Our friends Jim and Janet will be visiting Vietnam come June. And if they have the kind of experience that seemingly everyone who visits that country has, they are likely to come back marveling at the culture, the food, and the warmth of the people who we were at war with not so long ago.

Saigon fell in 1975, but Ken Burns thinks we’re still not over it.

After Saigon fell in 1975, though, I’m not so sure those of us at home ever fully reconciled with one another. Just a month ago I was party to an argument that I surely didn’t think I’d be hearing in 2017. It was about Jane Fonda, and her infamous trip to North Vietnam while the war was raging. There are those who despise her as a traitor, and those who will defend her to various degrees. This, more than 40 years after the war ended.

It was an unpopular war, one we lost, so the returning veterans didn’t get any ticker tape parades. And lots have had to fight—or are still fighting—for benefits and treatment that were owed them by the VA.

I was just old enough to remember the strife at home clearly. The war tore open a rift in my mom’s side of the family—one that they all carried to the grave. My sister, who was editor of the high school paper, was nearly expelled after she ran an anti-war poem. Hard-hat construction workers beat up long-haired demonstrators. And Kent State. And, and, and….

I was reminded of all this by a NY Times piece written by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick titled Vietnam’s Unhealed Wounds. Burns and Novick are doing a documentary on the Viet Nam era that is soon to be released.

Here’s a passage from their article:

For more than a generation, instead of forging a path to reconciliation, we have allowed the wounds the war inflicted on our nation, our politics and our families to fester. The troubles that trouble us today — alienation, resentment and cynicism; mistrust of our government and one another; breakdown of civil discourse and civic institutions; conflicts over ethnicity and class; lack of accountability in powerful institutions — so many of these seeds were sown during the Vietnam War.

I think there’s a lot to the idea that a lot of current divisions are traceable to that time period. The older I get the longer view I take. I’m looking forward to the documentary. But it will be hard to watch.

A lot of inquisitive kids.

The visit Whitney and I made to Arlington Traditional School last Thursday was our last one for this school year. What a great way to end the season. The second-graders we talked with had already read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound before we arrived, so they were armed with questions. Some examples :

• How many years could you see, and how many years could you not?
• Do you know when it’s daytime?
• How much did it cost to buy that dog at the puppy store?
• Can you write in a straight line?
• How did you pick that dog from all the puppies at the puppy store?
• What games do you play?
• So if you didn’t buy your dog at the puppy store, was she free?
• How do you write books if you can’t see?
• If you didn’t train that dog, who did?
• Can you spend your own money?
• How did you train that dog?
• How did they teach it to cross the street?
• Do you ever get scared?
• Is she a puppy, or a dog?
• How many streets did that dog help you cross so far?

That last question was a toughie, and I took my time answering. “Four thousand three hundred and sixty-two times,” I said. They seem satisfied with my answer.

A few weeks ago our friend Mark did a guest post about his bout with depression. Besides being a well-written and illuminating account, writing and agreeing to publish that post was a courageous act on Mark’s part. That’s because we’ve come a long, long way when it comes to mental health, but still, people don’t talk about it the way they do, say, migraines or acid reflux. And when it comes to health insurance, mental health coverage tends to be spotty, treated as a sort of luxury add-on.

In other words, a stigma still lingers around mental illness. It’s a kind of cloud consisting of a lack of understanding on the part of broader society, and a tendency to conflate mental illness with character deficiency. For those living with a mental health issue, that stigma can create a sense of shame and reluctance to talk about it. All of which results in a negative loop that reinforces the stigma. On one hand a lot of people don’t understand, but if we don’t talk about it, how can they?
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As of today, the Chicago White Sox are one game below .500 (that means they’ve lost one more than they’ve won). And the Chicago Cubs? One game below .500. Both total surprises. The Sox were expected, in the first year of a rebuild (when clubs sort of intentionally stink to get good draft picks) to be god-awful, not mediocre. The Cubs, defending champions, were expected to run away with their division again.

Don’t even think about sitting in an opponent’s cheering section. (And Please refrain from wear of visitor’s uniform.)

It’s taken most of this past week for me to catch up to baseball and settle back into old routines, including checking game scores and box scores and standings and trade rumors. My 10-day trip to Japan wasn’t that long, but our nephew Brian and I were constantly on the move, and Japan is just a dizzying tableau of things completely familiar to this American and things completely bewildering and incongruent. It’s really one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, good for the spirit and for one’s perspective. I highly recommend you go, even if it has not been on your list.

If you do go, get thee to a Japanese baseball game. I think you’ll enjoy it, whether or not you’re a diehard baseball fan.

At one level, the Japanese professional game completely resembles its American counterpart. There are some minor rule differences—if a Japanese game goes into extra innings, for example, it will be called a tie if the game is still even after 12 innings. But otherwise, the game is completely recognizable and enjoyable—there are lots of very good players, including some former MLB players: We saw former Cub Kosuke Fukodome hit an RBI double at one of our games, and we watched former White Sox Dayan Viciedo manning first base on a televised game.

