My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  Sunday, August 8

  Bryan and I slip out of the house early to see Eve in the nursing home one last time before heading back to Seattle. On this trip we have witnessed flashes of lucidity from her, and now she is back to total non-lucidity: perhaps just a magnified version of how our minds are always working, this switching back-and-forth. But as always, there is a ground of sweetness to her. “Her essential nature,” as Bryan puts it. Today Eve gives up trying to talk at all, and just squeezes our hands and smiles brightly to each of us in turn—taking in our faces slowly as if savoring a delicious flavor—until it is time to go.

  “Do you remember Eve’s koan—that thing she said about cookies?” I ask Bryan as we step out of the nursing home.

  “Oh yes—that was great.”

  A few years ago, on a similar visit, we all ate sugar cookies together after a meal, each person passing the plate like communion.

  “What’s this?” Eve had asked as she touched the cookie on her plate.

  “It’s a cookie,” replied Viv.

  “I know that. What is it?”

  “It’s butter, sugar, white flour, baking soda. . . .”

  “Oh, I know how to make it. But what IS it?”

  “I don’t understand your question, Mom,” said Viv.

  Eve tried again: “What’s—a cookie?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” said Bryan, holding up one of the cookies and really looking at it. “I honestly have no idea.”

  When we return to the house, Kathy is talking animatedly with Dick in the living room and Viv is watching on from her chair. There is a sort of frantic good-naturedness to her speaking, an injection of sunlight into a dark room. She is kind, I think, a kind person who wants to do right by others but who also struggles—just as I do, just as we all do.

  That cheerful sunlight stays in the room as we say our farewells and I am grateful.

  “Your Dad seems to be dealing with Viv’s condition pretty well, considering,” says Kathy as we pull out of the driveway.

  “Yeah, he’s doing a lot better now than he was even last week,” says Bryan. “Still, he’s having a hard time. He just doesn’t always show it.”

  Yellow-green landscape slips past us as we consider this. I say, “I remember once Dick saying that on his fishing trips he’d begun releasing every third catch for Viv. We were all at that Mexican restaurant. Bryan, do you remember what he said?”

  “Something like, ‘I got the idea from the Buddhists—still trying to figure out that merit concept.’”

  Kathy smiles and takes Bryan’s hand.

  Midway through our journey, we stop in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to swim in the endless blue lake. Bryan and Kathy playing in bright sunlight and water, laughing. They seem passionate and broken open, like two people who know it’s going to end.

  Tuesday, August 10

  I spend my last day in Seattle at Green Lake—my ideal, lonely farewell—walking and stopping at intervals to sit beneath the trees with my notebook. I have a deep and enduring fondness for this particular place because, everywhere I have lived, there has always been a path where I go to walk and get my thinking done—a habitual and recursive journey that is like an old friend. After Koun and I returned from Japan that first time and then got married, during those ten brief months we lived in Seattle, I came here nearly every day. Though we didn’t know it at the time, we were in transition. We’d just returned from two years in Japan, and we found ourselves slowly realizing that we needed to go back—Koun for his formal Zen training, and me because of a gnawing fascination with that unique Japanese aesthetic.

  And now, another time of transition. Or perhaps an arrival.

  In the evening, when Bryan comes home, I admit my discomfort about returning to Alaska tomorrow. “I always feel that something bad awaits me there—it’s illogical, I know. But the discomfort is real. I’m not sure how to make peace with that feeling.”

  And so, as a way to calm my mind, he shows me how to do a basic puja, which looks and feels very much like one of the ceremonies at the monastery. It begins with both of us sitting on meditation cushions in front of his makeshift coffee table altar. Vishnu, deity of ultimate reality, is invoked through mantra, incense and a candle are lit, and water is sprinkled on a miniature plate of cooked rice. The candle, then, is lifted and circled. The ceremony concludes with a final mantra, and I can’t look away from a photograph of a smiling Ammachi, the Hindu “hugging saint,” swimming in a white sari in the Ganges River, flower petals floating around her. This is Bryan’s chosen guru—a woman who has dedicated her life to hugging strangers as if they are her own children.

