Old Lullabies

The other day at a playgroup, I met a Japanese woman, maybe in her early thirties; I mentioned that my mother, who died last year, was Japanese. "Do you speak Japanese to your child?" she asked. "Well, my Japanese isn't really that good," I said, "But I do sing this lullaby to him once in a while." And I sang the opening bars of a Japanese lullaby that my mother sang to me when I was young.

"That's an old song," she said in surprise. Apparently, Japanese mothers aren't singing that song to their children any more.

"Yes," I said; "my mother was 38 when she had me, and I'm 45 now."

She looked at me with eyes open wide. "You don't look that old."

And at that moment I felt, not so much old and decrepit, but a sense of closeness to my mother--and to my grandmother on my mother's side, raising my mother and seven other children in Japan, over a span of time stretching from the mid-1920s to the early 1960s. Time telescoped for me, as I looked at this young Japanese woman; I felt that I could see my grandmother in 1920s Japan, so different from today's Japan, singing that same lullaby to her own baby girl, my mother.