Everything else, everything, is vividly different. For example, Brian bought our tickets at a magic ticket machine at a 7-11. (Yes, that 7-11, but like everything else in Japan, it really wasn’t what you think of when you think of the U.S. version. More later.)

Click to see and hear Yomiuri Giants fans cheer on American transplant Casey McGehee.

Inside the stadiums, there are formal, specifically designated cheering sections for both the home and away teams. And an etiquette around sitting in these sections that includes a prohibition of wearing the other team’s regalia or cheering for the other team. Don’t like it? Don’t buy a seat in that section.

At the two games we attended, each team had a pep band. Heavy on the horns and percussion, they were at it every time their respective team was at bat.

So were the cheering sections. Every batter brought a rousing banter of encouragement, including some in English: “Let’s go, let’s go Mah-Gay-Hay” was the cheer for American import Casey McGehee. And some players warranted their own original songs, which the entire section would break into, on time, precisely, as if there were a conductor.

And there were conductors of sorts. I don’t know if these guys had been elected or if this organically sorts itself, but two leaders—one up high on the concourse behind our seats and one several rows down in front—seemed to be coordinated. And every base hit brings a roar American fans would associate with a walk-off homer.

The result is a more or less constant roar the entire game. It’s more like a World Cup soccer match than a baseball game.

You can get a hot dog at a Japanese game. But, why would you, when you can pick up a bento box, a tasty bowl of fried yakisoba noodles, a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich, a big bowl of ramen, or … you get the picture.

Your typical beer vendor.

And of course, there’s beer. Except it doesn’t come from burly guys who stomp up and down the steps, lugging trays of cans of beer, growling out their own signature beer-hawking schtick. No, it comes from delicate girls with silk flowers in their hair, wearing dainty outfits, carrying mini-kegs on their backs, and pouring beers into cups on order. They wave one hand in the air. They smile. They pour. They bow. They smile. They climb up. They climb down. They move onto the next section. They smile. They pour. They bow. Their makeup never runs and their legs, impossibly, never give out.

Maybe the best thing about the experience for a fan who dearly loves the game is learning that halfway across the world, fans love the game every bit as much. Just differently.

That’s me and Gus, modeling our homemade sweaters from Northern Ireland back in the 1980s.

I subscribe to a podcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) called Ouch. It features BBC journalists with disabilities who bring their personal experiences to the table, and it can be downright charming to hear them talk about disability in their lovely British and Irish accents. It’s intriguing, too, to hear how British and Irish laws regarding disability sometimes differ from ours here in the United States.

As you might imagine, I was all ears when reporter Emma Tracey checked in from maternity leave by phone to talk to Ouch about what it’s been like to be a blind mum. I am blind, too, but it’s been so long since our son Gus was an infant that I was curious to hear about any new techniques for 21st century parents taking care of infants they can’t see.

When Gus was little I took care of other infants during the day to make some pocket money on the side. Because infants don’t move much, they are easy to keep track of. When it came time to pick them up, I’d place my hands palms down on their mattress and feel around until I found a little body. I’d feel up and down to determine whether I had arms or legs, then lift the baby to my shoulder, one hand always under the head for support.

I walked backwards with babies to get us from room to room. That way if we bumped into door frames or walls, it’d be my well-padded bottom that took the impact rather than the baby’s head.

Diapering was easy: remove the baby’s clothes and wipe their bottoms clean. Without being able to see where the mess was, I just wiped everything. The infants I took care of had the cleanest bottoms in town.

If the babies wanted to stretch out, I’d put them on a blanket on the floor and make a rule for myself to never ever step on that blanket whether a baby is on it or not. That way I could keep toys out all the time and not worry about tripping over them — or stepping on the baby!

Most parents supplied pre-made bottles that I simply put in the microwave when the baby got hungry. And yes, I always shook the bottle afterward and checked to make sure the formula wasn’t too hot. This is one aspect of baby care where BBC’s Emma Tracey had a different approach than mine: she is breastfeeding.

“The most challenging thing about feeding for me is based on my own hang-ups, and it’s feeding in public and doing it so that I don’t flash…” she said on the podcast, explaining she always brings a little cover along to use. “I think if I were sighted I’d be a lot more brazen about it.”

She said people look at her enough anyway,. “They look at me as a person with my dog, feeling around a table at a café for my tea or whatever I happen to be doin’, so actually, in fairness, breastfeeding shouldn’t bother me, but I think I am a little bit concerned about flashing!” Emma said she doesn’t let that concern stop her from breastfeeding in public, though. “I still do it and it’s fine, it’s absolutely fine.”

Other than that, Emma Tracey uses pretty much the same tricks I used back in the late 1980s when caring for Gus and other infants. We didn’t have smart phones back then, though, so one thing new is…texting.

Emma’s baby’s name is Tadhg, which is an Irish name that sounds like the first syllable in the word Tiger. “And the interesting thing about that is, I dictate all my messages and correspondence with Siri on my iPhone, and it is the least easy name to dictate in the world!” She says every time she gets to Tadhg’s name when she’s sending a text she has to stop what she’s saying, type t-a-d-h-g on to her smartphone, and then go back to dictating. “So he gets called ‘the baby’ a lot.”