  When, at last, I begin to enter sleep this night, it is the image of the woman in the flow of a river that stays with me.

  Wednesday, August 11

  Remarkably, I am on an airplane, once again defying space and time. For much of the five-hour journey, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything I’ve brought with me and so, in neurotic cycles, I flip through a favorite novel, a book of kanji, the materials in the seat pocket in front of me, and my notebook. Nothing offers escape. The oxygen in the cabin seems inadequate, and I feel that there is a slow constricting in my chest as the plane draws closer and closer to the place where I came of age.

  But when we hover over countless glaciers and great, jagged, snow-peaked mountains, I experience an extraordinary expansiveness—like a slow taking in of breath. There is a rightness in that treacherous view below that I can’t deny. Home.

  After the plane lands, I exit into the main lobby and immediately spot my mother waving cheerfully from within a group of others (mostly tall, sturdy-looking men with facial hair) waiting to collect and depart. As usual, I’m struck by how alike my mother and I look—it’s disconcerting every time. As we move toward each other, I wonder if anyone is observing us as a single subject approaching her future (or past) mirror image.

  Together we gather my luggage and then step out of the airport building. A blinding blast of sunlight and remembered smell hits me.

  “What time is it?” I ask, squinting into the brightness.

  “10 p.m.”

  Thursday, August 12

  The glowing rectangle around the sun-blocking window shade wakes me much too early. My body is already ticking with that manic Alaskan-summer alertness as I lie on one side of a twin bed. It is funny how, even in sleep, I habitually make space for Koun.

  I rise and draw open the shade, look out on ocean before turning back into the smallness of a room that houses familiar and unfamiliar objects—a bedspread from my youth; a newer painting of my mother’s, of sunflowers; an antique dresser and mirror purchased from a secondhand shop when I was here last; a shelf filled with books on painting techniques and cans and jars of pencils and paintbrushes. My mother has returned to a long-abandoned artistic self since divorcing my stepfather some years ago, in that year before I moved to Japan for the first time, in the year of my own divorce in grad school.

  When my mother wakes a few hours later, there is a flurry of welcome distraction having to do with Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan’s expected arrival today—mainly, I have no idea how to track them down. The original plan was to meet them at the hotel—and that is where we go—but the hotel desk clerk insists that no such names are on the guest list. A quick over-the-counter peek while we are talking reveals that their names have been horribly misspelled, as are most of the Japanese names on the list. “We are sure that the spellings are correct,” the desk person says. “But if this is your friend and granddaughter, they will arrive shortly at the airport, and the tour guides will bring them here.”

  Finally, we locate them at the airport: Satsuki-chan, a thirteen-year-old with the long slender limbs of a ballerina, looking wide-eyed and in awe of her first moment in an exotic, foreign land; and Yoko-san, as genki as always, in awe of nothing. Apparently they will shortly be collected by the guides, and after they drop off their bags at the hotel, they will be immediately off on an all-day to
ur—a glacier cruise just outside of Whittier. After such a long plane journey, I can’t imagine being eager for a long bus ride and then climbing aboard a ferry. “It’ll be beautiful, though,” my mother says. “It’s a great day for the ferry—maybe the glacier will be calving. And the animals will be out.”

  Our plans of being tour guides thwarted, my mother and I return to her condo to sit on her couch, contemplating from her picture windows a cargo boat’s slow movement across the ocean’s surface.

  “The culture here—I’m trying to put my finger on it. It’s like, do whatever the hell you want to do, just make sure you leave me alone.”

  “And make sure you stay away from what’s mine,” Mom adds. “People are liable to shoot you if you step onto their property.”

