with whatever seemed appropriate. Friendly-but-wary were the watchwords. Social rules were being re-written on the fly.

During one trek, out of the blue we crossed paths with Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, who are among the famous entertainers who reside in the Nashville area. We respected their wanting to do the same thing we were in peace and lost our cool only after they’d passed by.

Here’s a few choice shots:

Rock Island State Park

Bledsoe Creek State Park

Montgomery Bell State Park

To close, I’d like to emphasize my attitude of gratitude. Getting a bit stir crazy and needing outdoor activity and fresh air is a privilege many people still don’t have. 

From our neighborhood

We’re lucky to have been able to weather the beginning of the COVID storm in Tennessee, with its gorgeous natural beauty and space. And great people.

Merry Christmas 2020

Season's greetings from Yokohama.

We are reflecting on this uniquely awful year for so many people around the world. Thus, I’m grateful to have a nice Christmas at home with my family, all of us safe and healthy. That’s the best gift, after all.

Wishing everyone as much joy as you can grab this holiday season and a much better year ahead.

COVID chronicle – Three

In April-May the world around us went to varying extremes of lunacy and denial as deaths mounted and the economy faltered because of the COVID-19 crisis. 

Meanwhile, the Rising Family™ steamed ahead into a new ecosystem of self-containment and change.

Education
The Rising Daughters™ were overjoyed to not go to school and by the absence of homework. Boards of education and politicians weighed options to determine if school would resume or not. The health and safety of the kids were always top of mind, but with associated fears of lawsuits and concerns about the learning hiatus’s impact on student intellectual development. It was uncharted territory for educators that resulted in limbo for weeks. Like millions of parents, we tried to step in and do what we could to keep our daughters on their learning track. We failed miserably.

I made a creative writing program with a carrot-and-stick motivational model that…failed semi-miserably.

The teachers genuinely tried remote learning via Zoom and sent over projects that we zealously promoted. The kids just weren’t buying it. Scholastically, the Rising Family was soon rudderless. 

And we drifted. Endless hours of TV soon lost its appeal. With no chance to socialize with friends, Lady E. and M. soon turned on each other. The girls are usually sweet as pie but hellraisers when provoked. They clutched each other lovingly one minute and cursed each other the next. To quell these sibling crises I’d banish them to separate rooms. If it was a physical altercation, I’d break it up. Otherwise, after repeated incidents, I let ‘em fight it out. One example: I’d just signed off working when I heard banshee shrieks from one of the daughter’s room. They were clawing each other to get the same electronic game. They screamed at each other, followed by outrage-crying at the nerve of the other. Hitting ensued. Why were they so well-behaved for their grandparents and their teachers during Skype or Zoom calls, but behaved like Veruca Salt with us?

To stave off these boredom brawls, we played games such as The Game of Life, Uno, Jenga, and Aggravation. We also turned to creativity as an outlet. One afternoon, Marina gave us “The Everything Show.” She charged admission. It was a hilarious display of her eight toy dogs and three balls nicknamed Bluey, Greenie and Pinky who had magically transformed into dogs. M. gave a funny opening monologue, then provided drinks and finger food for the audience. She put a lot of effort into it. We have her due respect during the 40-minute show and a standing ovation at the end.

 
Government
The federal government ducked and weaved, but mostly stuck its head in the sand. Debates raged about safer-in-place versus shelter-in-place ordinances. Governors of different political stripes showed their real colors in obscure wording. It boiled down to the liberty/small government idea versus 'do-this-more for the greater good'/top-down decrees. Could we go out into society again? What personal countermeasures were necessary--facemasks or not, anyone? There was always the cultural component balanced against mounting infection rates and casualty figures locally, nationally and globally. But everything still felt remote because we hunkered in our bunker.
 
I stayed at home to Work@Home. Yet we slowly started to venture out into society under the new rules of hygiene, masking, and social distancing.
 
Coping mechanisms - work
Endless screens and Zoom meetings. My colleagues and bosses all worked hard to adapt to the new normal of our industry and do our part to keep the company’s business going.

Coping mechanisms - life & play

- Found time and the inclination to hold online reunions with old buddies who live all over the world.

- Furtively resumed dentist visits (braces).
- Warmer weather = BBQs in the backyard.
- Motorcycle day trips were the ultimate COVID-friendly escape.
- Dogsitting the neighbor’s dog, Bubba. We love Bubba.
- The unstated agreement among exhausted parents to let only the kids on our street play together (but with eagle-eyed attention to any symptoms).

- Haircut from my daughter!

- Online music festivals to raise morale

In short, we all adjusted.

COVID chronicle – Two

Our lockdown began the day after we arrived home from Mexico. 

I, along with every other employee at my company, could no longer go to the workplace. My Homer Simpson daydreams had become reality! Lady E. and M’s Bart Simpson-like head trips materialized when schools shut…indefinitely! America was going batshit crazy. The Long Wait began. 

To be fair, there was near-terror that March-April. The psychological immunity many people felt had evaporated. The DMZ between major population centers and the few infection hotspots in the U.S. was no more. Folks withdrew into their homes and stockpiled whatever supplies they deemed necessary for their lifestyle. The authorities implored citizens to stay indoors and avoid contact with others unless absolutely necessary. In response, people went shopping online and in-person. Some were protected by masks and gloves. Others shielded themselves with defiant “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirts. 

We had enough toilet paper. Instead, I hoarded Starbucks Dark Roast ice coffee, my fuel of choice for the home office. I went alone to the supermarket for basic foodstuffs. Once there, I witnessed the most un-American scene I had ever encountered: empty store shelves. 

The Rising Family® kept indoors for several days, relying on Nickelodeon and Disney to keep the kids sedated. We adults sipped news reports, and scoured local Facebook groups and Nextdoor social media apps to divine what was happening around us. 

After less than a week of staying in the house our lockdown ended. We needed to get out, and began departing on night drives in our trusty Rogue SUV to marvel at the quiet downtown and gawk at the lack of any social normal activity. We rolled down the car windows along country roads in the crisp March evenings. That air became an elixir of stress relief and a tranquilizer.

Work@Home
I started my new work routine headquartered in our spare room. I soon rearranged the space for better optics and audio, i.e. nesting. 

Using Zoom for serial remote e-meetings with my coworkers brought back dim childhood memories of the Hollywood Squares C-list celebrity game show circa the late 1970s. 

The more I worked from home, the more I grew to miss the 30-minute drive into the office, with the better angels of NPR reporting the day’s morning news bulletins on the car radio. I had cherished my alone time during the evening trips homeward when I would I flip between classic rock and podcasts of my choice. I missed these commuting rituals!

After some time passed working at home I came to feel that no coping mechanisms were enough. For me, online happy hours, side-chats, and Skype calls simply could not recreate an atmosphere for ideal collaboration, teamwork and friendship among coworkers. We all did – are doing— our best. But true social interaction can’t be replicated online. An emoticon does not -- will never – be the same as a knowing wink of disdain, or a raised eyebrow signaling “is he/she for real?”, or a telling nod that telegraphed support from a colleague.

Like people googling themselves during the early days of that search engine, I daresay many people fiddled endlessly with their Zoom settings to find the most flattering lighting. I am sure many have learned to shut off the microphone when slipping away for quick “bio break” executed within earshot of the computer speakers or smartphone during yet-another sonorous conference call. New digital skills have emerged.  

I have always favored strict division between my work and my private life--Facebook kudos excepted. COVID-19 obliterated that. I am still utterly grateful to be working when millions of others aren't as fortunate.