Writing and Japanese maples
We all have callings to create. This is some of how I found mine.
1988
In front of our house on Taylor Street grew a Japanese maple—Acer palmatum—which I could climb up into and from which—though the canopy of five- and seven-pointed leaves—I could see down the street, or over East Portland, or out to the Cascades.
In Japan, the Japanese maple is called momiji. They grow all over East Asia, thriving where moderate climates have clear seasonal shifts. Humans domesticated the maples at least a thousand years ago, though they broke out during Japan’s Edo Period, when gardeners bred cultivars for elegance. There are now hundreds of varieties, with colors ranging from chartreuse green to bright red, flame orange, dark purple, and sunshine gold.
In art and culture, the momiji’s array symbolizes harmony and change, especially as the leaves run up the color spectrum through fall. Acer palmatum went worldwide in the late 1800s, when the Meiji Period opened Japan to the West. American and European botanists flocked to the Japanese maple and carted saplings home in crates.
One of those botanists was Theodore Payne, an Englishman who became captivated by West Coast flora and moved across the Atlantic and the U.S. to Los Angeles, where he bought Evans Nursery in Encino. Payne soon collected plants from around the Pacific Rim and built a trade pipeline to the Far East. By his retirement in 1958, he’d introduced over 430 different plant to Californian gardeners, including a vast collection of momiji. The trees’ range flourished as Japanese aesthetics became popular in North America through the 20th century.
There are Japanese maples almost everywhere I lived, from the front yard on Taylor to across the street from Liberty House to the corner where Mom and Dad met. A vast purple momiji shaded the strawberries in front our house in Garden Home, the last place I lived with Mindy.
And I write under one now, from our front porch in Southwest Portland. She has four thick trunks which lift up ten narrower ones, which rise and branch into a canopy of feathery green stars, each searching out and soaking up sunlight the best it can.
Back in 1988, inside our house off Taylor, it’s after bathtime and right before bed. Tyler and I are wrapt in blankets and sit close to Mom as she reads: Little Cabin in the Woods and Little House on the Prairie; anything from Beverly Cleary; My Side of the Mountain; Charlotte’s Web. I follow along over her shoulder, sometimes make corrections if she misreads, and learn how words look and sound. I consider inflection and how sentences take shape. I note hiw stories always get sad before they’re happy again.
Sometimes I watch Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers Neighborhood or Ramblin’ Rod, but the main stories I have are books. I plunder our shelves and borrow them from the Holgate Branch and rip through fiction and non-fiction alike. In the mornings, I read The Oregonian. Front page, then Comics, then Sports. Sometimes I get books from grandparents or when Uncle Graig returns from Germany with Asterix and Tin-Tin. No matter the source, I chew through stories like apples.
1991
At some point, I began to write my own. First drafts in notebooks, etchings of characters and plots. Mostly, my storytelling built gradually though there were breakthrough moments too.
Like one morning when I woke up and went downstairs and Mom and Dad were prepping for the day and Kailyn was in their bed sucking her thumb and snuggling her blankie so I snuggled next to her and asked how she slept and she told me of a scary dream about being surrounded by alligators.
“What’d you do, Kai?”
“I fighted ‘dem.”
“With what?”
“Swords,” she nodded for emphasis.
I liked that dream and I told Mom.
“Maybe you should make the dream into a book,” she offered.
So that’s what I started at school. I wrote the story out and illustrated each page and my favorite was a drawing of Kailyn with her bowl cut, wearing footie pajamas, dual-wielding scimitars against a gang of gators. I made a title page and a front and back cover and stapled the book together three times down the side and shared the story with my family and they said they liked what I made and that felt satisfying.
Later that year, Ms. Gilbertz assigned us to imagine and draw a map of an island. Like maybe the island could be a pizza and the cities were pepperoni, or a boot with Shoelace Town for a capital. I built a fantasy world instead. I started with an island populated by standard tropes—dwarves, elves, orcs, etc.—and as I nicked out forests and etched mountains and swamps and named cities, the work swept me up, and when the project was due there were two full continental coastlines, six sheets tall and four sheets wide. Ms. Gilbertz suggested I try writing a play. We were studying the Aztecs so I wrote a script about Moctezuma and the fall of Tenochtitlan and the class acted it out.
Then that summer our wood-paneled Dodge Caravan was headed northbound on Highway 191 toward Jackson Hole on a road trip to national parks, and we were listening to Harvest Moon, and the Grand Tetons rose into view.
Oregonians are no stranger to natural glory, but the Tetons were something else, and a yearning welled up in me to explain what I saw and felt—and praise—so I picked up a pen and wrote.
2016
I’m reading Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking and stumble across a line I’ve heard some iteration of before:
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
The place we’re called to create isn’t always art, but we all have a dominant expressions. For some the expression is visual, in forms of ink and paint. For others maybe it’s exercise or mathematics or sound or sculpture or weaving or weightlifting. For me the realm is words.
1987
We are merging onto I-205, northbound from Division, and I’m in the back seat of the wood-paneled Dodge Caravan, running my hands over the ceramic frits which border the back windows. Mom turns down the radio for a moment, which I know means she has something to share.
“I heard lately how God always answers our prayers,” she calls over her shoulder, eyes on the road. “Sometimes His answer is ‘yes,’ and sometimes ‘no,’ and other times He says ‘I’ll show you later.’ But he always answers.”
I consider this and a question rises: Even if there wasn’t a God, wouldn’t every question still be answered that way?
Mom continues.
“See for yourself! You can ask Him anything any time.”
What I want most in the world right then is a Hot Wheels car from a series called Speed Demons, which are basically hot rods mashed up with a monster design. Every time we shop at the Glisan Freddy’s, I beeline for the toy aisle to admire them through their polyethylene bubbles.
So that night I say a prayer:
Dear God, thank you for the day today. Please let me have a good day tomorrow. And please let me have a monster Hot Wheels. Amen.
I don’t ask anyone else for Speed Demons, not for my birthday or Christmas or from my grandparents. I just pray. For months, maybe years, until the prayer becomes rote and fades away as I age and move on to sports cards and comic books.
1992
One early spring morning I’m walking to school along 80th. I usually walk with my friend Matt, but today I’m alone and the sky is grayed over in clouds and the air is cool and still and at least it’s not raining. When walking alone I watch the ground to avoid cracks and think up stories, so my head is down as I step off the sidewalk at Mill Street and a glint of silver near the curb catches my eye. There’s grass growing from a crack in the pavement and I spot an unnaturally green tint and texture—a plastic car with shiny black tires and metal gray exhaust pipes. I reach down and lift out Fangster, a Hot Wheels Speed Demon. He is a green dragon with wide red eyes and jagged teeth. He has long claws for fenders and a coiled tail instead of a spoiler.
The diecast print on Fangster’s belly says he was built in Malaysia in 1985. His axles are bent and his wheels are wobbly. But otherwise he’s in good condition and I know right away that the Speed Demon is an answer.
Maybe if I’d got Fangster when I first asked, he’d be forgotten by now. Instead, he features in this story I tell about reasons I believe. In my 20s, Tyler found him in our old toy box and gave him back to me as a gift, and Fangster often sits nearby as a write. So one thing I learned from the answer is God takes God’s time. (For us, that’s usually slow.)
The other thing I learned—a lesson which grows both more mysterious yet solidified as time passes—is God truly knows me.
I love this piece/chapter. So good!!