Writing Yoko

My mother insisted I write letters…mostly to my grandmothers…mostly to her mother.

Grandmother Eakes (We called her “Eakes” to distinguish her from Grandmother “Howell”, though the two were as different as night and day.) never answered.  Never.  I don’t mean to suggest she forgot.  I don’t mean to infer she was busy.  She just never answered.  Period.

I mentioned it to my mother once…the lack of response.  The meat of her answer escapes me now, some thirty-plus years later, but the flavor remains.  I taste it often.  It serves me well.  After all, there are many occasions in which when we are called upon to “rise above”.

Eventually, my mother presented me with a pen-pal.  The how’s and why’s faded over time, but I know her name.  It was Yoko, as in Ono, but no…Ono was not her name.  It is, however, the way I’ve thought of her since John Lennon died. One day she came to mind as she always had; she was Yoko Yakushima.  And, the next, she was Ono.  I don’t know...

I can’t stop thinking about her.

We exchanged letters for a couple of years.  Hers were always enthusiastic, filled with life, and all the drama a thirteen year old girl could muster.  I tried to keep up.  I pretended.  I crafted excited sentences and feigned filial frivolity I didn’t feel; until I didn’t. 

I stopped writing Yoko.  Her letter came, wrapped in onion skin that labeled it foreign even before seeing the postmark.  I read it, but I didn’t answer.  I felt guilty for as long as allowed between volleyball games, swim meets, and clandestine bumper pool lessons given by Bernard, a seventeen-year-old boy my parents hated that I would have followed to the ends of the earth. 

Even without response, Yoko continued writing for weeks; until she didn’t.

And now, I wonder where she is. 

I hope she’s okay.  I wish I’d kept writing. Are her children safe?  Did her house wash away?  Was hers one of the faces standing in bread lines?   I worry.

The tragedy in Japan compelled me to break my years-long boycott of television news.  I watched as death flowed onto the beach and kept on going.

Over and over and over, again, I watched houses join other buildings, unidentified debris, and the occasional vehicle, in a watery swath that wrapped its arms around everything in its path, until I couldn’t breathe. 

Yoko wasn’t the kind of girl that would have left home. 

Days passed.  I continued watching. 

An elderly man excused himself as he passed between two people standing in a line that wrapped around the grocery store he exited.  He walked down the line handing out loaves of bread from his ration.

Diane Sawyer, appropriately devoid of makeup, happened to be standing nearby.  In a voice filled with just the right amount of disbelief, she asked the man why he was giving away the food he’d waited in line for hours to receive. 

“I only need one.”, was his answer. 

And I wonder, “Would that ever happen here…here in the land of “me”?”

No matter her actual proximity to the destruction, nothing I have survived can come close to what Yoko has endured. That knowledge serves me every day; that and the image of that man, the one who shared his bread. 

Combined, they are grace.  In deference to their sacrifice my spirit quiets.  I am more giving.  I strive to share what they have taught me.

Today the earth shook again.

And still I pray.

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