On Sunday June 14 of this year our favorite eldest granddaughter Venice Takara Bailey graduated from Oregon State University Cascade Campus in Bend, Oregon with a degree in Arts Media Technology. The day previous the Arts Media program held an art showing of students’ art projects and Venice’s project was on display.

     A bit of the backstory for perspective—Barbara and I, Venice’s grandparents, are a cross-racial couple who married in 1961 some sixteen years after World War II. Mixed race couples weren’t totally unknown in the early 60s, but whenever they appeared people did take notice. Ours was a little different in being white and Japanese. We learned a great deal about patience and poise whenever we went out in public

     My father was a Japanese immigrant to our shores from Hiroshima, Japan, and was considered an Issei, a first generation Japanese American. I am considered a Nisei, second generation. Our son and daughter, our daughter being Venice’s mother, are Sansei, or third generation. To complete this generational description, Venice is a Yonsei, fourth generation Japanese American.

     Venice elected to center her art project around her ethnicity, of being both white and Japanese, and the profound struggles this has been for her. She makes a statement, simple and direct. It would be familiar not only to one of mixed race, but anyone with something that sets one apart however minor.

     We humans are peculiar this way, sensitive to anything that sets us apart from the pack. Anything and everything that helps us find who we are and come to love that person, finds the amulet of priceless wonder and the soul learns to rest in peace.

     I think it is always thus for mixed-race individuals, an ocean of sea-change to be weathered, a voyage to be traveled alone in some ways, but if lucky with the fair winds of family filling one’s sails.

     Venice had family and her Jiichan (grandfather), and it shows in how she managed her travels and her art.