Stories From the Past Forge a Loving Bond to the Future

By mid-September, aspens are splashing gold upon Colorado’s high country. Down below, farmers are harvesting corn. The smell of apples lingers from the neighbor’s tree, and my father’s garden is fading in anticipation of autumn and eventual winter.

It is my last trip home to Fort Collins, Colo., this summer to visit my father and what may be his last garden. Earlier this year, he said the garden was getting to be too much work, and he may have to give it up. On my two previous visits, I have watched the garden grow and listened eagerly to his stories.

I can now envision him as a youngster. I can see a young Sam Noriyuki on the Fourth of July, when his parents brought home watermelon, which my grandfather loved, a case of Nehi soda and “Baby Ruths big enough for a whole meal.” I can see my father in rawhide shoes and bib overalls sprawled on the ground after falling from a slide. And I can see his mother sitting at the sewing machine stitching together clothes from flour and rice sacks.

They are stories of a quiet life, the kind most of us live without thinking much about it. He doesn’t seem to understand why I’m interested in hearing them. But, to me, they are the careful unfolding of rich, worn fabric, the almost forgotten scent of a soft, old blanket.

I can taste the dust of long summer days in the fields, where he must have had more dreams than the one he remembers, that of being a mechanic. Or maybe that’s all his childhood allowed--one dream.

I have visions of his father, who learned little English and longed to return to his native Japan, and I have visions of my father doing all he could to be American.

A word that surfaces often is “struggle,” such as the time his father borrowed money from a bank during the Depression and deposited it in his own bank, which went out of business before he had a chance to make his purchases. He still had to repay the money, then borrow more to keep the farm afloat.

During those lean years, there was peanut butter or jelly but never both. There was sometimes chicken, dead or alive, and always a garden and cellar to store vegetables. Maybe that’s why my parents, in their most extravagant moments, have never spent more than $15 for a restaurant meal and why their refrigerator is filled with plastic containers holding small bites of leftovers.

I now can understand my father’s disappointment of having to quit high school to work on the farm and having to quit farming to work in a factory. I understand his circumspection after selling crops to buyers who never paid, after losing crops to hail or snow or floods. It’s why he never invests in stocks and why, even now, he has nightmares about the farm.

“But one thing about farming,” he says, “you have freedom.”

Differing Views of the Military

His understanding of freedom runs deeper than mine. During World War II, the man at the parts store would not serve him because of his Japanese ancestry, and my mother and her family endured two years in an internment camp.

Still, my father took his physical and was ready to help fight the war. But as the oldest child of a large farming family, his father growing old, he wasn’t called. In another war, Vietnam, I wasn’t called by the luck of the draw. The difference is my father would have served; I wouldn’t have.

I’m the youngest of his three children, the spoiled one. I got more things as a child than my brother, Ron, the quality engineer, and sister, Georgia, the lawyer-judge--a blue Schwinn 10-speed bicycle, a set of drums. There also was a stereo that my brother co-signed a loan for but my father ended up paying off.

I’m the one who one day quit college, left my job scrubbing floors at a grocery store and without notice bought a bus ticket for anywhere out of Colorado, ending up in Eugene, Ore., where I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

I was the one who rebelled against everything my father told me, who screamed at him, who moved away and stayed away for long periods and missed family gatherings, the one who bounced around from job to job, town to town, who never learned to farm or to garden or to repair a car, things that came naturally to him.

These are the things that have never been addressed, that have filled me with regret over the years. One day while we are sitting on the couch, I finally ask him about these burdens I placed on him throughout my life, the arguments that stood between us.

All he says is, “Well, everything worked out OK.”

I pause in thought and consider his words. I realize that is all I need him to say. I feel absolved. We sit silently.

In farming and in life, storms pass.

*

It’s hard for me to tell where one life begins and ends. What I have learned about my father’s parents and about him I will tell my children. One of them, Rhuby Yumiko Noriyuki, 18 months old, has accompanied me and my wife, Julia Sandidge, on this summer’s final trip home.

Yumiko is my mother’s first name, but when she started school, a teacher couldn’t pronounce it so my mother became Amy.

My other daughter, Rhiley Bamber, 18, is my stepdaughter, but we don’t like to use that term. She has started school at Pasadena City College and is unable to make the trip.

She accompanied me on my last visit, however. I am always amazed at how gentle my father has become with young people and children. He reaches out to Rhiley to make sure she feels at home, a part of the family. He has taken her fishing and helped her buy a car. He makes sure there are small treats awaiting her when she visits.

For me, family issues are the most complex matters that surface in life. They are fluid and confounding. Since Rhuby’s birth, a piercing question has been raised: Do I love her more than Rhiley?

My immediate response was no, absolutely not. It breaks my heart to think otherwise, that I could love one child more than the other, but I must admit this: When Rhuby was born, I loved her instantly, even before she was born.

The first time I saw Rhiley, I didn’t love her. She was 6 years old, and my relationship with her had to grow over time, in the same way it did with her mom. I must also say this: There are many times when I’m holding Rhuby, when I look at her and wish I could have held Rhiley at this age.

Trying to Be a Better Father

Rhiley and I have gone through much of what I went through with my father. She knows my silence. Rhuby doesn’t, and I hope she never does. I am trying to be a better father, a better person to both of them, and in my heart I believe I love them both, one as a child, the other as a young adult.

Rhuby calls my father “Coppie,” as close as she can get to “Grandpa.” She helps him pick tomatoes, and once when we were walking across a parking lot to a restaurant, she reached up and grabbed my hand, something she is not inclined to do, favoring instead the freedom of walking on her own. With her other hand, she grabbed my father’s, and the three of us walked together.

About all that remains of the garden is to mow the wilted plants and till it all under, my father says. The first freeze of the season is likely near. Trees will soon stand bare against expanded horizons, and snow is not far off. Winter arrives in many ways. In my father’s life, it comes peacefully.

“It comes on real gradually,” he says one day as we are standing before the garden. “When a bunch of us get together, all we talk about is getting old. We can’t do things like we used to, that’s about it. Nobody really complains about it. . . . I don’t know of anyone who says they’re scared of getting old. Your time is limited, you learn to accept things as they come.”

Next to the obutsudan, the Buddhist altar in the family room, my parents have a small, framed piece of Japanese calligraphy. There are two characters, which combined mean “to endure; to bear with patience.” That is how they live their lives.

My father believes in reincarnation, that we will all be together again in another life. Maybe in that life I will be able to work on a car engine and grow a garden. Maybe I’ll be a farmer--and have short hair.

Julia and Rhuby hug him as we prepare to leave. They always do when we leave, and Rhiley does the same when she visits. I do not. Even now, that is not our way. We stand on the front lawn next to the ginkgo tree as Rhuby gallops and waddles to the car. I fix my gaze on her and tell him I will try to be as good a father to my children as he has been to me.

“I wish I could have done better,” he says.

“We all turned out OK,” I reply.

For a brief second, we look into each other’s eyes. The words that fathers and sons speak to each other are never quite right. I don’t say the word love and neither does he. I guess that’s not our way, either.

But our eyes tell me we understand.

Duane Noriyuki can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.