Wed., Nov. 13, 2013
11:30AM
Celeste seems a little better than yesterday, when she skipped Second Tuesday church and lunch. She still sounded congested and raspy when I called her this morning.
I’m sniffly, with a little catch in my throat, but I’m not yet certain I have a cold.
Thanks for inviting a longer version of the story I told you. On Tuesday morning, when I wrote the check for my church offering, I wrote month-day-year, xx-xx-xx, and thought nothing of it until Mrs. Reeves, at lunch, remarked that Tuesday was 11-12-13. She told me a sequence like that will also occur on December 13, 2014, but will not come again until 01-02-03, when more than eighty-eight years have gone by. Well, that brought to my mind a story, which I told to Mrs. Reeves and her daughter and which I then told to Pastor Schilder and then told to my dad and then told later to Celeste. They all seemed to enjoy the story, even though, as it turns out, the essential fact in it was incorrect. Here is approximately how I told it.
Some years ago, in Hawaii, I visited a friend, Kazuo Mizutani, who was old, frail, sick with cancer, and manifestly soon to die. He was in his home, in bed, drugged up with morphine, barely whispering a greeting to me. I sat beside the bed, jabbered at the old man awhile, and then I decided to try to figure out how alert he was, so I asked, “Kazu, can you hear me?” He whispered yes. I asked, “Can you tell me when you were born?” He whispered a reply: “Eleven. (Gasp.) Twelve. (Gasp.) Thirteen. (Rest.)” I said, “Kazu, can you hear me? I’m asking you, when were you born?” And Kazuo said the same thing again, “Eleven. (Gasp.) Twelve. (Gasp.) Thirteen. (Rest.)” I started to ask one more time. “That’s good, Kazu, but what I am asking is, can you tell me ...” And just then Kazuo’s daughter Paula came into the room and said, “Dave, Daddy’s trying to tell you. He was born November the twelfth, nineteen thirteen!”
So then, yesterday at lunch, I thought, Oh, hey! If that’s right, then Kazuo was born a hundred years ago today! I think I’ll call Paula and tell her I remembered. When I got home I called, but I only got her answering machine. I left a message, and then I sent an e-mail, wishing the old man a happy hundredth birthday, though, of course, he is now long gone.
This morning, I received from Paula an e-mail reply. It began, “Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 22:40:30 -1000 / Subject: Re: 11-12-13 / no it was 12-12-12 but thanks for remembering it was 12 like ha ha ...”
Dang, “Twelve. (Gasp.)” is even better than “Eleven. (Gasp.),” but now I’ll have to wait till next year in mid-December before I can tell this story again!
Thank you, Debbie, for remarking that the story was too brief the first time I told it to you. Be careful what you wish for. I’m not quite done with it yet.
Love, Dave
