My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  As if on cue, a young woman with a backpack and dark, purple-tinged hair exits the building I am about to enter. I recognize something in her downturned eyes, that countenance of being heavy with one’s own thoughts. I turn as she passes me and feign the look of having possibly forgotten something important while I observe her quick, deft insertion of earplugs and her entrance into a personal reality that now comes with its own soundtrack.

  As I turn back to my destination, I fish out of my pocket a slip of folded paper with an office number written on it. My aim today is to meet up with an old friend, Lisa, during her lunch hour. I met Lisa through Bryan some years ago, and she has become a mainstay in my repertoire of Seattle people—those I try to check in with when passing through. I am always struck by Lisa’s humble steadfastness in her ever-evolving practice. She has, I think, lived in every Buddhist residence in the city, and I am hoping that today she will offer some insight into my own floundering attempts along the path.

  When I find her, a small and radiant African American woman, she is poring over a stack of paperwork, her expression serious and focused.

  “Lisa?”

  She looks up, smiles, and it transforms her instantly into the friend I have not seen in a long while.

  I gesture to her office, the vague-but-official title beneath her name on the door. “What exactly is it that you do anyhow?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to know about that. Let’s go to lunch.”

  As we make our way to a restaurant overlooking the nearby river, Lisa tells me that she’s been taking classes in preparation for converting to Catholicism.

  “What?” I stop walking and turn to her.

  “I like the singing,” she explains. “That’s always been a strong spiritual practice for me. The first time I went to this church and sang—I could just feel it. It was right.”

  “But—I mean—you’re Buddhist, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I don’t know—I’ve never decided that I am this or that. Buddhism appealed to me, so I guess I’ve done Buddhist practice. But I’m not so worried about what to call myself.”

  “I envy your sureness. I guess this is my year of waiting for Zen—or maybe waiting for me. I keep thinking, If I just pay attention, surely I’ll get it.”

  “So what did you pay attention to today?”

  We arrive at the restaurant, but stop short of entering so I can consider this question. Before us, we watch as river water flows toward the ocean. “Your words, just now. And a girl, probably a student, as I was coming into your building. I don’t know why I noticed her. Maybe it was how different-yet-the-same she seemed in comparison to the young women in my classes in Japan. The posture and movement and fashion was all wrong, but there was some other unnameable feature there that was the same. Or maybe it was just her youth, the fact that she was female.”

  “What was she doing?”

  I smile. “Nothing, really. Just listening to music.”

  Tuesday, August 3

  Brinda picks me up at the end of her work day and delivers both of us to her weekly yoga class. Together we sit in a circle, a mandala of women. Roz, our instructor, leads us through slow stretches. “Remember to breathe,” she says. “Don’t hold it in—let it go. Out. In. Out. In. Not breathing is not doing the pose correctly.” The women around me are all shapes, sizes, colors, ages. Some are limber as cloth, others only water-soaked wood, bending just a little, and a little more, and a little more. Roz rises and begins to move among us, guiding our bodies into impossible postures. “Breathe,” she urges each of us, “breathe.” A sculptor, I think, or maybe a goddess.

  “It’s funny,” I tell Brinda as she drives me home, “most Tuesday nights I spend with a bunch of women, making pottery. I’m not sure that it is so different from what we were doing tonight.”

  “Yoga is a wonderful spiritual practice—is your class like that too?”

  “Oh no—that’s not what I meant. It’s difficult. I’m always failing.” Brinda looks at me, smiles. “So, okay, yes. It’s exactly like a spiritual practice in that way.”

  “Have you made anything interesting?”

  “No. I just make the same things over and over again.”

  “Well, that’s definitely spiritual practice.”

  Wednesday, August 4

  This morning, Bryan and I pack the car and stock up on snacks and coffee before heading off to Montana to visit Viv and Dick, his and Koun’s parents. As we drive inland, the moisture is slowly sucked from the air, and the temperature rises. We roll down the windows, and I put my hand in the wind. I imagine water droplets lifting off everything around us, pulled by the slipstream of the car as it glides down the highway.

