Forgiveness (22 page)

Until she too broke down, five years after the war’s end. The dust, the isolation, the poverty had worn her down. In a desperate fit, she dressed Glory in a warm winter jacket and boarded a train back to British Columbia. She cried harder returning to Vancouver than she had leaving.

Being separated from her sons made her desperately unhappy, but she could not stay another night at the Golden Valley farm. She felt she had never left Coaldale, she still felt at war. She pleaded with Hideo to leave the farm. He promised he would. It took him two weeks to find and rent a house in Medicine Hat. The house, on 2nd Street, was tiny and old, but it was enough to get Mitsue to return. She never left again.

My hometown is Medicine Hat, Alberta. We hear it all the time: it’s a funny name. When government officials were first sent to the southeast corner of the Canadian prairies to determine its suitability for human life, they deemed it uninhabitable. It was altogether too hot, too barren, and too dusty to provide the basic needs of life.

The people of Medicine Hat did not want to be a sideshow, a prairie joke. They needed branding advice. They sought out the best. They wrote to their distant friend—Sir Rudyard Kipling, the Empire’s poet. He was a man of the world. He understood the power of the word. He knew the industrious, the prosperous, people of import. From his vantage point in Sussex, surely Sir Kipling could tell them which alternate name was preferable: Leopoldville or Smithville. His expedited handwritten response shocked the council:

This remote outpost of the Dominion, wrote Sir Rudyard Kipling in 1908, “seems to have all hell for a basement, and the only trap door appears to be in Medicine Hat.” He was referring, of course, to the large reserves of natural gas that gave the city its nickname, Gas City. He was gone as quickly as he arrived, but was not forgotten.

Medicine Hat it was. Medicine Hat it shall remain. It was the right call.

In 1912, evidence of Medicine Hat’s growing economic prowess was erected to great fanfare. The town christened a large and imposing hotel, a four-storey, forty-six bedroom red-brick masterpiece across the street from the train station. Visitors were welcomed by a grand foyer, not unlike the one they would have just checked out of in the great hotels of Winnipeg. Every inch of the establishment was designed to exceed the expectations of the particular traveller. No expense was spared: lush carpets were laid on each floor, handsome brass bedsteads and chiffoniers were installed in each room. Guests could find a warm and welcoming dinner in the main floor dining room, which quickly won a culinary reputation second-to-none in western Canada. The men could retire with a cigar and a glass of imported scotch in the smoking room off the dining room. The proprietor, Mr. D. Broadfoot, a well-known hotel man, named his masterpiece Hotel Cecil. It was the town’s crown jewel.

Hotel Cecil was a monument to Kipling’s confidence in Medicine Hat. And it would feature largely in my future.

Forty-two years later, just down the road from the Cecil, on a crisp fall morning, Medicine Hat’s first baby of Japanese descent was born. It was my father, Stanley Gene Sakamoto.

Medicine Hat was a kind town to my father. He did not have to fight his way through his childhood like his older brother Ron. If Ron inherited Mitsue’s steely grit, my dad inherited her empathy. It seems a well deep enough to quench any need.

My dad is not of this time. Walking around Medicine Hat with him is like stepping into an episode of
King of Kensington.
It takes him an hour to go to the bank to make a simple deposit. He actually goes to the bank to speak to a teller. He does not have an Interac card. He has never used an ATM. Instead, he carries around enough cash in his fanny pack to buy a used car. Finally, as a caring family, we managed to convince Dad to limit his “walking around” money to a few hundred bucks, but the fanny pack is a bright red beacon. From his cold, dead hip shall we remove that fanny pack. We have tried our best to find him chic designs, but a fanny pack is still a fanny pack. He giggles as he clips it on in the foyer every afternoon.

In a strange way, he is also ahead of his time. Night after night throughout the early ‘90s, Dad would fall asleep with technology magazines forming a tent across his face. He knew about BlackBerrys and voice-recognition back when the technologies were still sometime off in the future, but he stubbornly refuses to relinquish his Motorola dumb phone for a smartphone. Instead, he carries around an actual phone book.

He usually puts three or four boxes of files into his Honda CRV for the day instead of using a laptop or an iPad. He does have a computer, but he uses it primarily for accessing Google Maps, where he can soar far above the clouds and wonder at it all. He has been able to bend and shape his world to suit his quirky ways. He goes to bed at 4 a.m. He wakes at noon. He is nocturnally nomadic, sleeping in various spots throughout the house, rarely returning to the same bed as the previous night. He giggles. A lot. A remnant of his time spent in the South Pacific, no doubt, his preferred wave is a
Hawaii
Five-
0
–style “hang loose.” In Medicine Hat.

He is terrible, absolutely terrible, with names. His go-to names when he’s in a jam are “big guy” or “shooter,” whether it’s a man or
a woman. I have never seen him kiss anyone on both cheeks—that is too chichi. He does shake hands, but he prefers to thump the chest of the person he is greeting, just below the neck, with an open hand. Two or three thumps usually does the trick. Again, man or woman. It is the weirdest way I have ever seen a human being greet another. It is like he is in the wilds.

