The Moon in the Water: Reflections on an Aging Parent

Dug Up Kuan Yin

1 Dug Up Kuan Yin Someone has chiseled Kuan Yin on a slab of stone. As near as I can make out from the photo in a book, she sits on the ground on her island, holding a willow sprig in one hand and a water jar in the other. The outline of the full moon marks her off from rows of etched calligraphy, in two separate inscriptions . According to the translator, one Chinese worshipper in the eleventh century wrote that he had lost his father and was making this prayer stone for Kuan Yin. Much later, a magistrate in the seventeenth century recorded, closer to the artwork, that people lost track of the slab until a farmer dug it out of a field and gave the ridged and dirt-clogged stone to his daughter, to scrub clothes. Then (so goes the story) the washboard began to glow. . . . In May 2001, I’m emptying out Dad’s house in New Jersey , where he’s lived for fifty years, and notifying his friends that he’s planning to move to my apartment in Hawai’i in a month. The old house is the one I grew up in, so I have memories stashed here too, but for the moment, unwelcoming stuff overwhelms me: rows of lawnmower guts and chassis, unconnected, receipts from gas and electric bills going back to Methuselah. Upstairs, cast-off furniture huddles together, the very names fallen out of use: chiffonier, china closet, vanity, commode. My heart catches at the furniture Dad has built himself, incredibly beautiful, but too heavy and too many to ship to Honolulu. I convince cousins to lug away precious 2 The Moon in the Water pieces, hoping that if I manage to visit them some day, I might find Dad’s cobbler’s bench, on which he incised a tree, or rediscover his clothes chest, making a new life for itself with some other child’s mittens. Dad’s pals from the firehouse bring him a plaque. For their send-off, they roll up in style, clinging to the long hook-andladder truck. The neighbors must think the house is on fire. As a kid, I’d hear Dad get up in the night at the siren’s summoning . I’d try to stay awake until he returned, safe. Recalling these vigils digs out the memory of his return vigils, at his small child’s bedside: rubbing my back and waiting for me to fall asleep. Now the gray-haired firemen and the younger ones, who know Dad from quieter years as firehouse secretary, troop into the living room to read their etched plaque aloud: “in sincere appreciation. . . .” Standing at the screen door with his walker, the old volunteer watches them go. When these Kuan Yins pull away from the curb, tooting their horn, Dad laughs—the only time in a morose month. Down cellar, I breathe cool mustiness and survey boxes, jars, drawers of nails, screws, bolts, and whatnots, plus a stack of unplayable 78-rpm phonograph records, homemade by Gram on a machine that spun out fragrant black hair and put Mom’s songs in the grooves. I invite Aunt Verna to the cellar for souvenirs. She pokes at empty mason jars, formerly filled with Dad’s red grape juice, transformed from blue grapes, and his cucumber pickle, whose turmeric painted the whole kitchen yellow. Suddenly Verna’s eyes light up: “I’ve been looking for Mummum’s doily stretcher!” She must have been looking a long time, as that grandmother died—let’s see—forty-one years ago, when Dad brought the contraption home from his Reflections on an aging PaRent 3 parents’ dismantled cellar. He’s been using it, unrecognized, to hang tools, until the pegged board glows back into an unsnarler of washed lace. Pat, Dad’s employee but also buddy, is devastated at his impending move to Honolulu. She has helped him since his bypass surgery in 1996 by cleaning up the house and rubbing his back; he helps her by repairing her vacuum cleaner and listening, probably one of the few to do so in her crowded day. Together they planted an unclaimed back field in collard greens and strawberries. “I ain’t no young chippie,” Pat sighs, but if they’d met a decade or so earlier, a few of the sparks crossing may have caught fire. He gives her Mummum’s oak...