  “Is everything going okay with you and Kathy?” I ask as I roll up my window.

  “Yes . . . and no. Sometimes we’re really great. And I have to say that I’m learning more in this relationship than in any I’ve ever had before. We clash a lot though—we have very different styles. But I guess it’s all just process.”

  “Process. That’s good. It sounds so mature. I don’t understand love.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All of my other relationships were terrible—embarrassingly terrible, like I was actually trying to damage myself—and I don’t think I learned all that much. Then I fell for Koun and had this kind of epiphany, and we’re great. I think I must be tremendously lucky.”

  “It has to be more than luck.”

  “Maybe. Koun once mentioned this theory about two versions of love relationships: endothermic versus exothermic. One takes energy; the other creates it. For some reason we are the latter.”

  “I think Kathy and I are both sometimes—but maybe mostly endothermic, if I’m really honest. There’s a lot of work involved.”

  We stop for a rest at an old Catholic church in Idaho that is now a kind of monument. As we enter, there is an immediate sense of recognition. “The iconography,” I say, “I’ve never noticed it before, but it looks like Tibetan Buddhism, or maybe Hinduism. All these bright colors, the deities.”

  “Yeah, I wish I’d noticed all that when I was growing up in the Church,” says Bryan. “I think I would have appreciated it a lot more. And there’s ceremony too. It’s actually really nice stuff.”

  “One of the residents at Shogoji, Jisen-san’s son, is thinking about getting ordained under his mother. He’s Catholic, and I believe in some sense she may be, too. Koun tells me that every day he prays to the statue of Avalokiteshvara in the temple. To him, she is the Virgin Mary, and Mary is the Goddess of Compassion. Sometimes I think it must be only the Americans who are hung up on labels—me included. We see everything in black and white—you are either this or that. But the Japanese, they ask Koun if he’s Christian all the time. They’ll ask him while he’s wearing his full monk’s robes, after he’s just done prostrations in their living room. It was one of the first questions the reporters asked just after he got ordained.”

  “Japanese tend to also be Shinto, don’t they?”

  “Most are both Shinto and Buddhist, married together into one complex cultural aesthetic. Maybe Shinto is like the religions of the Native Americans—there is spirit in all things, the stone, the river, the mountains, even things created by people, like furniture or washi paper. Everything is sacred.”

  As we turn to leave, we find a book of pictures and descriptions of local Native Americans being converted to Catholicism in this church. What is immediately striking is the mix of traditional clothing and Western attire that each Native American wears, one culture obscuring another in dark shades of cotton. That devastating history.

  As we pull out of the parking lot, we roll slowly past a younger and an older priest walking together in full robes. How similar their dress is in comparison to formal Buddhist monks’ garb. If Koun were walking beside them, he would look as if he belonged.

  As we continue on to Montana, we drive a bit out of the way in order to visit a petrified forest. Walking along the trai
l, we stop frequently to touch the wood transformed to rock. Out here in this sparse high desert, the sun is so hot against skin and stone. And quiet, so quiet—the only sounds are a few insects moving around us, and I hear each one distinctly as it passes by. “I miss that—the clarity of no-sound. Like an Alaskan winter. It’s easy to forget, living where I do.” The skin on my hands feels dry and tight, as if I’ve just cleaned them after working clay.

  It is dark when Bryan and I finally pull into his parents’ driveway in Helena. “Are we missing time?” I ask.

  “I don’t know how that happened. I guess we should have done more driving and less exploring.”

  Dick greets us at the door and hugs us both, and I am reminded of just how much bigger he is than either of his very tall sons. A gentle giant. “I already put Viv to bed,” he says. “Guess I’ll probably do the same. Sure am glad you guys are here.”

  Thursday, August 5

  Bryan and I are already up, sitting on the couch talking, when Dick wheels Viv out to the living room. He sets the brake on the wheelchair, bends toward her in a kind of embrace, leans back, and pulls her stiff body forward into him, pivots thirty degrees, and then leans forward and lowers her slowly into the plush recliner. This activity—performed several times a day—must take considerable strength on his part.

