Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (89 page)

THEIR FAVORITE BOOKS

Groucho Marx:
Charlotte’s Web
, by E.B. White

Madonna:
Gone With the Wind
, by Margaret Mitchell

Stephen King:
Lord of the Flies
, by William Golding

James Dean:
The Little Prince
, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Barack Obama:
Song of Solomon
, by Toni Morrison

Joe DiMaggio:
Superman
comic books

Lily Tomlin:
The Shipping News
, by E. Annie Proulx

Angelina Jolie:
In Search of the Real Dracula
, by M.J. Trow

Will Smith:
The Alchemist
, by Paulo Coehlo

Uncle John:
Drop City
, by T.C. Boyle (this week, anyway)

There are more pet fish in America than there are dogs and cats combined.

A THOUSAND CRANES

Sending a sick person a thousand paper cranes, each one folded from a single square of paper, is a tradition that originated in Japan and has spread all over the world. Here’s the story of a little girl who helped turn it into an international phenomenon
.

C
HILDHOOD, INTERRUPTED
In the fall of 1954, an 11-year-old Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki came down with what her family thought was a cold...until they found large lumps on her neck and behind her ears. That was enough to terrify any parent, but Sadako’s family had a special reason to worry: They lived in Hiroshima, and were just a mile from ground zero on August 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city in the closing days of World War II.

Sadako, two years old at the time of the bombing, had escaped the blast with only minor injuries. But she and her family were caught in a shower of “black rain”—radioactive fallout—as they fled the city. Now, nearly a decade later, as Sadako’s condition worsened her parents’ thoughts turned to “A-bomb disease,” the catchall name that many Japanese gave to radiation-caused illnesses. In early 1955, doctors confirmed the Sasakis’ worst fears: Sadako had leukemia, most likely caused by exposure to atomic radiation. She had less than a year to live and needed to be hospitalized right away.

THE GIFT

Sadako’s parents could not bring themselves to tell her what was wrong or what her prognosis was. They just told her that she would have to stay in the hospital until her lumps went away.

While Sadako was living at the hospital, a group of high-school students from Nagoya sent the patients there a gift of
senbazuru—
a thousand folded origami paper cranes, strung together like beads on a necklace. In Japan and other Asian cultures, the crane is a symbol of long life, and it is common to give paper cranes as gifts to newlyweds, to children, and to the sick. The high-school students intended the cranes as a gift to the
hibakusha
(“bomb-affected people”) at the hospital, to give them strength.

Eew! What is
heliculture
? The science of growing snails for food.

A WISH UPON A CRANE

Tradition also has it that when a person folds a thousand paper cranes, the mythical crane of Japanese folklore will grant a wish. Inspired by the gift, Sadako began folding her own paper cranes in the hope that the crane would grant her wish for a cure.

Paper was scarce in postwar Japan, so Sadako used whatever she could get her hands on: wrapping paper from the gifts she received, envelopes from get-well cards, notebook paper that her classmates brought when they came to visit, and even the tiny pieces of waxed paper that many of her pills were wrapped in. She cut everything into squares and folded the squares into cranes. When the squares of paper were too tiny for her to fold with her fingers, she made the folds using a straight pin.

In the eight months that Sadako lived in the hospital, she folded more than 1,300 cranes in all. She went on folding them until the middle of October 1955, when she became too ill to continue. She passed away on October 25 at the age of 12.

JOURNEY’S END

Sadako’s death was expected, but it was still a shock to her classmates, a third of whom were also survivors of the Hiroshima blast. They wanted to remember Sadako in some meaningful way, and decided to raise funds for a monument that would memorialize not just her but every child who’d been killed by the atom bombs. When they passed out leaflets at an annual meeting of junior high school principals, their local campaign grew into a national one. Many of the principals brought the idea back to their own schools and encouraged their students to get involved. Japanese newspapers and radio stations got behind the effort, and soon Sadako’s classmates had more than enough money to pay for the memorial. On May 5, 1958, just two and a half years after Sadako’s death, the Children’s Peace Monument—a bronze statue of Sadako atop a giant pedestal, her outstretched arms and holding a giant folded paper crane—was dedicated in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park.

After the Children’s Peace Monument was dedicated, Sadako’s story began to spread beyond Japan. Over the years it has been the subject of numerous children’s books, songs, plays, and musicals, as well as films and television shows. Her story is taught in schools all over the world. Many include paper crane folding as part of the instruction, and the schools send the completed
senbazuru
to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima, where they are put on display. Today, more than half a century after the statue was dedicated, the monument still receives more than 10
tons
of folded paper cranes each year from children (and adults) all over the world.

