by Tracy Franz
JANUARY
Ikasu
Saturday, January 1, 2005
This morning I am skiing fast through trees and over ice and snow on the deserted trails of Kincaid Park, a place I often visited in high school, a place I visit even now in my dreams. It is overcast and cold and quiet. There is only the rhythm of movement and breath.
I found these old skate skis a few days ago while searching for a box of winter clothing in my mother’s storage shed. Pushing aside all those carefully tucked-away memories, I gathered up my old red ski bag and made a plan. Now, moving like this through landscape, I see that it was a good choice. The right choice. The body, in motion, is fully engaged. There is both a singular focus and a diffusiveness. There is balance. In Japan, certain monks will begin the New Year seated on a black cushion; I begin mine gliding over white snow.
As I reach the top of yet another hill, I pause. Light breaks through cloud cover overhead. I feel, suddenly, like crying. It is surprising how so much can be bound up in the body-memory of movement. It is not unlike the awakenings brought about by a smell or a fragment of music. Had I been at the top of this hill or some other when that obvious solution to my adolescent misery hit me? Take the family car in winter, at the deadliest of temperatures, in the dead of night. Drive and drive and drive and then park in some inconspicuous area, well out of sight. Hike as far as possible into wilderness and then drink from a bottle of hard liquor to take away the survival instinct (how I hated the taste and sting!). Remove the life-preserving warmth and fall back into snow. Pull the whiteness like a blanket over me.
I can see now how all of this appealed to some part of my teenage vanity, that such an act might preserve the image of the body while expelling whatever pain it carried within it. I can marvel at the stupidity of all of this now. I know the preciousness of this life. But then, but then . . .
The truth is that I remember standing in the kitchen. I remember the weight of the backpack on my shoulder. I remember putting on my boots. I remember the sound and feel of the car keys in my hand. I remember that I never got past the front door. I remember, also, being terrified of getting into trouble and so in this one way it could be said that my stepfather, or my own fear of being caught by him, saved me.
I have not thought about any of this in a very long time.
Monday, January 3
“Mom, why didn’t we tell people what Fred was really like? Why did we keep secrets for him?” My mother and I are driving home from yet another of her doctor’s appointments. All night and also today, rain pours out of the sky, melting snow and ice. I don’t recall ever seeing an Alaskan January quite as fickle as this one before.
My mom leans into the steering wheel and sighs, seems to contemplate the unlikely weather surrounding us. “I was afraid. All those stories from Vietnam, from the police force before he became a teacher . . .”
“I guess those veiled threats were pretty clear, weren’t they. He was always letting us know what he was capable of.”
“Yes, and not all of the threats were veiled.” My mother, the ex-wife of this man, knows things that I do not know.
“Sometimes I think we were just trying to be good girls. We were well behaved.”
“It was like that, wasn’t it.”
“And if you think about it, our good behavior was rewarded. Until a mood or a misstep made it all go to hell again. There was no real winning, only a staving off of something. Some beast.”
“Yes, there were definitely cycles. Good times for a while and then . . . not so good.”
How we learned to define ourselves within the treachery of those moods—stupid or smart, good or bad, ugly or beautiful. I want to ask, Do we still keep those secrets? Do we have to carry this burden forever? What are we supposed to do? Even now, I always want to know what I’m supposed to do. A good daughter. A good partner. A good person. What am I supposed to do?
My mother turns to me, smiling as if in answer. “But why focus on all that negative stuff? I want to think positively from now on. It’s healthier. It makes me feel better. I want to enjoy all the life I have left.”
So lighthearted, I think. We look so much the same, but inside we carry vastly different emotional landscapes. I envy her.
Thursday, January 6
I drive through a winter sunset, out to the Valley to visit with Cheryl and her kids. Tomorrow I’ll go in with her to Wasilla High, to talk with the students in her coworker Carla’s Japanese-language classes. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a sleepover,” I say as I step into her house.
“That’s true! But it might be a little different with the kids.”
“Right. I guess that makes us the adults now.” We quickly settle into chatting and playing a board game with her four-year-old daughter. Cheryl’s son, who is somehow already in grade school, sits cross-legged on the couch, arranging thick stacks of Pokémon cards.
“I need to travel more,” says Cheryl. She seems, I think, lighter than the last time we spoke. “I keep remembering how I had such a great time hiking with my dad in the Grand Canyon. Something about that trip—it just cleared my mind. And it really got my dad talking, too. I felt that I saw a new side of him. He was lit up.”
“What did you talk about?” I ask as her daughter gleefully moves a game piece several squares along the path.
“Oh, lots of things. Nothing important, really. He kept going off on ‘liberals this, liberals that . . .’ He had a lot of opinions about what you and your husband are doing.”
“Ha! Opinions about hippies like me?”
“Yes. . . .” She gives me a cautious, sideways look—unsure, perhaps, if we’ve ventured into unsafe territory.
“Okay. You can tell me—is it the Japan thing in general, or the Buddhist thing specifically?”
“Well, both.”
“I know it all sounds weird, everything we’re doing. It is weird. Unless you’re in it. Then it’s just what’s happening now. It’s a new perspective, a new definition of normal.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“But your dad wouldn’t buy that, would he?”
