Nonfiction | September 23, 2014
The Veterans Project Number Two
It’s Christmas Eve, two days after my husband and I have arrived in England to visit my family, when my mother, Hiroko Inoue Sherwin, comes down to the kitchen to tell me she’s just finished the first chapter of her latest book-in-progress. I want to embrace her but my husband is laid out with the flu and Hiroko, in her mid-seventies, is frail; even though I have no symptoms, I can’t take the risk. So instead I beam and wave my cereal spoon at her and ask, gesturing at the sheaf of papers she’s holding, if that’s it and is she ready for me to read it?
She nods. Then she says she’s hoping that I—“my daughter, the professor” is the phrase she uses—will not only read it but edit it, too.
I hesitate for barely an instant before saying I’d love to.
This essay is not currently available online.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Nonfiction
May 17 2022
Facing It
Facing it Sally Crossley “there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” —T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock … read more
Nonfiction
May 16 2022
Oranges
Oranges Robin Reif We called it the Buffet of Dead Food: flaccid bacon, eggs—hard-boiled and cold—and toast so tough it scratched the roofs of our mouths. Still, the meal had… read more
Nonfiction
Jan 07 2022
Cover Up
Cover Up I did not begin my time in Jerusalem with the desire to be dangerous. I arrived in that most intoxicating, infuriating, enervating, derelict, and sad of cities with… read more