Authorship

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Ten-hundred-million Paper Cranes

Sixty-five-years ago the Enola Gay flew over a city in Japan and dropped the first of two the only two nuclear weapons to be actively used during war.

Ten days later, Japan surrendered. The Emperor gave up his status as a deity--no longer were the Japanese descendants of the sun. They were human just like everyone else. Welcome to the Atomic Age.

Somewhere in a desolated prison camp in Colorado, my grandmother found another woman to nurse my infant aunt because my father had just been born a month-and-a-half and he was crying to be fed.

Grandpa went west looking for work as did many of the other men who were slowly gaining back their lost freedom. The farm was gone. The house was gone.

It all seems so long ago. Grandma, Grandpa, Obachan, they've passed on. All I have are yellowing pictures, fables, and artifacts. And half-truths that I try to piece together into logical narratives.

I remember as a child being told that a thousand paper cranes would cure a sick person. Sixty-five-years on there is still a sickness and fingers are getting to calloused to make fine creases.

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