  “Oh yes! And that kind of collective glee that shows up when someone gets eaten by a bear or dies of exposure. ‘Well, that guy wasn’t prepared. Had it coming to him.’ Not a lot of compassion there. Not a lot of empathy.”

  “Maybe every culture comes with its own good and bad,” says Mom as she rises to brew more coffee.

  Show no weakness—the simultaneously great and tragic creed of the Alaskans, I think. I wonder how much of this culture is still mine?

  In another time and place and culture, surely Koun is letting himself into unlocked strangers’ houses in Takamori today and tomorrow, having been released briefly from the monastery to help his teacher deliver blessings for the Obon season, which honors the spirits of the departed. If someone is home, they will greet him after he enters the genkan, and lead him to the butsudan, the home’s Buddhist altar, where he will light a candle and incense, chanting the Heart Sutra in the name of each family’s ancestors. Afterward, there will be tsukemono (pickled vegetables) and green tea or maybe amazake, a fermented rice drink, and yokan, sliced sweet bean jelly. If no one is home, he will find the butsudan by himself, do the ceremony, then leave. The smell of incense the only clue that he was there at all.

  Friday, August 13

  I walk toward the center of downtown Anchorage with Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan, my accidental guests in this place where I am now more tourist than local. A prescribed burn in the Interior lends a smoky haze to the sky, obliterating the mountains. And it’s much warmer than usual—in the upper seventies.

  “It’s cold, ne,” says Yoko-san.

  “Yes. Cold,” says Satsuki-chan. I think of my mother, who has left windows open and turned on multiple fans to cool the air in her condo.

  “Do you want to borrow my sweater?” I offer.

  “No thank you,” says Satsuki-chan.

  “Ohhhh, good English conversation, ne,” says Yoko-san, as Satsuki-chan smiles and blushes. “You can practice in the store, too.”

  For Day Two of their journey, the aim is to locate suitable obligatory omiyage—for each of Satsuki-chan’s classmates and teachers as well as for Yoko-san’s various family, friends, and associates. Given Yoko-san’s careful attention to proper etiquette, I suspect we’ll be at it for a good part of the morning, if not the whole day. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what here will appeal.

  “There,” says Yoko-san, gesturing wildly. “And there.” I see nothing of particular note at first glance—shops, yes, but why the excitement? And then I see it: all of the windows display multiple little signs written with Japanese characters.

  “When I walked here yesterday, I didn’t notice those signs at all.”

  “Now you are seeing with your Japanese eyes,” says Yoko-san.

  Later, when we enter my mother’s aging condo building to take in the gorgeous afternoon view of the ocean, I cringe when I see how Yoko-san’s gaze moves over the small living room, the cramped kitchen, the dining nook, the many paintings and sketches in mid-process. She pities my mother. I know she sees divorce, a woman who has been “forced” to have a career. But somehow she stops short of commenting directly, and I am relieved. These things will be talked about later, among the pottery ladies perhaps, and they will feel sorry for my mother, and for me, for all the wrong reasons.

  Saturday, August 14

  I am beginning to realize that the phenomenon of “recognition”—that curious bit of culture shock that prompts the brain to believe that passersby are known—is probably, here anyway, real recognition. This morning as I stroll to Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan’s hotel, I see at least two people I went to high school with, only really catching on to this fact some minutes later, when an ephemeral flicker of memory translates the familiar features of face and body across time: a boy who kissed me once, a girl who hated me because she mistook my depression for arrogance.

  After I collect my charges, we head to the Performing Arts Center to watch a film on the aurora borealis—the northern lights. It’s definitely geared for tourists, but still I am moved by the sweeping displays of green, red, blue, and gold set to over-the-top New Age music. As the sound and images fade and the theater lights come on around us, I turn to Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan. Both appear stunned. “Are you okay?” I ask

  “They . . . they are like ghosts. Very scary,” says Yoko-san.

  “Honto? Honto?” asks Satsuki-chan, her eyes wide.