Space shuttle tires were good for only one trip (and cost $70,000 apiece).

CRANES FOR KUWAIT

After the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, Sadako’s story was taught in Kuwaiti schools, and the children there learned to fold paper cranes as a means of helping them deal with the trauma they experienced during the occupation. Following the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, many strands of
senbazuru
were left on the fence surrounding ground zero in a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the tragedy.

Today Sadako Sasaki’s older brother Masahiro, now in his late sixties, travels the world telling his sister’s story as a means of furthering the cause of peace. The Sasaki family long ago donated all but five of Sadako’s original cranes to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima. On the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Masahiro Sasaki presented one of the family’s five remaining cranes, folded by Sadako out of the wax paper from one of her pills, to the WTC Visitors Center in New York. Small enough to fit on a thumbnail, the tiny red crane is on permanent display along with the
senbazuru
collected from the fence at ground zero. “I hope that by talking about the small wish for peace, the small ripple will become bigger and bigger,” Sasaki says.

IN PERSON

If you ever visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, be sure to visit the Children’s Peace Monument and see the thousands of folded paper cranes on display there. Ring the Peace Bell, another popular memorial, and visit the Peace Flame. Unlike many memorial flames, this one is not eternal: It will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon has disappeared from Earth.

The average European walks 237 miles a year. Average American: 87 miles.

ANSWER PAGES

CALCULATOR WORDS

(Answers for
page 98
)

1.
Sizzle

2.
Eggshells

3.
Belize

4.
Zoo

5.
Shell

6.
Igloo

7.
Oslo

8.
Hobo

9.
Oboe

10.
Bolo

11.
Boise

12.
Glee

13.
Google

14.
Ebbs

15.
Ellis

16.
Gigolo

17.
Hills

18.
Oil

19.
Oozes

20.
LEGO

21.
Hell

22.
Boggle

23.
Hobbies

24.
Bolshoi

25.
Illegible

GRANDMA CELIA, CARD SHARK

(Answers for
page 168
)

Insta-matic:
Grandma Celia didn’t memorize all the cards when she shuffled; she just memorized the card at the top of the deck, which happened to be the Seven of Clubs. (At the end of the shuffle she slowed down just enough to get a look at the card.) When she cut the deck into three piles, she made the pile with the Seven of Clubs the third pile—the one on the right—so that she’d draw that card
last
. But she called out “Seven of Clubs”
first
, because that was the only card she knew. Then, after she drew what turned out to be the Jack of Hearts from the top of the first pile, she called out “Jack of Hearts” as she drew the card from the top of the second pile. That card was actually the Three of Spades. So she called out, “Three of Spades,” when she drew the top card from the third pile, which she already knew was the Seven of Clubs. (That’s why she didn’t let me see any of the cards until she was done.)

Longest field goal in NFL history: Tom Dempsey, for 66 yards in 1970 Even more impressive, Dempsey was born without half of his kicking foot.

Seeing Is Believing:
Grandma Celia planned this trick in advance, so before I came over she took the Ten of Diamonds out of the deck and put it in her purse. Then when she wrote the note, put it in her wallet, and put the wallet back in her purse, she made sure to put it right next to the Ten of Diamonds.

Later, when she said “Stop!” and took her wallet out of her purse, she pressed the Ten of Diamonds against the outside of the wallet with her fingers and lifted it out of the purse with the wallet, taking care not to let me see the card. When she laid the wallet on top of the cards, she laid the Ten of Diamonds face down on the top of the pile. (That’s why she told me a messy pile was OK—to make it harder for me to spot the new card on top.)

Flip-Flop:
Before she did this trick, Grandma Celia turned the card on the bottom of the deck face up, without me noticing. When she fanned out the cards in her hand and told me to pick one, she was careful to make sure the bottom card wasn’t showing, so I couldn’t tell that it was face up. After I picked my card (and while I was momentarily distracted reading it), she closed the fan, squared the deck, and casually turned the deck over without my realizing it. All the cards in the deck were now face up, except for the card on top, which was face down. I assumed that the entire deck was face down, which is exactly what she wanted me to think. When I put my card back in the deck, it and the top card were the only two cards that were face down—the rest of the deck was face up. When Celia put the cards behind her back, she turned the top card face up and turned the entire deck over, so that now all of the cards were face down...except mine, which was face up.

A Stand-up Guy:
This was the simplest trick of all: When Celia held up the Joker she kept her
fourth
finger—her index finger—hidden behind the card. Then when she set the cup on top of the card, she raised the finger up just enough to allow the cup to sit on the card
and
her finger.

MOVIE QUOTE QUIZ #1

(Answers for
page 201
)

1.
Kindergarten Cop
(1990)