A Word In Edgewise: Time Is An Ever-Flowing Stream

I’m writing on a quiet, grey Tuesday. Guy Fawkes Day if you’re historically-minded, Election Day if you’re centered in the here-and-now. I’m looking back.

A photo; my first Christmas. Sitting on the floor, snug in my bathrobe, smiling up at the tree that’s mysteriously appeared indoors; enchanted by the tinsel, shiny balls, ropes of silver and gold, strands of colored lights. I couldn’t have said I was almost eight months old, or known, yet, the pretty packages were mine. Much less could I have said that eighteen days earlier, a Hawaiian island had been bombed, or the next day my country entered World War II. You’d excuse a baby, but when does one begin to have a handle on things? To know… I’ve always played catch-up.

Years back, when I was researching an article on fireworks, a co-worker suggested talking to a professor “over in the Science Building.” I called, and soon was at his office, seated across a desk piled with papers and scattered metal tchotchkes. When I mentioned fireworks, he exclaimed, “People think black powder will explode! It will not! I will show you!” Pulling an envelope from a drawer, he shook some black powder into a squat metal cylinder on the desktop and began striking matches. To my relief, nothing caught fire. Much later, reading “American Prometheus,” I finally realized the elderly professor was the George Kistiakowsky, the “cylinder” a copy of the ignition system he and his team created to detonate Trinity on July 16, 1945.

It was long after the war I read of our government’s internment of some 120,000 Japanese-American citizens; entire families stripped of their homes, shops and belongings, for the duration of the war. And when I say “read of,” I don’t mean during any high school history classes, for those events weren’t mentioned. Much more has been revealed over the years, but just this week I read Tim Arango’s New York Times editorial on the part baseball played in the lives of those in camp Manzanar, isolated in the Mojave Desert. Forbidden their own language or practice of their own religions, the Japanese internees were somehow not forbidden balls and bats but were allowed to sketch out a field and to own equipment to play baseball. The ongoing games kept an American thread running through their lives, as it had since 1872, explains Arango, after Horace Wilson, an educator from Maine, introduced baseball to Japan.

Dan Kwong, a performance artist whose mother was incarcerated in Manzanar, long dreamed of having Japanese teams play baseball there once again. For two decades he wrestled with the National Park’s argument that Manzanar was an archaeological site that couldn’t be disturbed — an ironic decision considering those related to people once unable to leave Manzanar should now be unable to enter to play ball.

Kwong persisted, and today the original field has been restored to its original dusty self, via vintage photographs and the dig’s own information — rusty pegs located bases, lines, even unearthed coins and soda bottles left behind. Two exhibition games were played between Games 1 and 2 of this year’s World Series. While Japanese phenomenon Shohei Ohtani shone for the winning Dodgers, Dan Kwong, 69, was at Manzanar playing first base for the Li’l Tokyo Giants, his team for the past 53 years.

Two exhibition games; just the players, one allotted guest each and some volunteers. A slender beginning, but there it was: the restored field, Japanese teams in vintage gear and baseball played in Manzanar for the first time in 80 years. In his early pitch to sponsors Kwong embroidered on “Field of Dreams,” promising, “If we build it, they will come. This time willingly.”

Time is an ever-flowing stream. It’s always Opening Day somewhere, a fresh arm is winding up for the first pitch in a whole new ballgame. Take deep breaths.