  “Hi guys,” says Viv weakly, as we each lean over the chair for a hug, taking in the smell of roses, the primary note in her favorite perfume. As Bryan warned earlier, her condition has changed considerably since I last saw her. She is not nearly as mobile, nor is her face as animated during our casual catching-up discussions; there is a slackness, a distance. And a more pronounced smoothing of the features, a side-effect of MS. I get the sense that she’s having a hard time keeping up with even the easy narratives.

  “When do you go home to Canada?” she asks.

  “Alaska? In a few days.”

  “How is your mom?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “Is she in Texas for the whole summer?”

  “No. In Alaska. I’ll visit her there.”

  “Oh.”

  We speak in simple, measured sentences, and I can see that Viv is grasping for words, translating from the language within the mind to the language of the voice. And then there are the cognitive hiccups—little flaws in thinking that occur during that process of concentration and translation, a misfiring of the synapses.

  “Could I have a glass of water?” she asks, and when I rise to get it Dick turns on the big television, something that has become Viv’s constant, comforting companion these past years. When I return, glass and straw in hand, Viv is asleep, despite the volley of sound coming from the television—some kind of impassioned courtroom argument—and Dick and Bryan are out on the deck, watching deer tumble across green lawn.

  In the late afternoon, Bryan and I go to the nursing home to pick up his grandmother Eve—Viv’s mother—who is now in her nineties. She, too, has become much less responsive since the last time I saw her. Still, she smiles when she sees us, and we remind her who we are and where we’re taking her. “Let’s go home and have dinner together.”

  “Well, that sounds nice,” she says. “How was your trip?”

  “Great! We took our time and made a few fun stops along the way.”

  “Well good,” she says, settling into a silent stillness that will not end for the remainder of the evening.

  While Bryan sweetly carries on a one-sided conversation with his grandmother as we drive, I think about Dick’s years-long idealization of how he might like to live in an island lighthouse someday, and how one relative or family friend—I forget who—pointed out the raw truth that he’d gotten his desire at last. His life now almost monastic, cloistered.

  Friday, August 6

  Kathy shows up at the airport on a last-minute whim—she had called Bryan with this news last night, after I’d gone to bed. We all pick her up and drive out together to eat lunch at Jade Garden, Viv’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Bryan and I are talking animatedly and laughing as we take our chairs, using the language of brother and sister. “Watch it, or I’ll break out the buzzybee!” I say.

  “Excuse me,” snaps Kathy. “Nobody understands what you’re talking about.” I stop talking, look at Bryan. “Well—what’s so funny?”

  “Oh, it’s um. . . It’s just this story about when the boys were kids. I guess Garrett used to jab Bryan with this little buzzy-bee-on-a-stick thing when the family went on cross-country road trips together. Bryan was always trying to read, so that bee drove him nuts. Garrett could never entertain himself by reading or drawing because he got carsick. Harassing Bryan was his only entertainment. I—”

  Kathy looks at me unsmilingly, blinks slowly. Dick leans over to set the brake on Viv’s wheelchair. Bryan appears to be listening to something intently. It occurs to me that I have no idea what’s really going on.

  “I guess it’s not that funny. Never mind.”

  Bryan and Kathy decide to drive out to the hotsprings after lunch, and I decline Bryan’s invitation to join them, sensing their need to discuss some urgent lovers’ business. Instead, I sit in the living room with Viv, placing pictures of Garrett/Koun in her good hand and removing each after I finish explaining: Here, Koun grinning in a group shot in front of Shogoji, so much taller than the other monks; Koun chanting sutra; Koun in his begging clothes, affixing the hat strap beneath his chin; Koun in his robes carrying a tray full of delicate tea cups down an open-air hallway, intention revealed through that upright posture.

  “Oh,” says Viv weakly after each photo is explained.

  In the evening before going to bed, I look over the collage of family pictures downstairs. Bryan, the kind and sensitive intellectual bookworm with a penchant for science and the subtle realms. Koun, the baby brother, always the ham, constantly vying for his big brother’s attention. Koun explained once, “I was the look-at-me kid, the crowd pleaser. I think Bryan just wanted to be left alone. It’s ironic that I wound up the monk.” And Viv and Dick there, too, standing behind their sons, smiling down at them, this legacy of children.

