"Do you know I why I create bonsai?" Midori asked me.
"Because they are beautiful?"
"It is true. A masterful bonsai is living art, both beautiful and fragile. But a masterwork takes many years to create, patiently training, guiding and nurturing the plant as if it were a child. I have trees, in our greenhouse today, that will not be beautiful until long after I am gone. Why do you think I still spend many hours tending them?"
"You love the hobby?"
"It is not a hobby, my love."
"What then?"
"Many years ago, before you were born, when I was just a child, an infant, in fact, I lived with my family in a small Japanese community. Right along the coast, here, in California. In the hills above the beach of what is now Crystal Cove State Park."
"Not far from my sister's house,” I said. Midori had told me various versions of this story over the years. It was her history, and I listened to her as if it was the first time she'd shared her past with me.
"Yes, not far from your family's home. Back then, Japanese families leased land and farmed. They sold produce on the roadside. We have always been an industrial people. My father and mother were raised on the land. My father grew bonsai."
"And he taught you?"
"No, dear. He died in an internment camp when I still a baby."
"That's horrible. I'm sorry."
"It is my history. When the Japanese were taken, ripped from their homes by our government, a way of life was forever altered. My father saved one special tree; it was very dear to him. My mother, to respect his memory, tended that tree. It was a child to her. She passed it to me, it sits there, now."
She pointed to a bonsai tree I knew well, it had become a permanent fixture in my home. Like a Getty Museum sculpture, it fascinated every guest that came to my home. It was alive, of course, but it was also Alive.
"So do you create bonsai to remember your father?"
"To remember? No. He died before my memories could form a picture of him. And I have this." She waved her hand towards the tree. "It reminds me that he is with our ancestors. And that life is beautiful, yet very fragile."
"So why do create new bonsai? I mean, if it's not a hobby and you're -- I don't want to sound morbid -- if you're not going to be around to see them when they are beautiful?"
"That, my love, that is the question you must answer for yourself. Why tend things that may die? Why care for things we may never get a chance to love in their fulness? Why do the Japanese masters sculpt bonsai when those very trees they painstakingly love will not be magnificent until long after they've passed into the next life?"
I smiled at Midori.
I knew her questions were rhetorical.
I looked at the tree.
Its shape spoke of perfection, elegance, life. It spoke to me. I will carry its truth with me as I journey to find love. I believed love, true love, existed at that moment.
It was in Midori's father's love for his tree, in his shattered hope of a new life, in her mother's desire to carry that love into the next generation.
Nearly eighty years had passed since a man I'd never known had died. His daughter had never known him. But his wife had, and she had passed his love and his wisdom to their daughter.
And she'd shared part of her life, her wisdom--her very being--with me.
Life is sad, beautiful, and full of promise.
WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning, I knew ghosts had visited me during the night. They'd surely spoken to me in my dreams.
I thought ahead, to my journey, and smiled.
"Thank you."
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Fifty-Two Pickup: Aces (Jessica Rogers Book 1) Page 14