And the cat went back to being our pet. ​ and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. ​ These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. Another memory of my father is this: ​ I should explain a little about my father’s background. ​ Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings. ​ Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us. ​ is breathe the air of the period we live in, ​ I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life. ​ Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity.