SOME THINGS I HOPE are true:
1. That people are basically good.
2. That frozen yogurt is as healthy as regular.
3. That Amy P. has forgiven me for failing to stand up for her the day Trevor and Sam made fun of her on the playground, next to the red tunnel slide.
I sift the past and the memory surfaces: a red-haired girl standing next to a slide. She’s skinny and freckled with clothes so wrong that even twelve-year-olds know they’re from the thrift store. She’s laughing, but her eyes are like a cornered animal’s, and she’s wobbling backward toward the slide— backing away from the sixth-grade class that’s surrounded to watch a tall blond boy and his spike-haired friend make fun of her skirt, knee socks, and high-pitched voice.
She looks at me.
I turn and walk the other way.
Though the memory haunts me, it wasn’t the last time I failed to speak up. It happened again just the other day. My friend Andy and I had finished rock climbing and were hiking back past the day’s triumphs and embarrassments, when we met two men, stripped to the waist, staring up the rock face, ropes at their feet. Their bare chests embarrassed me, a girl raised to believe in shirts. The one was a hairy bulge, the other, concave and starkly white. “You know what this wall is rated?” the hairy one asked.
“5.11,” Andy said, referring to the system that rates the difficulties of climbs.
“5.11?” The man punctuated his question with a long drink from a brown glass bottle. “Shoot, doesn’t look it.”
Andy tried to explain that the wall started easier (he estimated it was a 5.7), but about twenty feet up, at a ledge, it became more difficult. For the next few minutes, while the hairy man slurringly asked Andy about the climbs around here and the skinny one drank and stared at me, I fidgeted with my equipment, saying little—I tightened and loosened the strap of my harness, opened and closed a spare carabiner, brushed specks of dust from the climbing shoes I held in my hand.
It wasn’t because I was still embarrassed, or even because of the stares, but because I wondered if I should say something. If friends don’t let friends drive drunk, what about letting total strangers rock climb? I settled on a simple, “Have a safe climb,” as we walked by. I hope they didn’t fall. But if they did, would it be my fault?
There are other times when I’ve failed to speak up. One, the first time I felt like I’d sinned, started like this: I was four years old, and my dad had bought a pair of floor-to-ceiling speakers. He put them in our family room, where he’d play the Carpenters and Lincoln Mayorga. I would perform “dance recitals,” while Danny, my two-year-old brother, played stereo button keep-away with my mom. One day, when the stereo was silent, no one else was in the room, and I was holding a pencil, I discovered that I could create perfect little circles in the fabric face of my dad’s speakers. I created several before I made my next discovery: Dad didn’t want circles in his speakers.
When Dad found the holes, he asked Danny and me who had made them. In Dad’s retelling, he “found out that no one made the holes.” He and Mom had never heard me lie before, so they ended up blaming Danny. I’m not sure what happened then—maybe they sent him to time out? Or maybe they just moved on? Whatever the case, while I may not have known that my perfect circles would go unappreciated, I’m fairly sure I knew I shouldn’t let Danny be blamed. And I know I knew lying was wrong.
Some twelve years later, I told my family what really happened. Danny, though he was only two, swears he remembers getting blamed.
More things I hope are true:
1. That time outs can’t do permanent damage.
2. That sins really can be forgiven.
3. That I’ll remember not to jump to conclusions when I have children, at least some of the time.
There are other wrongs to think on. I’m guilty of being too lazy to write to my congressman and of cruelly mimicking Janie during eighth grade. I’ve held grudges, been impatient with new cashiers, and forgotten to feed my dog for over two days.
Once I saw a little girl outside her parents’ car, whining because she didn’t want to leave the park yet. The door of the car was open, and the girl’s mom was yelling at her to get in. When she didn’t, the girl’s impatient father started to back up. The door pushed her to the ground before the mother, laughing nervously as she looked at me, pulled the now-crying girl inside. I thought the parents should be reported. Or at least talked to. But all I did was give the mom a dirty look.
More things I hope:
1. That parents love their children.
2. That children are resilient.
3. That when I don’t write my congressman, someone else does.
I’m guilty, too, of a granddaughter’s offenses: sneaking off to play video games with my cousins while Grandma cleaned up after our Christmas dinner; fooling around in the shade instead of helping Grandpa weed; and dashing downstairs to play after a quick parent-induced “hi” to my grandparents. When Grandpa and Grandma passed away last year, I wished I’d spent more time with them.
And so it goes. I sift the past, cataloging questions and regrets, then seeking answers. Hoping for redemption.
I think again of my grandparents, this time of their courtship in a Japanese relocation camp. Their story, recorded on home video, seems to transcend barbed wire. “You know, in camp the only dates we could go on were walks around the camp,” Grandma says. “And boy was he a fast walker.” She slaps her thigh, accenting her throaty laughter. “He just dragged me along.”
“Well, she came along,” Grandpa says with a smile. Then Grandma says that the first time she saw my grandpa, he had just fallen off of his bench at a party and was lying on the ground.
“I think that bench was kind of lopsided,” says Grandpa. Then he jokes, “Well, during that period, we were taking whatever came to us.”
Over thirty years after my grandparents were released, the government offered ex-internees $20,000 in compensation. Both my grandparents could count plenty of losses: their homes and freedom, the family farm, and nearly everything Grandma owned, including her childhood photos. But my grandparents decided not to accept the money. They told the family they considered their experience a blessing: it was in camp that they met and married and had their first son, my dad. After the war, they ended up in Utah, where they made new friends, over the years bought and worked an even bigger farm, and found a new religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The faith my grandparents found turns things upside down. It teaches about Christ’s Atonement, describing how sins can be forgiven because the Savior allowed Himself to be sacrificed. Isaiah writes that the Messiah was sent to “bind up the brokenhearted” and to liberate those captive to sin— He was sent “to give … beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”
This is what happened with my grandparents. Imprisoned in an internment camp, they found each other and started a family. Later, they cultivated the Utah desert and found beauty. Maybe—I hope—there’s beauty for my small ashes too.
More hopes:
1. That deserts really can blossom as roses.
2. That cheerfulness is contagious.
3. That the two rock climbers I met didn’t fall.
Emily Inouye currently lives in Provo, Utah. This fall, she will begin an MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University.
