Leif's 8th Birthday - Sagamihara, Japan - January 28, 1983 - Age 8

Leif's eighth birthday was the second one he spent with an injury. His first birthday, he had a burned hand, which I wrote about here long ago, and for his eighth birthday, he sported a cast on his arm. He had broken his arm during recess at school when he fell off the monkey bars.

When we lived in Sachsen bei Ansbach, Germany, before moving to Japan, my friend Bunny had observed that Leif was so able to withstand pain that "you could cut off his arm he and would say, 'that doesn't hurt.'" That was obviously an exaggeration, but there was a very large grain of truth in it. Leif could stand physical pain, though he didn't do as well with the sight of blood. He maintained a bravado that hid his vulnerable feelings, so he seemed very tough, even though his photos betray his innocence and vulnerability.

One day at school, that January 1983, after he fell on the playground, he simply went back to class for the rest of the day. He was supposed to take the bus from the school, where he was a second grader, to the child care center, because at that time I was working full time for the Japan Engineer District and didn't get home until after five.

That day, when school got out, he went to the office and calmly asked to use the phone. He called me at my office and just said, "Mommy, can you come and get me?" I asked him why, whether he had missed the bus. "No," he said, "I think I broke my arm."

Before I could get any more details out of him, he hung up. I didn't even know where he was. He hadn't told his teacher or anyone else that his arm was broken. He had just stayed in class all afternoon and done his work.

I was really worried and didn't know where to find him, but on the chance that he probably had called from school, since that's where he would get the bus, I called the school and asked if they had seen him in the office. They said they had, but they had no idea about any broken arm. They had to go out to the bus stop to find him.

Meanwhile I called Peter W., who rushed over there to get him. And there he is, with his cast on his arm, blowing out his candles.

The second photo shows Peter W. acting silly, like a sci fi monster, and Leif's friend Atul is with him.

Leif is wearing a jacket that Peter got for him in Korea.

Happy Birthday, Leif!

Leif's 7th Birthday - Sagamihara, Japan - January 28, 1982 - Age 7

Here's Leif blowing out the candles on his seventh birthday cake in the middle of our tour in Japan. It was a good time for us, one of the best times in our family life. The boys had good friends and good activities. We got to see a lot of Japan and Japanese culture.

And yet, on base, it was like living in a little 1950s town with Little League baseball and soccer games, programs at the schools, community theater, and our American celebrations like Christmas and Halloween, and birthday parties, right alongside Japanese festivals like the Obon in August.

I'm still amazed and rather amused when I see the birthday cakes. They really do look SO homemade . . . but they tasted great! And the boys always looked forward to them and of course, to the presents. The presents in Japan were the BEST, because of all the cool Japanese toys.

I should have had enough sense to take photos of all of those toys at the time, and failing that, before I gave all of them to Peter A. for Marcus. The were special, mind-stretching, wonderful imagination-building toys, and we were there are the perfet age for the boys to appreciate them. They played an instrumental role in the personalities of both boys, along with Star Wars and Star Trek, in making them devotees of science fiction and futuristic ideas.

This school year, in which Leif turned seven, he was in first grade at Sagamihara Elementary School, where he was not only the tallest child in his class, but taller than his petite teacher. She said he was a "straight arrow" and never gave her any trouble or bullied the other (smaller) kids.

He did, however, attack his brother and a bicycle. In December 1981 I got a job as the public affairs officer of the Japan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Initially it was a part time job, so that year, I was usually home when Leif and Peter A. were home. One afternoon, Peter A. had taunted Leif one too many times. I no longer remember just what he had done, but one of this favorite ploys that drove Leif nuts was to just point at him and keep pointing. I think this time it must have been something "worse" because Leif had a chain with a bicycle lock on it and chased Peter out the door and all the way out to the street swinging it. I don't know whether he would really have hit him with it if he had caught up with him, but if he had, he could have done some serious damage. I HOPE he was just threatening him.

I think it was that same year that he got really angry at another boy who lived near us and rather than attack him, he beat on Chad's bicycle with a broom. He really attacked it savagely. At least it was the bike and not Chad he was beating on. We couldn't see any damage to the bike but his family claimed Leif had damaged it. Somehow, it seems comical now to think of a seven-year-old attacking a bicycle with a broom, but at the time, he certainly was serious about it.

None of that mattered on his birthday. He was exuberant and full of fun.

Happy Birthday, Leif.

Peter & Leif at Himeji Castle, Japan - 1982

We were fortunate to be able to travel in Japan and adventurous enough to do so by train and car even when there were no English signs. The boys were unconcerned because they didn't have to figure out how to get to our destinations and back home again, but I had to memorize Japanese Kanji names by sight along the train or auto route to try to get us where we needed to go.

I was working as a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Japan District, which was spread out on bases all over Japan. The district held a conference in Osaka, and Peter W. decided he would take vacation from his office, where he was the Deputy Staff Judge Advocate for U.S. Army Japan, go along, and take the boys sightseeing while I was at the conference. Not only that, he was brave enough to decide were were going to drive there from Sagamihara.

We actually managed to get there, despite the lack of English signage, and stayed in a Japanese style tatami mat room. The walls were a rough kind of Japanese stucco that looked like they were painted with sand grains in the paint. I remember the boys cutting up and acting silly, throwing their socks at the wall when they were getting ready for bed, and the rough paint caught the socks and there they hung like some weird decorations.

This was in 1982, and women were in the work force but the mentality was far different from now. It was amusing that when we arrived the first day, wives of some of the men working at the District asked me if I wanted to go shopping with them the next day. I laughed. I had to attend the conference, take photos and write articles. I jokingly said they could ask Peter W. if he wanted to join them.

That wasn't what he had in mind, though he does love to shop. Instead, the took the boys to see Osaka Castle and various other sights around town, including a big underground shopping area.

After the conference was over, we went to the nearby city of Himeji to see the famous Himeji Castle, which was beautiful and impressive. However, I think the boys were even more impressed with the "samurai warriors" we saw there. They were thrilled to pose with them, as you see in the photo above. We weren't able to communicate with them much. My Japanese wasn't good enough and neither was their English, so I am not sure that my supposition is correct, but I think they were really young guys who were in costume for a reenactment. Peter Anthony was 13 in this photo and Leif was 7 years old. He was ecstatic that they allowed him to hold and pose with one of their swords.

Both our boys became fascinated with the samurai, their armor, their swords, and their history.

The series "Shogun" made from James Clavell's book, came out while we were in Japan, and that, along with the samurai dramas they saw on TV (without any English), fostered more interest in the samurai and in martial arts.