The old man walked between the abandoned structures, kicking up desert dust as he went. His progress disturbed a big lizard, which skittered onto the broken-down steps of a mostly demolished building. The lizard crouched and stared balefully at the old man, like it was wondering what a human was doing in such a godforsaken place.

The temperature hovered in the hundreds, and the sun was merciless. The old man stopped and gazed toward the bleak, heat-blasted mountains that loomed in the distance. It was as if he were orienting himself. Then he nodded and walked purposefully toward a building whose roof had collapsed but still retained some of its former barracks-like exterior.

The old man paused in the doorway and looked down the length of the structure, which, in its time, had been the living quarters for dozens of families. A tiny lost dolly lay sprawled on a pile of rusting bed frames. Curious, he picked it up and looked at it. But it held no significance. So, he gently placed it back on the rubble.

The remains of the fallen roof blocked most of the old man’s view. But he remembered the noise and smell of too many humans living too close to each other, as well as the pitiful sounds of people crying in the night. He shook his head in resignation, turned, and walked back into the dusty sage-brush strewn area between twenty similar buildings. The sight was no worse than it’d been back then–only different.

He reached into his pocket and produced an ancient Kodak Brownie. The camera was as much an anomaly as the old man. He snapped a series of pictures. It was as if he were trying to preserve something of great significance. But it had happened too far in the past to understand its meaning.

The sun was intense, and the heat was so overwhelming that it felt like a giant hand was pressing down on him. He would never have imagined the limitations of old age when he was young – how powerless he would feel. He could detect the weakness down to his very bones. It was as if the stark reality of the approaching inevitable was tapping him on the shoulder.

The old man had an old-fashioned Army canteen slung over his left shoulder. He took it, unscrewed the top, and drank greedily. Then he carefully put the top back on and screwed it shut. He laughed at himself. He had always been so ridiculously meticulous. It was something bred into him by his culture.

The old man took one last look around. Then he turned and began to plod slowly toward the ruins of an abandoned masonry building. He remembered the long days that he’d spent in that building, trying to squeeze the last few drops of meaning out of his life.

A warning sign was posted on one of the adobe pillars. It said, “Beware of Bees.” The old man snorted in amusement. He knew from experience that there were a lot worse hazards than bees in that area - like scorpions, ten-foot rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, and the occasional coyote or wolf. THOSE features of the deep Sonoran Desert were an eye-opening experience for a kid who had spent his entire pampered childhood in suburban Los Angeles.

He walked several steps inside the roofless wreck and stood there trying to orient himself. Then he took a few measured paces to his left and stopped, reached into the florist’s box he was carrying, pulled out a single perfect red camellia, kissed it, and dropped it at his feet.

In the hanakotoba – the flower language of Japan – the camellia symbolizes painful love and unwavering devotion. He gazed at the beautiful thing as it lay there in the dust and ruin, reflecting. Then he muttered under his breath, “fitting,” turned, and walked sadly out of the building.

His granddaughter was standing next to a white Mercedes EQE sedan, patiently waiting for him to emerge. The old man snorted again ... electric ... really??! He searched his memory, trying to recall whether he had ever imagined being driven around in a high-end electric car - nope ... nothing, nada. He didn’t expect there to be.

The old man’s granddaughter was stunning. A flawless face, an elegant figure, and the grace and sophistication of a woman who, at age twenty-six, had the world by the nuts. She was wearing a white linen dress that contrasted with her dusky skin, and her long, smooth black hair was styled back in one of those refined waterfalls that only the truly wealthy can afford.

It was evident that she adored her Gramps. She rushed around the vehicle to open the passenger side door, fussing like a mama hen over her chick. She said, “Get in quick before you have heatstroke ... I’ve got the air conditioning turned up.”

The old man had another one of his far too frequent ironic thoughts, “The kids have absolutely no idea. It’s probably best that they don’t. The current generation wouldn’t survive in a world before technology. But then again ... nobody in their right mind would ever live here–willingly!”

