<Begin Segment 31>

AI: Before our last break, you were just on the point of, your husband Yosh had retired from Bell & Howell, and you were then going to be moving to Irvine.

MY: Yeah, okay.

AI: And what were you doing at that time with your writing?

MY: You know, I collected a lot of, you know, during the time I was in bed a lot, I was working, too, but I had to get my lungs cleared out in order to be able to breathe for a day or two, and so it's a very tiring process. And so I, after work I was just exhausted so I would go to bed and do a lot of reading or resting and writing. And essentially the stuff that I wrote during that time, I think I -- actually I threw it out because it just sounded a little bit too melodramatic. I wasn't really feeling sorry for myself but it just sounded really very personal in some ways. I wanted my children to get to know me, as a person, and so anyway I just decided that was not too publishable so I threw it out, I think. And my children later were saying, "Why did you throw it away?" They thought it would be kind of interesting to read. But I also had a kind of superstition about it, you know, that now that I'm not dying -- I had to get used to the idea of not dying, dying anymore -- hanging onto this thing at that period felt like, you know, once I've finished writing this thing, that that was sort of the end or something like that, and since it hadn't been quite finished, that it felt like I didn't want to have it around, and so I, I threw it out. And then I gave up my little stint with sculpting which was actually very funny because my husband is very artistic. He is not only, was not only artistic but he was a very fast worker, because he was a watercolorist. So he would get painting, and he would just whip up this gorgeous painting in fifteen minutes and I had never seen him sculpt before but I'd be sitting there, I'm kind of a tedious worker, like there's a difference between the Beethoven and the Mozart method of writing, of composing. Supposedly Beethoven, Mozart ever since he was a small child was able to have a whole symphony, musical composition in his head and he would sit down and write it all out. And that Beethoven was the kind of composer who plodded along. He wrote and then he rewrote. And so I was sort of a Beethoven more of sculpting, and I was sitting there with a glob of clay and I was just kind of working at it and working at it every day, and my husband one day couldn't stand it any longer. He was watching me, it just got too painful to him, so he said, "What are you trying to do?" And I said well... he said okay, and he sat down and he went b-b-b-b-b-b and he composed this beautiful little bird, you know? I'm going, oh.... [Laughs] I don't think that I have the talent. I don't have it, there's something wrong with my fingertips.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.