The small porch is austere, two pairs of shoes the only decoration. I add mine to the line-up gigantic in comparison. The elderly Japanese couple answer the doorbell with smiles open wide as the door, big as their hearts. Husband and wife are giddy as I lumber through their delicate house hoping not to break anything. Finally we are safely seated on a patio in Honolulu, a city I don't like, in a climate I detest. I want to wash my sticky hands and face but I don't ask. Instead I take Blackie's hand and look straight into his eyes. At eighty-six his tour of duty in that highly decorated Nisei Division is only memory. He studies my face as I speak. Is he seeing my dead father? Perhaps, but soon I realize that he is practically deaf. He is at least three inches shorter than forty years ago when I first met him. Fate and war conspired for these men to meet beginning a friendship spanning sixty years. Blackie tells how he offered to cut off the bottom of his sleeping bag and pup tent so my father would have appropriate sized equipment. I love hearing this story for what I am sure is the last time. I ache for my father's presence, for both men to have ears able to hear again, to share one more visit spinning out their web of communal memory. I watch his shining eyes. Through my own damp ones I see two old soldiers sitting on a patio staring into each other's face— remembering.
—Susan Gunderson
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