The old man sat in the plush leather of the Mercedes as his granddaughter drove them out of that place. He gazed through the elegantly tinted passenger window as if he were watching a movie. His granddaughter said, to make conversation, “Why in the world did you want to come to this awful place?” The old man said, “It’s a long story, and it is probably worth telling, my dear one.”

The count was three and two, and I knew the pitcher would have to come in with the next one, or risk walking in the winning run. I was the worst player on an arguably bad team. But they didn’t have any pinch hitters left. So, the manager had sent me up to the plate with the sage advice, “Try to get beaned.”

That was hurtful. But getting hit by the pitch was probably the only way I would be able to get on base. Their pitcher was a brute. He had been throwing high heat all day. But maybe he was getting tired. Because Mikey had smoked him for a sharp single to right, and then the guy had walked two after that.

The game was tied at the bottom of the ninth, mainly because our pitcher was good, too. Now it was all up to me, a tall, gangly kid who sat on the far end of the bench only because his dad was a rabid baseball fan. I was a reader and a thinker, not a doer, and I hated baseball. I was a disappointment.

The world is full of all kinds of people, and my lot in life was to be awkward. Still, that was who I was. I was also cleverer than most. Their pitcher had thrown five pitches to me, two strikes and three close misses. While that was going on, I had not as much as moved the bat off my shoulder. I could hear my dad’s voice above the rest of the fans yelling, “Hit it out of the park, Sabby.” I loved the guy. But he was a long way from being realistic.

I knew that the next pitch would be right across the middle, and it would be thrown carefully, not hard, like the freak on the mound had been doing. Overpitching was what had put the last two guys on first and second base. So, yes ... the pitch floated in, just as I expected, and I was waiting with my right hand moved way up the bat ... to bunt it down the third base line.

I wasn’t so utterly uncoordinated that I couldn’t put a piece of hickory in front of a slowly incoming ball. The other team, who’d seen how hopeless I was, was caught totally off guard. So, they had no play on me. I was scampering up the line toward first as Mikey streaked across the plate to score the winning run. And that was the first time I realized that anything was possible.

Our guys mobbed Mikey at home plate, while the other team walked disgustedly off the field. My dad mobbed me after I finished my run to first base. My girlfriend Yuki was with him. Yuki was cute as a button, a little Japanese doll ... all five-one and one hundred pounds of her. They were both just as excited as the fifteen other players celebrating ninety feet away.

My dad was short and stocky, like the rest of us. I mean, seriously ... I had no idea where tall and skinny came from. Whoever contributed those genes must have done so before the Meiji restoration ... generation-wise, that is. Since nobody else in the family was tall, and I was Japanese to the core.

Yuki and I were the first generation born in the United States. Our grandfathers had been recruited as cheap labor to replace the Chinese, who had laid down the Transcontinental railroad and worked the gold mines of California. And the new Japanese immigrants brought their children with them. Those children were our parents.

American business always needs foreigners to exploit ... from the Irish beat cops, through the Italians in the construction trade, and the Poles in the factories. We Japanese replaced the Chinese ... who were unceremoniously booted out of the U.S. by the Exclusion Act of 1882. Nonetheless, we had a special talent for growing things in small spaces, and we quickly became dominant in the vegetable markets thanks to our small truck farms.

Naturally, we also did fishing better than anybody else. So, the best fishing fleets and canneries were located over on Terminal Island. The Japanese owned them ... or we owned them as much as we could ... since we still had to work around our neighbors’ prejudices.

Both Yuki and I were brought up in Little Tokyo, in an upper-middle-class lifestyle that our Japanese forefathers could never have imagined. Her Dad owned half a dozen fishing boats, and my dad owned the cannery. Both of our parents had inherited those things from their parents. Who had leveraged our ability to fish into a vast empire.

All of us Japanese had arrived as legal immigrants, and thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, my generation was American from birth. But we still ran into the same prejudice the Chinese had faced. The Anglos didn’t want us living among them ... after all, we were the “Yellow Peril.” So, Little Tokyo was formed and thrived separately from the rest of LA.