  I remember a hard conversation, on a visit a few years ago, with Koun and Bryan and their father in the living room after Viv had gone to bed.

  “How are you holding up, Dad?” Bryan asked.

  “I got to tell you, it’s been getting harder and harder.” He had recently started putting up big red STOP signs all over the house, reminders to just pause and reorient himself to a more positive state of mind. “I’m angry all the time. I catch myself swearing—saying really bad stuff. I never used to do that kind of thing.”

  Gin, Viv’s identical twin sister, and Jim, her husband, had already gone through a version of what Viv and Dick are experiencing now. Even after Gin became blind and completely bedridden from MS, Jim refused to accept help. He died a few months before her from his six-packs-a-day smoking habit. The addiction had been his way of coping. This story—this history—colors the family discussion about Dick’s situation.

  Garrett leaned forward on the sofa, wringing his hands together, in pain at the sight of his father’s pain. “Dad, if it comes to a nursing home, nobody will blame you.”

  “You don’t understand, she’s my sweetie. It’s like you and Tracy. Imagine that. Imagine that.”

  Saturday, August 7

  While wandering out of Dick and Viv’s neighborhood and down into Helena proper for my daily walk, I happen past an iron buffalo skull the size of a car. Two young children—a boy and a girl—attempt to climb on the sun-heated metal as their parents look on. I think, Perhaps this is the true end—or start—to the ox herding pictures. The building just beyond the skull is the Montana Historical Society Museum, a place Dick has mentioned that I might find interesting. Turning up the path, I enter the museum and buy a ticket to view the art gallery, which boasts an extensive Charlie Russell collection. “It’s one of the best collections of his stuff around,” says the man at the counter.

  “
That’s wonderful,” I say. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I have never heard of Charlie Russell. Inside I find classic paintings of cowboys and Indians—that complicated and tragic history idealized—and cattle ambling across the hot, dry landscape of Montana. It’s not the kind of art or narrative that I am usually drawn to; looking at it now makes me feel like a foreigner. But there’s also something intimate there. Something that tugs at memory and old desires.

  Koun told me once that he used to want to be a cowboy, like his grandfather. When his grandfather found out, he started making all of their outings more and more difficult. “He was worried that I’d actually grow up and choose such a hard life, but I was just a kid who thought my grandfather was cool. And the more difficult he made it for me, the more I loved it.” I imagine him riding for hours on horseback, an eight- or maybe ten-year-old boy floating through a stream of cattle. Brown leather gloves too big for him. A rough rope held tightly in one hand.

  When I return to the house, the television is on as usual so I settle into the overstuffed couch next to Viv and try to be present in some small meaningful way as she falls into and out of consciousness. I feel sad and useless; I can’t begin to imagine how Dick feels every day. Viv—the center of his life—and the two of them held fast in a love story of what should be, not what is, not reality. The TV drones on, the hands of the clock make their circles, the sun drags shadows across the carpet. A few days ago Viv had been hallucinating horses galloping through the living room—something to do with a change in her medication or her condition. The doctors did not know which.

  Horses. Now I’m starting to remember. Sometimes I think our lives—all our lives—are variations on a theme. I close my eyes and see the art gallery from earlier, all of the images there. I always thought I’d be a girl who rode horses. After all, before I was from Alaska, I was from Texas. I remember visiting my grandfather’s ranch—over a child’s handful of summers—with my father. There are photographs of me smiling, high up in a saddle. The one time I rode alone, at thirteen, the animal ran fast and angry. She feinted crashing into trees and then a barn. When we at last returned to the farmhouse, the both of us panting and sweating like we’d returned from a vicious struggle, my grandfather exclaimed that he’d never seen her act in such a way. Perhaps, he’d said, the horse sensed some weakness or lack in the rider. This was how I came to feel about my awkward adjacency to family in Texas—a child of divorce in a culture of tradition, I was the thing that did not belong. By that time my father had another family. I never rode a horse again.