Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 18

 

Youngest Grandgirl still loves dressing up, loves flouncing around in my poor scarves and dropping them everywhere. Recently, though, when she was here again, I switched tactics and simply got her to stuff them into a bag. I was done harping and harping at her to put them back where they belonged. Much easier. Just stuff stuff.

But unlike any ragtag scarf in my possession, the robe she has on in this photo from last fall, my junk-store steal, is more hers than mine by rights. She’s the one with markings like those high-coiffed ladies’ on the sleeves, not I. I’m more at home in my battered old red-flannel thing with handy pockets.

The gold-painted lettering running down the front, she says, is kanji—Japanese. Or, some is kanji. Those are Japanese ladies, she says, not Chinese. Even so, I’m mystified. I can’t tell what is what. I perceive the fine points in the pictures only vaguely, as other hemispheric, blinded as I am by my parochial past, my years of insularity.

It’s she who knows, from whose tongue, sometimes, come the cryptic sounds. To her they’re nothing foreign, distorted, inexplicable. Her Japanese mother has schooled her well. She’s bred in this child the slight, shaded, all-important distinctions. She’s passed to her the very blood, her fulgent sense of pride and place.

Still, I see me, too, out on that trampoline—a teeny tiny bit that came down through her father.