Legacies
Sunday, August 1
Today Bryan and I opt to explore Seattle’s Chinatown today. At first, we are in a classic Seattle city district of tall brickwork buildings, endless concrete and glass. And then the landscape transforms: kanji looping across sidewalk art signs, storefront windows filled with Asian artifacts, passersby looking up at us with eerily familiar faces. “It’s so weird—I feel as if I’m recognizing people, their names on the tip of my tongue. It happens in Japan, too. I see a foreigner and I think, hey—didn’t we go to high school together? Aren’t we old friends? It’s an unexpected empathy.”
We duck into Uwajimaya, peruse the aisles of goods that are identical to those available in my neighborhood store in Kikuyo, save for the sheer quantity and also the exotic additions from Korea, Thailand, China. And then into the adjacent Kinokuniya, the bookstore that bears the same name as my favorite bookseller in Japan. “But this is even better than the one in Tokyo!” I exclaim, rushing from aisle to aisle like a kid in a candy shop. I am vaguely aware of Bryan trailing after me, amused, and then my focus shifts entirely to the books. The English section is exceptionally well stocked—and the theme is all things Japanese. It seems that I am the ideal consumer of this particular complex of consumables, and oh how badly I want to buy, buy, buy.
Some while later, Bryan’s voice pulls me from my frantic seeking.
“Oh—I’m definitely lost.”
“Hey, are you hungry?”
“Starving. Lost and starving.”
From the stack in my arms, I select just one tome to purchase for now—a basic how-to on Japanese ceramics in English, complete with illustrations. “Is this really all you want?” asks Bryan as we leave the store and move toward the food court.
“No, I want it all. But it’s too much. I’ll start with the pottery.”
After we make our purchases at the food counter and seat ourselves at the one unoccupied table, we lean eagerly into our meals. I pop tuna makizushi and bean-paste-filled mochi into my mouth. Bryan twirls a fork through spicy pad thai. At the neighboring table, two twenty-something Japanese boys—I imagine them to be local university students—slurp udon loudly and complain about the windy-wet Seattle weather in fast, rough Japanese. I want to embrace them, but I know they are as inaccessible to me as whatever it is I am searching for now. I think of Koun, then, how he should be here with us, experiencing this out-of-context abundance. I chew my final makizushi while a familiar bright sting grows wider and wider in my nostrils and pressure builds behind the eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“Very authentic wasabi,” I explain, laughing and weeping at the same time.
Monday, August 2
The University of Washington campus is, at noon, nearly free of students. But soon, I imagine, they will move in and out of the buildings in little tributaries of humanity, their backpacks slung over one shoulder, casually, as they arrive and arrive and arrive into their bright futures.
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.”
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 trail, 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.
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 tour—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 Time 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?”
“Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan have been a welcome distraction in many ways. Still, it’s overwhelming—an assault on the senses. I feel tired all the time.”
“Was it like that when I went to Alaska with you?”
“Somewhat, yeah. But we’d only been dating a year. I’m pretty sure that all I could really see was you.”
“That was mutual. . . . Maybe people who don’t leave have time to grow into a place, or they grow with it. But those who do leave—”
“Yes, yes! There’s this sense of a split personality, or of lost time. There is no real connection to that person who was and the person who is. It’s terrifying. Like being unable to locate my self, my ego. I’m lost.”
“Maybe it’s time to shave your head, baby.”
~
In the evening, I call Cheryl, my best friend from high school. We have, over the years, kept a slender thread of contact. Her voice, not heard in a very long time, exactly the same as I remembered it.
Monday, August 16
Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan are leaving at 3 a.m. tomorrow, and Yoko-san suggests that we say goodbye now, as the hotel shuttle will deliver them both to the airport at that early hour. So we see them off at the hotel entrance with an armload of souvenirs: a book of Alaskan photography, some coffee and loose-leaf tea, an assortment of chocolates from the gift shop where my mom works part-time. This is followed by lots of bowing, which my mother and I return awkwardly. Then as we get into the car and pull away, we observe as Satsuki-chan and Yoko-san dutifully stand and wave until we are out of sight.
“Wow, that was an elaborate send-off,” says my mother.
“If we turn the car around now and catch them before they go back inside, I’m pretty sure that Japanese etiquette will require that they start up again,” I offer. Some cruel part of me wants to do just this, as experiment.