“Not for a second.”
“It’s just wrong, what we’re doing.”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s certainly not the only person who feels that way.” I smile, swallow this small hurt, and roll the dice. Some part of me—that lonely inner child, perhaps—is always desperate for approval from one parent or another.
Cheryl’s daughter—her twin in miniature—looks up from the gameboard. “Mom, what’s a ‘hippie’?”
“Um, someone who has crazy-long hair and weird clothes,” says Cheryl.
“Oh boy. What’s the PG version of ‘free love’?” I say.
“A hippie is someone who takes a lot of very, very bad drugs. . . . Don’t you ever take very bad drugs!”
“Definitely not a Zen monk, then!” I laugh. “Or, at least, not one in Japan, who follows the rules. Though, come to think of it, the hair and clothes can be pretty weird.”
“Ha! You’ll have to show me pictures. . . . All right, guys, it’s about time for bed. School day tomorrow.” Her daughter squirms, protesting the ending of our game but also happy in her mother’s arms.
“I still can’t believe you have kids. I’ll need to get your advice if we ever get around to having them.”
“I wouldn’t know what advice to give. You just deal with things as they come up. I don’t know any other way to do it.”
“Like everything else, then.”
“Sure.”
~
Kneeling on carpet, I gather game pieces, fold the board neatly into the box—this journey in miniature of luck and choice to play again some other day. From the back of the house, a mother recites bedtime prayers with her two children. A moment, a universe.
Friday, January 7
At Wasilla High, I stand in a room that looks and smells very much like one of the classrooms in the high school I attended a few miles
away, in Palmer. I’ve just finished presenting to one of Carla’s Japanese-language classes, sharing tips on communicating with their pen pals at Shokei, and a number of Carla’s students surround me, some with questions, others simply eager to share their knowledge of Japanese culture. One tall and awkward boy says, “Tell me about Remi. Is she . . . is she beautiful?”
“She is very good at kyudo, Japanese archery. You should ask her about that,” I say.
A girl with bright eyes smiles and hands me several pieces of lined notebook paper on which anime characters have been drawn in careful detail—mostly big-eyed girls in high school uniforms. “Can you give these to my pen pal?”
“Nao is an artist, too. She will be happy to receive these. But don’t you want to send them with your letter?”
“I’ll make more. I draw one every day.”
“That’s good practice. I’ll look for your work someday.”
Another boy with sandy blond hair approaches and tells me his name is Trinity. He holds a fake Japanese sword in one hand. “I wonder if you can help me with something. I need to know how to do hara-kiri. It’s for a play.”
“A play?”
“Rashomon. You know the movie? We had to change some of it, obviously.”
“Well, I don’t think I’ll be much help to you—I’m no expert in disembowelment, or Japanese film, for that matter. What is the movie about? It sounds familiar.”
“It’s about many versions of reality.”
“Many versions?
“Yes, there’s this monk who stands by a gate in Kyoto. He listens to different people explaining an event—a rape followed by a death. Each person tells it in a completely different way.”
“Oh, I almost remember this story. Remind me—which person is telling the truth?”
“All of them.”
“Right, right.” I nod and close my eyes. I am sixteen. I am thirty-one.
Saturday, January 8
My mother and I bundle up and trek down the street from her condo to the museum to see the latest: an exhibit of Tibetan Buddhist artwork. There are paintings of the Dalai Lama at various ages, and also a number of mandalas. It’s the latter that really pull me in—those intricate and prismatic depictions of the cosmos—while my mother, drawn more to the portraits, notes that the Dalai Lama, at age five, “looks exactly like himself.” I see that she’s right, and also that the mandala and the portraits are perhaps not such different things. I think back to my experience as a child living briefly in Hatcher Pass, when I first began to really see the “Big/Small.” The infinite universe. The tiniest molecule. And here in this room, a mandala of people (each a mandala him/herself) move around and through and out into the cold of an Alaskan winter. Alaska, too, a mandala.
On the way back to the condo, Mom and I stop at a café and order a berry cobbler to share. It arrives shortly after—a big steaming bowl with two spoons, and a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on top. We each take big bites, and then I set down my spoon, drink most of a glass of water, and slump back into the booth.
“Are you okay?” asks my mother.
“I don’t know. This is the kind of thing I crave all the time in Japan. But here, now that I can have it, it’s much too sweet. I can’t bear to eat it. I don’t remember once feeling that way before moving to Japan. There was no such thing as ‘too sweet.’”
“Your tastes changed. Maybe all those new flavors had an effect on you.”
“Yes. Honestly, I feel that I’ve been altered in my DNA. Everything has been changed. Everything. This cobbler might be the best evidence I have for that. Before I liked sweet things, and now I don’t. I’m a person who doesn’t like sweet things. How can that be?”
“You know, over time, I think my tastes have changed, too. Maybe it’s something to do with aging. But it’s there. It’s a subtle shift.”
“Is this cobbler too sweet for you, too?”
“Not really. But I am also a changed person.”
“Changed but the same?”
“That’s right.”