Dad plays in two hockey leagues: one where he is fifteen years older than everyone, one where he is the young buck at sixty-two. In both leagues, they call him Stan “Hackamoto” because he is the dirtiest player on the ice. He loves it. He taunts his opponents and hacks at the back of their legs if they get past him. He calls them unrepeatable names as they scramble for the puck in the corner. He giggles all the way down the handshake line after each game.

He has let his hair grow out and there is a lot of silver in it now. His face is getting rounder. He is looking more like his mom. I love calling him out of the blue, hoping to catch him when he is out and about. That’s the best time. If he’s on the road, he’s all honks and waves. I know he has the phone cradled into his shoulder so as to not impede his ability to dish the “hang loose.” If he’s in a meeting, he always recounts the purpose in real time, as if I’m taking minutes. He ends those calls by telling me something interesting about the person he is meeting with: an upcoming event, a milestone reached, a granddaughter born. And that’s it. That’s why it takes my dad an hour to make a routine five-minute bank deposit. That’s why people love to receive a “big guy,” a “hang loose,” a thump on the chest or a slash to the shins. That’s why it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know the names of most of the people he connects with on any given day. Because he actually connects.

When my dad speaks to you—in a bank lineup, a car wash, a restaurant—he is genuine in his desire to know about you. He doesn’t give a shit about the weather. He knows it will change. He doesn’t care to grumble about the latest political scandal. He knows that won’t change. He wants to know about you. What is on your horizon, what you are proud of, excited for, fearful of. He
collects intent and roots down to find the nugget of positive. He comes out of each mine with something. He is instinctively positive. He floats.

My parents met at a dance at McCoy High School in the fall of 1967. McCoy was—and still is—the town’s one Catholic school. Even in my day, out of the dances of the three high schools, the McCoy dance was the one not to be missed. There was always a lot of repenting to be done the following Sunday.

Diane, my mom, had been cajoled to come down from Calgary for the dance by her cousin Darlene. She wore a green dress. They danced the night away to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Her parents didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll, but they took in the comfort fact that the records coming through the front door were from their homeland.

My mom was cute. She had a light to her. Not a soft light—a hard light, like when a match is struck. Stan and Diane’s romance flared. He was soon riding his 250cc motorbike north on Highway 1 to visit her in Calgary.

Darlene watched closely as Stan moved into her cousin’s life. Everyone wondered how her father, Ralph, would react. The young man who was frequently sitting at his dining table, praying with him and passing him mashed potatoes, looked exactly like his tormentors of over twenty years ago.

Ralph watched Stan closely. He made sure he was polite. He made sure he treated his daughter—the apple of his eye—with respect and dignity. But remarkably, he never raised the
issue of my father’s race. Not once. He deemed my father very suitable. He even thought Diane lucky for finding such an honourable and upstanding young man. He approved mightily.

One day in the spring of 1968, Mitsue set the table. A special guest was coming. She brought out the good dishes. She guessed that the guest would begrudgingly have learned how to use chopsticks. But would he want to? For days she thought about what to serve. It kept her up at night. She had served many
hakujins
before, friends from the factory, neighbours, the kids’ school friends. But never someone who had been imprisoned by the Japanese army. She decided on chow mein, sweet and sour spare ribs, barbecued B.C. sockeye salmon, and white rice.

She was scooping rice out of the Sanyo cooker when Ralph and Phyllis rang the doorbell. Hideo welcomed them in. Mitsue hurried into the living room, wiping her hands with a tea towel. They all shook hands and sat in the living room.
Senbei
crackers and almond chocolates were placed in a bowl on the oval living room table.

Mitsue and Ralph became instant friends. There was an unspoken understanding between them. They were both far too polite to state it, to address it. But they felt they knew each other. Deep down, they knew each other. They had both discarded the past, keeping only what they needed, leaving the rest behind. They did not compare hardships or measure injustices. They knew there was no merit to that.

They sat down at the dinner table. Hideo gave a toast. Ralph offered a prayer. They laughed. They could do that now.

Breaking down is the easy part. Anyone, at any time, can break down. The act of coming together again is what makes a hero. Moving on, with an open heart, seems, at times, impossible. But it’s not.

I would not be born for another ten years, but that was the most important dinner of my life. Every story has two sides. My life depended on my sides coming together.

Thirty-three years later, the forgiveness that was shared that night would give me my life.

Dad graduated from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. He and my mom were married on December 29, 1973. His first job was as food and beverage manager at the Calgary Inn, and that is where the wedding, which included 150 guests, was held. Shortly after, Tom Brook, who was on the board of directors at the Inn and knew my dad, hired him as executive director at his new resort on Castaway Island in Fiji.