“What now?”
“I have no idea. I feel like my purpose has been taken away.”
“Is there anything that you know you’d like to do while you’re here?”
“Nothing special—just be here,” I say. “Take walks, read, write a bit. Oh, and maybe try local Zen—I guess there’s a little group that meets in the mornings.”
“Okay. How about a drive to Portage Glacier today?”
“Sure!”
And so we shuttle off down the Seward Highway, that great route of stunning vistas—towering mountains and vast sea. When we arrive, it is as shocking as the first time I noticed: a concrete building adjacent to nothing more than a cold lake. Years ago, in my childhood, the lake was mostly glacier. Somewhere, there is a photo of me standing in front of this same building and the massive white-blue river of ice next to it, a small inquisitive hand reaching out to touch the frozen chunks that have settled along the dark riverside sands. Now, we stand before a giant vanished. That great receding, as if a memory erased.
“It’s changed a lot, hasn’t it,” says my mother.
“It shocks me every time. When we last saw the ice—that must have been with Fred.” I ask her if she ever thinks of her last ex-husband, the man who served as my stand-in father for most of my childhood.
“Sometimes, but not that often nowadays.”
“I worked very hard to put him out of my mind when I first moved to Japan—it was an active forgetting, I think. But sometimes something comes up, and I almost can’t believe it’s real, that someone could actually treat other people that way.”
“Yes, it was like being caught in one long nightmare.”
“That’s a good word for it, ‘nightmare.’ Our own personal hell. Nobody could see it but us. Or they chose not to see.”
My mother looks at the edge of water, then up toward the mountains. “When you went off to college, I remember having vivid dreams that he was fattening me up to eat me—to devour me—just like in the Hansel and Gretel story. That’s when I knew I had to get away.”
“I’ve had dreams like that. Little echoes after I left. Always something about being trapped—terrible.” And at the same time I allowed men to build traps around me. I walked into those iron cages knowingly. I shut the door and locked it behind me again and again.
“But you know, there were good times, too. We shouldn’t forget that.” This odd habit of my mother’s, always applying the positive spin.
“He was a bully, Mom. A horrible person. Nothing can change any of that.”
I think of a childhood friend, Matt, the son of a minister. His father hunted bear and moose with my stepfather while discussing the mysteries of God. Matt’s family moved out of state just after I entered high school—we already lived in different parts of the Valley by then, and we had been attending different schools. Still, over the years, we stayed in touch off and on. I had written him a letter that first year in Japan, and I told him what I had failed to tell so many others. But he hadn’t believed me. In his reply, he wrote how Fred, as his fifth-grade teacher, had been a kind of inspiration to both him and his younger brother, and that he would always be indebted to Fred, for showing him how to be strong, how to be a man. I never wrote back, even though he wrote to me again and again. That broken thread of friendship. A boy who had once held my hand as we crossed a treacherous tributary of a river swollen with spring ice-melt and glacial silt. I had thought we would always know each other. Maybe I shouldn’t have told, maybe he should have believed. I still don’t know which is true. I still don’t know.
My first day of “Alaskan Zen.” I rise at 6 a.m., pull on loose, dark clothing, and with my mother’s car keys in my hand rush out the door chanting, “Stay on the right, stay on the right, stay on the right.” Though directionally challenged, I do succeed in both driving on the correct side of the road and locating the little yoga studio where, according to the Internet, the Anchorage Zen Community meets for zazen every morning.
Still, I feel that I am trespassing as I enter the building. Standing before an empty reception desk that sits next to a large dark and empty room, I weigh my options: call out or leave or just snoop around. Then I register that the hallway extending beyond the desk is lit, and I follow it (thus opting for “snoop around,” I suppose). At the end of the corridor is another big room with a single glowing lamp, a few tall bookcases off to the side obscuring one corner, a simple table altar with incense curling around a small Buddha, and a number of square cushions and round zafu set out in a long rectangle. No one is in here, as far as I can tell, but at least I now understand what I am looking at. I gassho and bow, enter, and seat myself on the nearest zafu and let my gaze rest on the wall in front of me.