Sunday, January 9
It seems that true winter has returned, and with a certain violence. After morning zazen, Tozen and I shuffle in our thick coats across the frozen parking lot and tuck ourselves into my mother’s car. The engine has been running for at least ten minutes, but it still feels like the inside of a freezer. Tozen removes his gloves and rubs his hands over the lukewarm blast of air from the vent. “I will visit you in Kumamoto soon,” he says. “I will arrange to meet Koun’s teacher. You can move back to Alaska and take care of your mother.”
“But what would you do? Where would you go?”
“It is time for me to retire. This is work for a younger person, someone with energy. I have no more energy.”
“I think you have lots of energy.”
“No, not so much. Not so much now.”
“Honestly, I’m just—I’m not sure if that is the right path for Koun and me.”
“That is for you to decide. I will go to Japan and open a door. Then you will make a choice.”
In the late afternoon, my mother and I work together in her small art room. I pack my suitcase for my return home, while she cleans and puts her supplies in order for her next project. “I need to get back to painting. It’s time,” she says.
“That sounds healthy,” I say.
“Oh—I almost forgot.” From her closet she produces a zafu, a pattern of dragonflies flitting across the bright purple Chinese silk. “I picked it up at the bookstore. Maybe you can show me how to use it before you go? My doctor said meditation might be good for reducing stress. At least, she said it couldn’t hurt.”
I take the zafu in my arms and squeeze it tightly against me. “It’s a nice one,” I say. “Sturdy but not too hard—a good foundation for sitting.”
“Oh good. I wasn’t sure if it was a real one.”
“This doesn’t mean you’re becoming full-on Buddhist, does it, Mom?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You’d be a better one than I, I’m sure.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just a guess.” My mother’s heart—light as a dragonfly. I set the zafu next to the wall.
“How do I start?” she asks.
“It begins with the breath,” I say. “In.” We breathe in. “Out.” We breathe out.
“Well, that doesn’t seem so hard.”
Thursday, January 13
The horned cow is your mind. The horned cow is your mind. The horned cow is your mind. . . .
Last night and also the few nights before I dreamed of walking down an abandoned hallway of an airport—the words of a stranger on a loop as I catalogue the ink paintings hanging along the walls:
A man searching along a path in the woods
The hoofprints—a hint—in the mud
From behind a tree, a bit of leg and tail revealed
The man looping a rope around an ox’s thick neck, fighting against the strength of the animal
The ox following the man, who carries a whip and the rope lead
Now playing a flute, the man sits astride the ox, riding it along the path
The ox gone, the man rests peacefully in his home
A single enso—the Zen circle a kind of mandala that points to transformation, interconnectedness, wholeness, emptiness
A river flowing through the forest
A man walking along a village street, immersed in the normalcy of daily life—the trees around him in full bloom
~
It has been a few days since I arrived home from Alaska. The luggage from my trip sits mostly unpacked in my bedroom, and I feel out of sorts. Maybe I haven’t quite arrived yet; maybe I am still traveling. The feeling is not quite a depression but more an idea that won’t form—or a riddle not yet solved.
Koun, meanwhile, has been calling constantly from pay phones while out on some long journey with the monks. I barely miss him every time he calls and so there is this o
ther nagging discomfort, this near-miss longing. Finally, in the afternoon, I am standing near the phone when it rings and I jump at the sound.
“Oh, it’s you,” I say. “I’m so glad to hear your voice.”
“Same here, T. How was the trip? How’s your mom?”
“She seems well, herself. I’m not sure what else to say. We had a nice visit.”
“That’s pretty much all you can hope for, isn’t it?”
“You’re probably right.”
He tells me he’s been talking a lot with various people at Zuioji, translating difficult conversations for Aigo-san, in order to arrange Aigo-san’s finishing ceremonies, transmission, and so forth. “I’m pushing the limits of my language and cultural abilities. It seems to be going okay so far, so that’s good at least. I’m gaining a kind of competency.”
He also tells me that they’ve all being doing a lot of takuhatsu, a twenty-day run of it to be exact. Usually, they get to take turns resting, but he is the driver, so there is no rest for him. “I don’t know if I’m coming or going. It’s exhausting. Everything starts to run together. Sometimes I realize I’ve forgotten the name of the town as we’re marching through it, chanting and holding up our bowls.”
And then I tell him about my discomfort, the non-arrival, of being on the edge of an idea. “I want to say it’s like your experience—my brain is moving so quickly through different places that I can’t put my finger on what it’s all pointing to, or where I’m at.”
“Maybe,” he suggests, “you should make something.”
In the evening, I sit in my kitchen and form pot after pot after pot. But nothing comes to me. No grand idea. Just now, nothing but now. I finish well past midnight. After cleaning up, I slide open the back door, slip on shoes, turn off the kitchen light, and step out into cool darkness. I know there is a stand of cherry trees a few paces away. Beyond that, the field I walk through on my way to work each morning. Beyond that, vast plots of cultivated earth. But who’s to say that any of that exists in this moment? I could be anywhere. I could be nowhere—or everywhere. As my eyes adjust, I begin to regain my vision. Maybe it is time to unpack my bags.
