A Few Things I’m Loving Right Now

While I continue to work on a handful of writing projects, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve been enjoying lately.

Sakura

Sakura season or the blooming of cherry blossom trees in early spring, is drawing to a close in Tokyo. When we moved here in 2019, the season had already passed. The following year, Covid-19 meant the entire country was on lock down so again we missed the sakura. Last year in 2021, I finally experienced the two-week window where the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and it is absolutely breathtaking. Folks dress up, take photos, attend festivals and have gatherings called hanami with family and friends under the blossoming trees. I love that admiring the beauty of flowers is considered time well spent. It’s something I thoroughly enjoyed this year and I’m already looking forward to it next year.

Sunrise

Sunrise occurs at about five in the morning these days and I much prefer waking to the light as opposed to the cold and dark of winter. A few years back, one of my favorite television shows was “Sunrise Earth,” a simple telecast of the rising sun set in different locations around the world. The only audio was the natural sounds of the environment. There was no narration and no host. It aired for only a short while when my children were very young and it was always a peaceful and calming viewing experience. I recently found full episodes online and the chance to watch them again feels like a gift and a meditation. 

Miso

This past Friday I took a miso making class with two friends in Hachioji, a small city just west of Tokyo. It was held inside a 160-year-old grocery store that is still in operation. Using traditional ingredients including fresh koji, a type of fungus used to make miso, sake and other fermented foods, we mashed boiled soybeans, and combined them with the koji and salt, weighing the resulting paste down with rocks before sealing it. Though miso is a near daily staple in Japan, nowadays most folks just buy it at the store but our instructor has been making miso by hand for over three decades. She let us sample a batch that was aged 18 years! It will be a full nine months before my miso is ready. Circle back in 2023 :)

Fresh koji. Our instructor informed us there is just one purveyor of fresh koji left in all of Tokyo.

Books

Two Books I Have Been Recommending Over and Over:

“Crying in H Mart” by Michelle Zauner. Zauner and her band, Japanese Breakfast, just won a grammy but I first learned about Zauner when she published an essay in The New Yorker entitled “Crying in H-Mart.” In 2021, she released a memoir of the same name about growing up Korean American and her mother's cancer diagnosis. It’s a quick read, introspective, heartbreaking and hopeful.

The View From Breast Pocket Mountain by Karen Hill Anton

I’d already enthusiastically recommended this book to several friends and family before I had the good fortune to meet the author by chance at a bookstore event. TVFBPM details her childhood in Harlem to her time as a young woman who leaves the US behind to work, hitchhike and travel parts of Europe and Asia with her daughter. She eventually makes a home in Japan with her husband and their children. Her’s is an expertly written, absolutely fascinating story.

Otherwise, I am simultaneously reading “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin and “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmere. A good friend mentioned THP was one of her favorites and I’m hooked. I‘ve been reading one chapter just about every night with a highlighter determined to apply some of what Rubin has shared about her journey to become a happier person to my own life. I was gifted a copy of “Braiding Sweetgrass” by another friend and it is the most beautiful, informative and poetic scientific work I have ever read. It is a slow and illuminating read.

Wordle

Yes. I play Wordle. Daily. And BOOM, this happened! IYKYK

A Personal Index

The concept of a Personal Index was introduced to me as a writing exercise in a workshop led by Vanessa Hua. (Her new novel, “Forbidden City,” publishes next month and I can’t wait to read it.) It’s a practice I like to revisit every now and again. Here’s a truncated one for 2022:

Total number of cities or small towns I have lived in for at least two years: Seven

Total number of cities or small towns I have loved: One

Estimated number of times I have been told I could not possibly be a New Yorker because I’m “too nice”: Approximately fifty-eleven times. I am a native New Yorker but the naysayers are not entirely wrong. I’m from Brooklyn.

Precise number of ways ⅔ of the people in my household address me: Four. I answer to Ma, Mama, Mommy or Mom. It should be noted that mom is usually stretched to accommodate two syllables instead of one, resulting in a fog horn-like pronunciation: Maaaaaaah-Ahhhmmmm!

Odds that I am standing in my own way and/or my own worst enemy: Extremely high 

Number of regrets: Too many to list. Fortunately the overwhelming majority are arguably inconsequential. For example, I regret not going to at least one midnight screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Waverly in Greenwich Village when I was in High School. 

Personal Reserve of Love, Creativity and Optimism: Bountiful Beyond Measure