It is all clear to me now. My grandmother was cosmically misplaced. She should actually be Japanese.

I am a public television nut. Can't get enough of it. I'll watch virtually anything they put on except Masterpiece Theatre. ("Bleak House" for six hours? No, thank you.) Tonight there was a program called "Japanland," one woman's journey through Japan for a year.

While doing a 900-mile Buddhist pilgrimage, she meets my grandmother's twin sister, a woman in her 70s who still tends a grove of peach trees. She can't be more than 4'10" (approximately the same size as my own grandmother) and rides her bicycle like a demon. She races out to the field trying to beat the crows and the monkeys (against whom her husband stands guard) to gather and individually wrap each peach. She moves like someone set her pants on fire, has arms pencil thin and strong as vices. She can't retire, she says, because she's never sat still and is too old to learn. My grandmother says the same thing. She moves like that, too, like someone somewhere has a stopwatch.

She's fantastic.

Also fantastic are the other retirement-age Japanese women who form a champion croquet team. They play in the rain, in the mud. They are serious. But not so serious that they can't laugh open-mouthed at the crazy westerner. At age 60, they say, a woman no longer has to care what anyone else thinks.

I love these women. These women are like Gamms.

Now, if only we could get her enrolled in a conversational Japanese class, I'm sure she could make the croquet team. I wonder when tryouts are.