I’ll briefly clear out some leftover thoughts I have related to my posts over the past few months about my trip to Hiroshima in 2008.
First, I still remember the bookstore I referenced in the Hiroshima post. I can’t say for sure if this bookstore was any good. I just know that I’d essentially run out of books at some point on my six-week trip and the lack of reading material was threatening to become a major airplane emergency. Imagine, a trans-Pacific flight without a book! I reloaded in Hiroshima, picking up notable titles such as Tuesdays With Morrie, I Robot, and The Art of War.
A skeptical reader may have wondered at some point – how could I know for sure the exact day I went to Hiroshima? Well, reader, I actually have the one-day metro ticket I used that day still tucked into my wallet. I suppose this souvenir serves as a testament to Hiroshima’s impact on me. I used this ticket as a bookmark for a couple of years and I think I saw it often enough that the date punched into the ticket eventually became forever burned into my memory.
The Hiroshima ticket is not the only such memento I carry around – I have two others that share the same space in the front flap of my wallet. One is the Zone 2 train pass I used for a couple of weeks to visit my mom when she was living in a Needham hospice. The other is the ticket stub for the Slow Club ‘half-concert’ that really let me down at the end of 2016. I once thought keeping the Hiroshima ticket was evidence of how important the trip was in my personal history – however, when I consider now what else I keep in the same wallet space, I think the only thing these mementos say anything about is... Slow Club.
The posts about the Hiroshima trip were inspired partly by my reading Letters To Memory early in 2018. There were two thoughts I pulled into the original sketches for these posts that did not quite make it into the final drafts. First, a democracy dies as soon as one person has enough power to take direct action against a single race. And second, words used with positive intent such as refugee, outcast, or dispossessed often serve to reinforce the same shame invoked by racial slurs. I’d wanted to include these thoughts because my intent at the start of the posts was to link my trip to some of our current events – however, as the post drifted away from the here and now, I realized I needed to forge ahead without incorporating those two ideas into the writing.
Finally, I wrote briefly about what it felt like to be in the atomic bomb museum. The closest I’ve felt to that since came a few years later when I visited the 9/11 memorial in New York. In both buildings, the air was heavy with the sadness of lives needlessly and horrifically lost. And as it relates to the idea of a historical museum being able to transport visitors back to a specific point in time, there is very little that compares to the wall covered with posted notices from New Yorkers desperately looking for missing friends or family – outside of the content of the messages, it looked pretty much like any bulletin board you might find at the local coffee shop.