We built schools, temples, and churches, as well as markets and restaurants - right there in our little, unsettled corner of the LA basin. We adopted American traditions, things like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. However, we added a Japanese American cultural twist to them. So, the Baptist church sponsored children’s sumo tournaments, and the Buddhist temple organized a Boy Scout troop, while our school’s white teachers observed Japanese holidays.

Why do I use the term “white” to describe the people we lived with? Well ... most residents of LA looked more or less similar to one another. However, we Japanese have our distinctive Asian features. So, the majority lumped us in the category of “different,” not to be trusted or socialized with unless they wanted something from us.

LA wasn’t like it is now. It’s just one concrete sprawl today. But places like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and even West Hollywood had a distinctive identity in those days, and there was real green space separating the various locations. Our extensive and complex Japanese American community was centered on First Avenue, just east of downtown. However, individual Japanese families lived all over the Los Angeles Basin in fishing towns, farming villages, and suburban neighborhoods, from Pasadena to Long Beach and down to Terminal Island.

There was a lot of overt discrimination. But that merged into the background as you grew older. I was nineteen, and I felt that being discriminated against by low-life white trash was way down my list of worries. My life revolved around the two things that absorb every teenage boy ... sex and school.

My girlfriend Yuki was a gorgeous little woman with the same hormone problems I had. So, whenever our parents weren’t watching, we would sneak off to Venice Beach. We could get there because I had a 1932 Ford roadster. It cost my dad $150 with 40,000 miles on it. That was expensive, but as the only male heir in my family, I’d grown accustomed to the benefits that came with it.

My Yuki was a classic Bijin beauty, with flawless, light skin, long, smooth, and abundant black hair framing a perfectly proportioned oval face and a high-bridged nose, so prized by Japanese men. Yuki was slim and petite, approximately five one and perhaps 100 pounds. But she had an hourglass figure, everything in miniature, including a twenty-one-inch waist. That was how exquisite she was.

Both of us were Nisei. Our parents, who were called Issei, came over as children, with the first wave of Japanese immigration at the start of the Twentieth Century. But Yuki’s parents had been a little older when they arrived - old enough to have already adopted rigid Japanese cultural attitudes. Hence, Yuki was supposed to display the traditional Japanese virtues of modesty, tidiness, courtesy, and compliance. And, under no circumstances should she EVER question the judgment of men. That ultimately caused our undoing.

My Yuki was a Japanese woman, and it’s a trait of our culture that you never know what’s behind the Kabuki mask. Sweet, deferential Yuki was a perfect illustration of that axiom. She did a good job of hiding her feelings about being treated like a family asset. But she had a rebellious streak. Most of which was channeled into devious ways to spend time with me.

For instance, it would be unheard of for two nineteen-year-old Japanese kids to be seen together unchaperoned at night. But it wasn’t odd for Yuki and her best friend Akane to go over to the USC main library for an evening of serious study. Of course, if Ichiro, Akane’s boyfriend, and I happened to be studying in the same library, well ... what a coincidence!

Most evenings, we would sit around a table and work on our class assignments. We were all in our sophomore year at the University of Southern California, and the courses were challenging. But we could hold hands and make goo-goo eyes at each other while we were studying. Sometimes, there was even a stolen kiss and a little fondling in the stacks.

It was an enjoyable life ... until it wasn’t.

A kid’s reality is shaped by their experiences growing up. And all that Yuki and I had ever known up to that point was a privileged teenagerhood. So, I mean really!! Who could blame us for not understanding that greed and self-aggrandizement are fundamental human attributes? Nonetheless, fate was about to teach us a painful lesson.

My introduction to actual reality - I mean ... life the way it is, rather than the way I wanted it to be ... happened one fateful evening in mid-November. Yuki and Akane arrived for our usual study session, looking like they were mourning a death in the family. Yuki’s eyes were red from crying, and Akane was buzzing around her friend like a honeybee around a hollyhock. That was a bit disturbing.

Yuki and Akene were standing in the cavernous entrance hall, which was packed with people. So, they didn’t see me approach. They both jumped when I said, concerned, “What’s wrong?” Yuki looked sorrowfully at me. Then she did something unheard of in Japanese culture. She threw her arms around my neck and buried her head in my chest, crying.