A few minutes later, from behind the bookshelf comes the sound of cloth—a monk’s ample robes, perhaps. I sense an emerging from behind the bookshelf, a settling-in, and then the strike of a bell to begin the session. If I close my eyes, I could be at Tatsuda Center, or at Shogoji with Koun.
After a while, I hear movement again, a kind of pacing around the room, and then the person whom I have now decided is definitely the priest puts his hand gently on my shoulder and presses my lower back to correct my failing posture. I misunderstand and gassho, bowing low to accept the firm smack from the kyosaku stick, but he whispers, “No, no, no, no, no,” laughing a little under his breath. I smile when I recognize the accent—Japanese.
After zazen and then kinhin and then zazen again, there is a flurry of prostrations and chanting in English and Japanese from the lone figure at the front of the room. Without other laypeople to guide me, I’m not sure what to do, so I fake it, fumbling through every movement and chant. Finally, we rise and bow to our cushions and to the potential of other practitioners, and then I turn my gaze to the front of the room and really see the priest for the first time: a small, older Japanese man with a wide face, and an easy, broken smile. I like him immediately.
“Good morning,” he says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m very sorry. I messed up your beautiful ceremony.”
“Don’t worry. How about zazen? You are okay? It was not too difficult?”
“I think it’s always difficult for me.”
“Oh I see.”
“Do you need help with this stuff?”
“You can put the cushions away here. And the sutra books go here. There is a special way for the altar things—I will show you.”
“Is it always so quiet?” I ask as I gather and stack.
“Alaskan people are always busy enjoying their lives in summer,” he explains as he disappears behind the bookshelf. He emerges minutes later, now dressed in plain black samu-e. “Please call me Tozen,” he says. “Will you come again?”
“Yes. For a couple weeks, anyway. I’m visiting my mother, but I live in Japan. This year my husband is training in a monastery.”
“Oh I see. You are lonely like me.”
Wednesday, August 18
After a late breakfast, I borrow my mother’s car again and drive north through birch and evergreen and across endless mud flats, toward a stunning view of Pioneer Peak in bright sun. In just under an hour, I arrive in Palmer, the small town where I attended junior high and high school. Cheryl, now a high school teacher in the Valley, greets me with a hug at the door of her house—this tall, tan, stunning woman with long brown hair. We stand back briefly and just take each other in. “You look the same!” we both exclaim, and we do, but for that slight angular maturing of the features, that falling away of softness and rounded youth. Her son and daughter, she says, are with her ex-husband this week, so she has the day to herself.
“Let’s sit out back—in the sun,” she says, and we pass through the living room, out onto a bright deck. “So your husband—how long has it been now?”
“This is the sixth month. Six more to go.”
“You know, I was thinking about something you wrote me a while back, something about Buddhism.”
“Oh yikes—I hope I didn’t say something stupid.”
“No, it’s just that I was going to counseling for a while, after I got divorced. The more I think about it, it seems spiritual. Not what I expected at all.”
“Maybe Zen is like that. A little like that and a little not like that. I’m not sure.”
“Hey, do you want to—do something?” Cheryl has often been my guide to perilous outdoor adventure. I know whatever she has in mind will not be boring.
A short while later, we are biking at breakneck speeds along a forest trail that offers views of the glacially silted waters of the Matanuska-Susitna River. Descending a hill, my tire connects with a big rock and I’m neatly thrown into the bushes.
“You okay?” Cheryl asks as she maneuvers her bike to me.
I brush dirt and foliage from my body and pick up the bike. “Nothing broken. But I might need to walk it off for a few minutes.”
As we walk, my racing heart and breath begin to slow.
“I love coming here,” says Cheryl. “Makes me feel like a kid again.”
“Thank God we’re not. I don’t think I could bear all that teenage angst.”
“Yes, angst. . . . I worried about you, you know. Back in high school. I always did. But I had my own problems, too.”
I laugh. “I always thought you were the together one. I envied you.”
Cheryl stops walking and I stop too. I grow aware of the metal carcasses of vehicles between the trees around us. Ghosts from a distant time, a haunting. Cheryl says, “There was Ms. P, do you remember her? She once told me that we all have our time—‘yours just hasn’t come yet.’ That meant a lot to me, you know. That meant a lot. And she was right.”
