From Hays to Hamamatsu

I grew up in Utah, but my family was from Kansas.

            I was really a good kid. I almost never got into trouble. I got good grades. I was polite. I was quiet when I was supposed to be. I never got into fist fights or any real argument at school. In fact, my brother and I almost never fought either. He was a good kid, too.

            But if there was one thing I seemed to always get sent to my room for, it was the spaghetti issue. You see, in the eyes of my parents, I couldn’t ever eat spaghetti right. I guess when my folks grew up in Kansas, they made spaghetti the old Italian way, or as close to it as they imagined: you know, with salted boiling water, some olive oil, and a fistful of spaghetti. Then a nice tomato sauce was added, perhaps even a meatball or two. You know, spaghetti! But I think people in different parts of the world eat spaghetti in different ways. And, I’m sure that each household thinks that their way of eating spaghetti is the proper way to eat spaghetti and that all other households that don’t adhere to those important spaghetti-eating rules are full of uneducated and unruly people—the people that ultimately become truants and thugs.

            My mom always fixed a nice steaming mound of spaghetti on our plates, and the mound was topped with hot bubbling tomato sauce. I loved it, and I often dug in, taking a scoop of spaghetti over my fork, letting the ends of the pasta hang over the fork, shoving the top of the fork where the balanced part of the spaghetti lay, and slurping the other ends of the spaghetti that were hanging from the corners of my mouth. The slurping was part of the fun, I thought, but I really enjoyed the tomato sauce.

            However, my ecstasy was broken with even the very first slurp of pasta. My mother would look at me and cry, “Eric!” She didn’t just use a sharp quick pronunciation of my name. No! She put a punitive burst of in front of the “E-“ and dropped her voice an octave for a love puffy drawn out “-ric.” Although I hardly ever heard that means of using my name, I knew even at age 5 that those two timbres combined meant that I was in grave trouble and was on the brink of being sent to my room. “We don’t eat spaghetti that way, “ Mom would say, but she wouldn’t explain why. Perhaps she assumed that I already knew the proper way or that I was supposed to follow the means of eating the spaghetti the way she was modeling.

            Actually, I did follow the way she ate spaghetti. She took her fork and cut the long strands into teeny bite sized morsels. She then scooped them up on her fork with enough tomato sauce to attach them together, and she placed the on-inch long subsections of spaghetti into her mouth, and never once did a little piece fall on her plate, and never once did she have to slurp. I guess that’s the way she learned to eat spaghetti in Kansas. My father was pretty good at it, too. So, I did try to follow their way. I cut the spaghetti into little pieces, and I scooped up the little pasta pieces with just enough sauce to glue them together, but the pasta was just thin enough to slip through the tines of my fork, and the little pieces would fall, kersplat, onto the tomato sauce below, thereby spraying little spots of tomato sauce onto the white shirt my mom had just washed for me. Mom would be outraged and say softly, “You need to go to your room now, honey!” I bowed my head in shame and sluggishly went downstairs until my father came to get me. By that time, their meal was over and the parents and my brother had left the dinner table, so I could slurp up the spaghetti the way I wanted to because nobody was there to watch.

            But then I went to school in Utah, and we often got spaghetti for school lunch. And the children at the school didn’t eat spaghetti the way my parents told me I was supposed to. Most of them put their fork into the middle of the mound of spaghetti, holding the fork perpendicular to the plate. Then they twirled the fork clockwise, maybe ten or even twelve times so that the spaghetti would wrap itself around the fork. I thought that was pretty cool, so I tried it too. And I was excited because the spaghetti didn’t fall off the fork, it didn’t splatter, and only occasionally would a millimeter of spaghetti hang out from the side of my mouth. I didn’t need to slurp, either.

            So the next time Mom made spaghetti for dinner, I thought I would show off my new technique. I proudly thrust my fork into the middle of the pasta and started twirling it. Before I had even finished twirling, I heard that airy musical punishment of “Eric!” again. I looked up at Mom and said, “But, Mom! That’s how all the kids at school do it!” Mothers don’t accept that excuse ever, but I didn’t know this fact of life until I got older. At that time, I felt it was injustice because I never got in trouble at school for twirling spaghetti. Gee, even  the teachers there did it that way! But, Mom was in no mood for arguing: “Maybe they do it that way in their families, but in this house we eat spaghetti this way. My house, my rules! Now cut that spaghetti!” And of course, you just know that I did cut the spaghetti and it did fall through the spaces of the fork tines and I did get sent to my room again.

