The hardest thing I have ever done was to teach my own children English. Like with most international couples, my wife and I have secured dual citizenship for our kids, meaning that they themselves get to choose their nationality once they reach adulthood. Yet, long ago we realized that the choices we made for them when they were little would pave our son’s decisions. Emphasis on either language, we felt surely would point them in the direction of that culture.

I slouch on a rumpled cot in a hospital ward in the American Northwest. My second son lies out before me with tubes in his body and a packet of blood suspended above his head. A nurse wiping his brow tells me she too has a 21-year-old boy, a marine somewhere in the firestorm of Iraq. "He usually e-mails every day, but I haven't heard from him now in a week." There is a tremble to her lips.

I prefer this season not as one of tinsel, lights and storefront carols, but rather as one of quiet — a season of soft-falling snow, a season of anticipation, a season of memories. In this season I am haunted by the memory of a Christmas past, that of my very first Christmas in Japan in 1976. And like the Dickens messenger from the shadows of distant youth, the ghost that I welcome is not unfriendly at all.

One of our family has become a Buddhist. The new Buddhist is not my Japanese wife, who professes Christianity. Nor is it her kin, who advance the sukiyaki approach to religious faith, as in: whatever adds a little flavor is welcome to the mix. No, the family Buddhist is my dog. The story behind this is approximately 14 years long. One third-grade morning, my second son found a frisky puppy outside his classroom window.

She figured the last sight she would ever see would be that of a bear-sized American soldier chopping at her with a bayonet.

Sometimes love does find a way. Sometimes it is the only thing that can.

I am sometimes asked how I met my wife. I like to say this unknown girl rushed up and tackled me. My wife’s version is different