We climb back on our bicycles, and I look on as Cheryl rides ahead of me. It is jarring how the memories of others, once revealed, can rewrite our own histories in an instant. Cheryl was tall and awkward and smart and fearless and beautiful in a way that few could see. I was slight and shy and pretty and damaged, and for some reason certain things came easily to me. Self-absorbed in my own misery, I could not fully comprehend the misery of others. I had not been a good friend.
~
As I am driving back to Anchorage, a memory comes to me, bright as the evening light. One winter day into our second year of high school, Cheryl and I walked into the woods near her house. We carried with us the long and painful letters we’d written each other in junior high and that first bit of high school. There were many, and we had meticulously saved every one of them, compiling them in a three-ring binder over the course of those years. We also brought photos—one of Cheryl’s first boyfriend, one of a boy I had liked until, in the darkness of a near-empty movie theater, he tried to force me to do something I did not want to do, one of a girl who had called one or both of us “bitch” to all of her friends. We brought matches and a bottle of lighter fluid. We gathered dry branches and bits of yellowed grass revealed by the thaw. After we lit the fire, we dropped the photos in one by one, watching them curl up and burn. The letters, our devastating masterpiece, we could not bring ourselves to burn, so we buried the folder in the snow. Sometime after that day, we drifted apart, each to our own paths.
Thursday, August 19
I feel broken this morning. When I attend zazen, I am vaguely aware of many comings and goings of the participants—but it is all through a sleepy fog. Afterward, Tozen suggests he and I have breakfast at a little mom-and-pop diner nearby. As we walk across the parking lot, he tests my Japanese—a long riff of questions that move from easy to more and more difficult.
When I completely fail to answer, he tells me in English, “I am not only a monk. I am also a Japanese-language teacher.”
“Then you know exactly how bad my Japanese is.”
“Yes.”
“Ha—in Japan I always know I’m doing badly when someone compliments me. ‘Nihongo ga jozu desu ne!’ It’s a real giveaway.”
“Do you get a lot of compliments?”
“So many.”
“I see.”
Over breakfast, I learn that in Japan he lived in Gunma, “famous for nothing.” And that, for a while, someone in his family was desperately trying to develop a fugu blowfish with no poison. But this, according to Tozen, was a very bad idea because the mother said he had always been careless. I also learn that Tozen’s deshi’s deshi was at Shogoji recently.
“Tim?” I ask, faintly recalling Koun mentioning something about an American man, someone who stayed there only briefly. It seems everyone knows everyone in the small world of Zen.
As we are about to part ways after breakfast, he asks, “Do you know Tora-san?” Tozen has collected and watched the entirety of this long-running Japanese series about an ever-lovesick traveler. He says, “I am like Tora-san—completely hopeless.”
Maybe I am like that, too.
Friday, August 20
Sitting this morning is pure pleasure, a rarity: my posture balanced, my respiration measured, a gentle humming in the mechanisms of the body. Tozen is not here today and the atmosphere in the room feels slightly different, though I’m not sure if his absence is the reason. Maybe it’s the rain outside and the sound of cars moving through water. Or it’s that flash of brightness in my peripheral vision: a pretty blond girl in her twenties wearing all-white, in contrast to the others’ dark, demure clothing. A reluctant goddess, she slips away after the first end-of-zazen bow.
That pleasant energy evaporates midway through the morning, and the deep tiredness of yesterday hits me again. Mom and I make plans to go to a movie—a low-key event—but Koun calls just before we step out the door. I tell him about meeting Tozen, and when I mention his deshi’s deshi, Koun reminds me that Tim was the American monk who decided to leave Shogoji a few weeks ago. Jisen-san was constantly berating him for not being able to “sit like a real monk.”
“He has water-on-the-knees. A very painful condition. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She called him weak, lazy. I felt bad for him.”
He also tells me that he and some of the Shogoji monks had been invited to visit the Kurume temple, a complex nestled next to an unforgettable landmark: a huge statue of Kannon, or Avalokiteshvara, overlooking the city. Some years ago we entered the building and climbed the spiral of stairs inside to peer out from the very eyes of compassion. I remember a scratchy recording of the Heart Sutra echoing up and around us and also the jigoku, the hell realms at the base of the structure—horrifying yet somehow Disney-like dioramas of demons and figures trapped in eternal torture. Thus we climbed out of hell, and then entered back into it.
