<Begin Segment 27>

MY: And my children by that time were growing. My brothers, I think I started to say that Alta said to me -- we were gathered together in a room one day. She had gathered together her "shameless hussies" together, you know, we were sitting around a table talking, and we looked around, and every single, you know, I looked at Alta, Mary Mackey, everybody had been married but they were divorced. And they looked at me and they said, "Look, she's the only one who's married to the same man for years." [Laughs] And so, and then Alta was telling the group, well, you know, "The thing about Mitsu is that she's never, that she's had her experience, all the men in her life have been wonderful nurturing men." Beginning with, both my father... and then she said, you know, I had two brothers who were just wonderful, and my younger brother now, and my husband. So I just really didn't have the anger against men per se, men, individual men. But my brothers and my husband, there was a lot of teasing going on, you know, about my involvement with the women's movement. I think I wrote "The Silver Anniversary" -- when was that, 1975, in the middle of all this, where Alta thought that was pretty wonderful because I'm going, it sounds like a threat, that if you -- shall I read it?

AI: Yes.

MY: [Laughs] Let's see, if I can find it. I think it was in Camp Notes, the first... let's see, oh yeah, there was one that says "Punch Bag," called "Punch Bag." When Yosh was always making these little cracks that -- "I flaunted the spectre of my liberation and Yosh said, 'A good insurance policy in widowhood, you will do well.'" And then there was another one. On silver -- actually, this was literally on our silver anniversary. We got married in 1950, so it was 1975. And we were talking, and Yosh was eating, oh yeah, he was eating rice and nori, he just loved Japanese food. And he was eating this and he was talking about, I think he was saying something about, "I don't understand what the women are complaining about," da-da-da, that kind of thing. "What do they want anyway?" So I wrote this poem and it was called "Silver Anniversary."

On the surface you hardly noticed
a ripple
you never suspected that
with every stroke, so much
seaweed
would drip from your fingertips.

I have been busy
these last twenty-five years
feeding barnacles
with sharp teeth,
filling castaway bottles,
greening rocks
and covering your undersides
with chains of nippled beads
and warm moss.

If you put me out to dry
my verdant handwriting
will stretch wide across
the beach.
I will crunch beneath
you at every step
and then
when the tide turns
I will come alive in the water
like an involuted Japanese flower.

At night we work
to loosen our tangled limbs
leave trails of
phosphorescent sparks.

Now I remember what the occasion was. He, we were talking about the number, you know, we were married for twenty-five years, the number of people who were getting divorced after many years, the children have grown up. And I was telling him, "You wouldn't dare divorce me because we're tangled up, you know, like the seaweed you're eating over there." [Laughs] All that nori, the nori is kind of the thick, I don't know, the way the seaweed collects on the bottom of the ocean, and I said, "like the seaweed you're eating, we're probably all tangled up and we probably wouldn't be able to separate ourselves from that," and so anyway, that was the result of that, of that conversation with... my husband laughed and we... [Laughs]

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.