  “Yes,” I say. “They are real. I have seen them many times.”

  “Very scary,” repeats Yoko-san solemnly. Still, she buys four boxes of photo cards in the gift shop. A necessary proof, perhaps, of this haunted land.

  ~

  In the evening, after I drop off an exhausted Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan at their hotel, my mother and I meet up with Thor—local artist, commercial fisherman, and my mother’s long-time sort-of boyfriend. “Bar hopping is all about people-watching,” explains Thor who, I believe, looks more or less like his namesake. I wonder if people go to bars to watch him. The first place we enter, sparse and clean and nearly empty of patrons, houses a few of Thor’s paintings. We collect our drinks, then move to a mural—a lively New Orleans–style jazz scene with people dancing in the streets. Several of Thor’s friends—including my mom—appear in the crowd, held fast in an image of raucous nostalgia. On another wall, near the bar, hangs a portrait of Mt. Redoubt looming large. That singular, distinct character. “An Alaskan Fuji,” I say. The proprietor agrees with my assessment, reaches across the bar to shake my hand when Thor explains where I live, that my husband is a cloistered monk. “If I were inclined to be a religious man, I guess I’d be a Buddhist,” he says.

  We continue our rounds downtown in this way—a tour of art and life. A couple cozy hole-in-the-walls with rough-looking locals. And then an over-the-top classy place for wealthy tourists, the walls and fixtures sparkling with brass and mirrors. A final stop to a smoky room filled with people on the edge of youth, save for the old timers sitting at the bar itself, all of them deep in their glasses. As soon as we sit down—me just a little off to the side of Thor and my mom, who have just entered into some kind of quiet quarrel—one of the men on the dance floor releases a woman at the end of a song and asks me to dance. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep my hands to myself,” he says. I refuse—and then accept. What’s the harm? He’s seen the ring; he’s made a fair promise. But he does not keep it, so I walk away before the dance is over. “What’s your story?” he shouts after me. Mom and Thor turn from each other as I sit down.

  “I should have known better.” I can feel my face burning. Thor laughs and orders me yet another glass of wine. I watch from my seat as the man captures a sad-eyed redhead, then, and spins away into the music. I am more than a little drunk, I realize. I’ve never done too well with alcohol.

  When our drinks come, my mother and Thor get up to dance and I drift, trancelike, into memory. Nome. 1979. My mother beautiful in a short gold cocktail dress that she sewed herself for her role in the local theater—an adaptation of Bogart’s Casablanca. I remember she bought the thing I had been coveting for months from one of the gift shops in town, one of the few places to view and desire objects for purchase: a delicate miniature gramophone music box made of dark wood that played “As T
ime Goes By” at the lift of a tiny brass lever. She gave it to one of the men in the play as a flirtation. This, too, a pattern with us.

  On the way home from this last bar, I stumble, dizzy, and fall over onto concrete. I see my mother leaning over me in a gold dress—but it is just a bit of light behind her in the darkness. A flickering streetlamp, or a ghost.

  What’s your story?

  No story.

  That would be the Zen answer—wouldn’t it?

  Sunday, August 15

  Koun calls while out doing takuhatsu. He is on his onsen break at the end of his day of alms rounds, and we just have these few moments that he has saved by taking his bath more quickly than the others. How lucky that I am home in time for the call. I can hear the exhaustion in his voice, imagine those rope sandals cutting into his feet, those robes bound around his body gathering heat all day long. He tells me about the day’s frustrations: “Jisen-san gave us extremely complex instructions about going to Fukuoka and calling some monk and so forth. It was impossible to get right. And Aigo-san is driving the other monks crazy. They’ve begun mimicking him in Japanese—even when he’s in the room. He hasn’t quite figured it out yet. ‘That is not the way Dogen washes laundry. That is not how Dogen picks his nose.’ It’s comical, in a way, but there’s real tension beneath it.” He sighs. “How is it going there?”