by Mei Kobayashi (Shoshichi’s younger daughter)
My first memory of my father was our annual fall event – getting dressed up with my sister to go to the UC campus to be photographed for my parents’ upcoming Christmas card. Weeks before the event, my mother spent hours sewing us matching dresses then finding lace bobby socks and patent leather shoes. Sumire, being the A+ student that she was, always cooperated. Me? Well, … My parents found it a challenge to get me dressed and an even greater challenge to get me to sit still for 2 to 3 rolls of film (that is, 2 to 3 dozen photos). Ancient cameras of yesteryear consumed 3 square inches of film per photo so only a dozen could fit on each tall roll.
My second memory of my father is on my first day of nursery school up in the Berkeley Hills. As he dropped me off, I begged him not to leave. He was scheduled to rush off to the University to work, but he parked the car and stayed an hour or so until I met and started playing with other children. A few days later he bought me a beautiful square lunch box with a matching thermos bottle and cup. It was white and adorned with pink flowers in a lace pattern. I could now walk in every morning as a fashionable young lady!
Around elementary school, we started having dinner guests on a regular basis. To make sure I would learn table manners, I had to sit next to my father for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Sit still. And don’t let you pigtails dangle onto my dinner plate,” he would say whenever I leaned over to whisper a secret to Sumire. Sitting next to my father ended up becoming an educational experience in a completely unrelated matter – mathematics. I am not sure how or when the practice started, but he taught my sister and me mathematics at the breakfast table every summer morning. When we became too uncooperative, he instituted a policy. We would receive 5 cents per page each time we completed a chapter and finished all of the exercises at the end. When we got a little older and more rebellious, he revised his policy to a whopping 10 cents per page, but we were required to deposit 50% of our earnings in the bank to save up for college. We were quite naïve at the time, and were quite pleased with ourselves for having negotiated what we thought was a fantastic deal that doubled our earnings.
(We fast forward several years, bypassing acne and other adolescent perils.)
Before we went off to college, we were surprised when our father told us that we were now adults and responsible for ourselves. The temptation to keep clinging on as a parent would be too great if we stayed in Berkeley. “Just as children must outgrow childhood, parents must outgrow parenthood”, he said. My last memory from my childhood is at Oakland Airport. My father is standing with my mother by his side. Both are desperately trying to look happy, confident and reassuring. They are smiling and waving good-bye as I board a plane to Newark to go off to study at Princeton.
