And In This Corner....

So, here I am at the in-laws.

Grandma/Obaachan - she dotes on Mimi and gives her the requisite hugging, heart-to-heart chats, and lap time that a young, loving, grandchild deserves. She is typical of her generation of post-war Japanese immigrants - reserved, patient, self-sufficient. I may not want to be her, but I can find a lot to admire, and I see these traits in my husband, whom I love, love, love.

Grandpa Grumpy, or Grumps, is a different matter entirely. I've already given you the short version of our rocky relationship. He's a bully and I'm learning not to be his punching bag.

It didn't start out this way - when Bob first brought me to the Kansas property where his mother and her husband (his step-father) spend their summers, I found my future father-in-law to be garrulous but charming in a rustic kind of way. In his late 70's, he was a strapping farm boy made good who had travelled the world with the military (then later with the civil arm of the military), spoke a few Asian phrases (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). He was very handy with firearms, which I admit I found fascinating because I'd lived up north in the bush where hunting for food was a way of life. Done respectfully, it was a proper skill.

During that visit we toured the thousand acres he had bought back after his settler family had lost it during the Depression. He valued his ancestral roots, and as he ambled through the forested acres pointing out native birds and the sudden glimpse of a white-tailed doe, I appreciated how hard he had worked to live the comfortable life as a landowner and raconteur of his many travels. He taught me how to shoot a rifle (something his other daughters in law refused to do), and showed us the several hundred acre parcel he had deeded to the government for a wildlife refuge (hunting rights reserved, of course).

Trouble began once we started visiting as a married couple. Grumps and Obaachan, both retired from senior positions at the PX (stores on military bases), lived the other half of the year in a large modern home chock-full of antiques and collectibles they had purchased during their separate tours (some of them no doubt from post-war refugees without a pot to piss in). Grumps had been married twice - once to a Japanese woman during the tumultuous post-war period overseas when such things were frowned on, and again in the 1990's to Bob's mother, also Japanese. The key to what made Grumps interesting, and then soured into a bitter pill, was his obsession with proving to everyone what a admirable human being he was, how brave, how clever, how adventurous, how industrious, and above all, not racist. In short, everything became about Grumps. To this day, he shows absolutely no interest in, empathy with, or compassion for anyone else, unless, and this is a big unless.... they are Japanese.

You could bring Freud back from the dead with this interesting head case. Grumps, who had seen the devastation wrought by WWII in the Pacific Theatre, seems to have taken on the psychic wrench of American guilt after the atomic bombings in Japan. He missed the active war by a few months, arriving in time to be an M.P. for the occupying forces, even part of the clean-up crew in Nagasaki. There he saw families reduced to skin and bones from the poverty of war, villages bereft of men (all gone to graves), farms without fields of food, empty baskets, and loss, much loss and grief.

What he never saw was the other side; a close friend being shot or disemboweled in the heat of battle, prison camps for women and children, the mass murder of Chinese in Manchuria, the death marches, thousands of men going down in ambushed ships in Pearl Harbor. The horrible poison of war that visited hell on everyone caught up in the conflict. The American sacrifices, all abstract images to him, are only invoked when he wants to underscore his argument that America must engage in war, no matter what the ideology, no matter what the cost.

So here we are, sixty years on, and Grumps has gathered around him what he knows and believes in most - Japanese-Americans. I think it has something to do with cleaving to a culture that will put up with him. He and Obaachan live in a community of nisei, or second generation, all very nice, all very polite. If they are bored or offended by his endless self-agrandizement and he-haw jokes at other people's expense, they don't show it. He, in turn, is a broken record when it comes to how much these people should be applauded for having the good sense to be American Citizens.

Which brings me to one of the sticking points between me and Grumpy. Here is a guy who lived half his life in other countries as an American ex-pat, and yet he cannot stop harassing me about why I haven't become a citizen here in the U.S. In his eyes, there is no better place on earth, and while he touts the American dream, also denigrates my home country (and entire family still living there) as poor, spineless, socialist second cousins. Hmmm, I wonder why I wouldn't want to call myself his compatriot?

I don't bring these things up - and when he tries to bait me, I let it go. This isn't the bullying I'm talking about. No, it goes much deeper, down into the psyche of a man who at his core is exactly what a bully is: a sad, insecure soul who is terrified of being bullied himself. I know this because in the seven years I've known him I've heard the same stories over and over and over again about what a fabulous, hardworking, brave, savvy, smart, clever, un-prejudiced person he has been in every single situation in his life. He never stops talking. Never. It's as if he is afraid that if he does, something will come into the void and bowl him over.

When we brought Mimi home, the bullying intensified and grew to encompass everything we were as parents, as a couple. Our choices about where we lived, how we lived, how we raised our daughter were endless fodder for his judgement. He ignored us most of the time we visited, except when he wanted to pontificate about his view on child rearing, or to instruct me on my duties as a daughter-in-law. Though he never graced the kitchen with his presence, he was like a hawk, waiting for any perceived slight on my part if I wasn't fast enough to help out with cooking or cleaning. Sometimes his back-handed insults about my lack of character were so stinging I often had to hold back tears, I was so humiliated. If he was finished pontificating, he made real conversation impossible by turning up the television so loud we were forced to leave the room. And his only comments to Mimi were so laced with sarcasm that she instinctively stopped going near him and focused her attention on the old lady with waiting arms and a kind word.

So this brings me to our Christmas visit. I knew I'd reached the end of my rope with Grumps, so on this visit I decided I would start by just ignoring him. But as I mentioned in my previous column, the old man surprised us all and seemed happier than I'd known him in years. I relaxed and we had a pleasant dinner, even engaging in the kind of light-hearted exchanges like the early days. I felt hopeful.

The next morning, I was up early. The rest of the house was quiet and I started catching up on some reading. Grumps came down and sat across from me in his leather recliner. He took off his socks, stretched out his big, gnarly feet on the foot rest, and stared at me with a familiar glittering eye and Cheshire cat smile. I felt the old sense of doom invading the space like the early morning darkness. This is it.

I can't tell you exactly how the conversation started, but it wasn't long before the needling accusations began. It isn't important to go into the specifics, they were the same things he'd been pushing at us for years. All assumptions, because he'd never actually asked us anything about our lives. All judgments, none of them good.

I took the old guy head on. Didn't lose my temper, but I did get a little teary-eyed, which I ignored and pressed on. He thrust, I parried. His voice rose, mine matched his with intent. I kept repeating the same thing, over and over. "If you want to understand something about our lives, just ask. I am happy to answer any and all questions." Although Grumps wasn't particularly interested in the answers, it became abundantly clear that from this time forward, the game plan had changed. There would be no pronouncements and insults in a vacumn. His assumptions would be challenged. And often. And there would be no more impunity for the judge and jury he had become.

In the end, that's what felled the beast.

Grumpy thinks he knows everything about sacrifice. He's got lots of stories on that subject, except that when you peel back the holier-than-thou visage, you realize he's a healthy old guy whose lived longer than most with a fat government pension, free healthcare, summer and winter residences, and a ridiculous amount of collectable junk, so much that he filled his own museum with it. Whatever sacrifices he made way back when, pale in comparison to the sufferings around him in the real world, and it wouldn't take much to hold a cold, clear light up to shatter that illusion.

I'm wise enough to know that, and putting my small sacrifices in perspective keeps me honest about how fortunate I am to have all that I do.

The rest of it is just wind.

So go blow, Grumps. Or better yet, just put a sock in it.