            I was very confusing at first, but over time I learned to twirl the spaghetti at school and cut the spaghetti at home, although cutting it seemed so boring, so uneventful, so bland. Finally, Grandma came to visit from Kansas, and Mom decided to make spaghetti. I thought this would be the perfect time to demonstrate to Grandma my new technique. I speared the pasta in the middle of my plate and started to twirl. All of the sudden, I heard my grandmother’s correcting voice saying, “Woops, woops, woops!” The was Grandma’s polite way of saying that I was out of line and that I needed to make a self-imposed correction spiffy quick. So I said, “But Grandma, that’s how the kids at school do it. How do you eat spaghetti?” And you know that since she was from Kansas, she cut her spaghetti into little strands, scooped them up delicately, and never dropped them once. There was no slurping, no twirling, no pasta hanging from the mouth—none of that! I was so disappointed. In fact, her method was even more distressing than my mother’s because her subsections were even smaller than my mom’s. I told Grandma that I liked to twirl the spaghetti like the kids do at school, but she said that that was bad manners. So I asked, “Why is it bad manners to do that?” and Mom sent me to my room.

            Over the years, Mom gradually reduced the number of times she made spaghetti for dinner, and I had to resort to enjoying spaghetti when I went to visit my friends. A Good number of my friends had families who had moved to Utah from other parts of the world, and they all had different ways of eating spaghetti, even different from those I saw at school. My friend Cindy was from Maine. She twirled her spaghetti, and when she put the pasta in her mouth, she kept the tines pointing downward instead of upward. My friend Paul was from Texas, and he let the spaghetti hang from his mouth, but he said he worked to not make noise while slurping it up because that would have been rude. My friend Dana was from Pennsylvania, and he used a spoon as the foundation for twirling the spaghetti. In fact, when I went to Dana’s house and cut the spaghetti, she shouted out in disgust and dismay, “What are you doing?” And when I told him that that was how my mom had told me I was supposed to eat spaghetti, he said, “That’s stupid!”

            So that night when I went home, I told my mom that Dana had said that the way we ate spaghetti was stupid, and her response was, “Well, he can think that if he wants to, but in this house, we cut our spaghetti. My house, my rules!”

            I used to dream that line, “My house, my rules!” all through my teenage years and up through my college years in Boston. I used to have a recurring dream about how I would get revenge for the “my house, my rules” line. In this dream, Mom and Dad would join me at the breakfast table of my apartment. There, I would serve them doughnuts and cigarettes. And when Mom gasped in horror, I would say, “Well? My house, my rules!” But you see, even in my twenties, I was a good kid, and I never fulfilled my dream when they visited me in Boston. Besides, I didn’t smoke, and my parents like doughnuts.

            But when I was 26, I moved to Japan. After having lived there for nine months and had gotten some of the new customs under my belt, Mom and Dad came to visit. I wanted to show them all the highlights of living in a small city in Japan, one of which was going to the ramen shop for lunch. There I ordered each of us a bowl of hot sansai ramen, full of beef stock, long semi-curly Chinese noodles, and little mountain vegetables. We sat at the counter, and the waitress brought us chopsticks to eat the ramen with. Mom was perplexed. She said, “Eric, how am I supposed to eat this?” A big Grinch-like grin came over my face, and I said, “Oh, I’ll show you.” I took the chopsticks in my fingers, dipped them into the soup, brought the sticks together beneath some strands and lifted, balancing the noodles at the point where the chopsticks came together, making a narrow V. Then I bent my neck forward so my eyes would look straight over the ramen, and I lifted the chopsticks up to my mouth with all he ramen strands hanging from the point of the V. There I opened my mouth, and shoved the balanced part of the ramen into my mouth, thereby leaving long strands of ramen hanging over the bowl. Then I sucked. I slurped up the noodles, catching any slightly unbalanced noodles with my chopsticks, thereby helping the remaining ramen to eventually make it inside my mouth.

            Suddenly, I heard that airy songlike punishment, “E-ric!” I knew exactly what Mom was referring to, so I said immediately, “But Mom! Look around the restaurant and see how the people are eating their ramen.” Around us were thirty Japanese businessmen, mostly wearing blue three-piece suits, all slurping away, all letting ramen hang down, and all drinking the soup out of the bowls by holding the bowl with their hands and bringing it up to their mouths. As far as I could tell, no forks or spoons even existed in this restaurant.

            Mom said, “Well, I just can’t do that!”

            But you have to!

            Why?

            My country, my rules!”

…

            anecdote about basashi with Dad

            Climbing Mount Fuji in Japan

Japanese mail service and Japanese train conductors

Insert Waltz for a pretty mother