My Life in Tokyo

Here’s what Mark wrote to me from Shanghai this week:

Having breakfast in hotel atrium which, what with the palm trees and blue neon glass staircases looks a bit like a Miami cruise ship.  Listening to the pianist and clarinetist (yes, clarinetist) play “Home on the Range”, “Swanee River”, and now “My Way.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

This has been an especially sad week, as we learned of the deaths of three important people in our lives. I would like to tell you a bit about each one of them.

Gary Spradling

Gary Spradling was the husband of Michelle Spencer, a cousin of Mark’s father. He was 55 years old and had suffered from ALS for 6-1/2 years. He was an artist and a poet who worked in many different media and used his art to explore the difficulties and frustrations of dealing with a progressive, fatal disease. We got to know him over the past few years during visits to their apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which was so filled with his artwork it was a museum in itself. By the time we met him, he was nearly paralyzed. He was confined to a wheelchair and communicated using the movement of one finger, and later one knee, to compose words on a speech-enabled computer. Michelle brought his works alive for us, telling us the history and meaning behind each piece. Isabella especially enjoyed these visits and formed a special friendship with Gary. She enjoyed looking at all of his artworks and asking questions.

The director of the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center has written a very nice piece in memory of Gary. You can read it here.

Keith Harper

During our ill-fated renovation project in 2000, we ran into countless problems with the contractors. Rather than allow them to overcharge us for sloppy finishing work, our architect Claudio Veliz brought in his own team of craftsmen to do all of the detail work. Keith hung all of the doors, painted the walls, installed the trim, and took care of every other little task that popped up. He was in our apartment every day for about 8 months. He watched out for us when one of the incompetent fools hired by the contractor started throwing our expensive light fixtures out the window to an accomplice below; when another was about to saw through the beams supporting our double-sized bathtub; when the tiler wanted to lay a brand new marble floor directly on top of a warped subfloor. And he was a warm, friendly and funny character. He made friends with Isabella, who called him “Keef” (she was 2). He was a good soul, and he will be missed. He died of cancer last week.

Howard Green

Mark’s grandfather died on Thursday at the age of 91. He had spent many years in a nursing home. I remember visiting him several years ago when Isabella was a baby. Even when he began to sound a bit confused, he was an absolute whiz at checkers. The foolish outsider, I agreed to a game with him–and he beat me in about 4 moves. I understand that eventually no one in the home would play with him anymore because they were tired of losing all the time! He will be buried in the graveyard of the family church in Olean, Indiana, alongside all his family: generations of Greens, Spencers, Cooks and Buchanans.

It seems especially sad to have learned of the loss of all three of these people in the space of just a few days. And we are all disappointed to be so far away, unable to attend funerals and memorial services or offer our condolences in person. We knew when we left that we would probably not see Gary or Grandpa Green again, but we didn’t know how soon they would leave us.

We are all so grateful for the opportunity to live in Japan and have this wonderful adventure and learn so many new things. But there is no way around it: moving on to new things means you must leave others behind, sometimes forever.