“The priest there carves beautiful religious statues,” Koun tells me. “He’s made a living of it. If we ever have a temple here I’ll go to him first for statuary.” He also tells me that he served as the babysitter for the priest’s newborn son. “Such a happy little guy, his head constantly bonking on my chest. It’s the best monk’s job I’ve been assigned so far.” I smile at the image of my husband as Kannon with a baby in his arms. I wonder if we will ever be brave enough to have children.
He asks, “How are things there?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I was an asshole in high school.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“Well, I know for sure I’m tired,” I say. “Everything feels heavy.”
“I feel the same way.”
“Maybe it has something to do with the midway point. Or maybe it’s the weather or Alaska—I don’t know. Part of me can’t believe that we’ve come this far already. Part of me can’t believe we have six more months to go.”
Sunday, August 22
Mom and I drive out to Hatcher’s Pass today, stopping here and there as we ascend the mountain, snapping photos of each other dipping our fingers into the cold, clear water of the Little Susitna River, or pointing at damp stones laced with fool’s gold.
Near the top of the mountain, we’ve climbed high enough to reveal the blanket of clouds floating above the valley. Here dense foliage has given way to moss, lowbush cranberries, and blueberry bushes. We’ve brought buckets to gather blueberries, but it’s unusually warm this year, and the fruit is sparse and wrinkled. Still, we continue to search, taking pleasure in our rare findings.
On the way back down, we stop at the Motherlode, the lodge our family owned for barely a year before the business lost viability. It is strange to move through this remodeled version of my memories. Very few people are in the building today, and my mother and I comment on each space in hushed voices: “This was here, wasn’t it?” and “This is new.” I must have been ten years old when we moved in. My second stepfather, an alcoholic, poured away all that we had every night at the bar—rarely charging the patrons for the party. I was forbidden visits from school friends because, as my mother once said, “This is no place for a child.” She had been right of course, and so I mostly gave up friendships altogether—the start, perhaps, of a lifelong habit of letting go.
But in brief spurts, I remember feeling great joy here: there were those long, solitary hikes that were my refuge and then lying invisible on soft moss among jagged brambles, looking up at the sky, and thinking, I am a part of THIS. Fireweed blossoms, pungent Devil’s Club, the sound of the river, and black, black earth offering me up to blue sky. Or, in winter, it was the snow that held me. It was here where I first began to do what I called “The Big/Small”—I’d feel myself expanding to the size of the universe, and then I’d shrink back down to a grain of sand. In this way, I think I discovered some sense of spirituality; my way of seeing was my one true magic power. And it was this sensation, this practice that I would try to articulate to Koun so many years later. He was the first person to ever understand what I was talking about.
As we re-enter the Mat-Su Valley, my mother and I settle into a deep silence. When we are together, I realize, we are two women caught in the same stories—stories that we have rehashed and analyzed so many times before. And I know we’re both there now, turning it all over in our minds as we drive through memory and landscape. Perhaps for both of us it is the last character who is most difficult to forgive: my third stepfather, the man who rescued my mother from a bad marriage to a reckless alcoholic, and then pulled her into something more sinister. Fred had been jealous, controlling, cruel—and all of this interspersed with bouts of equally confusing kindness and charm. In this way, through these dualities in his nature, he became the architect of our reality. He put us in our place. And after I went off to college, my mother got the full brunt of it, as I knew she would.
And then there was the last time I saw my stepfather—I was in graduate school in Spokane. It was their first and only visit; I had not returned to Alaska since leaving six years before. In a restaurant, Fred revealed the impending divorce while my mother stared at the ice shifting in her water glass. There had been an eeriness to it all—the constant hand-holding and touching, like a grotesque of newlyweds, juxtaposed with the fear and pain in my mother’s eyes. But I was focused inwardly, on my own failing marriage. There were too many echoes there for me to cope. She told me later that everything in the divorce had been on his terms—the unequal division of money and debt, the date of his leaving her life, certain intimacies. And there were also the suicide threats, the veiled death threats. No horror surprised me. This was a familiar territory. Family friends were delivered a story and devoured it; my mother was abandoned by all.
How much do I not see?
Monday, August 23
In my mother’s mailbox, there is a letter from Koun today—a fascinating jumble of events and thought. He says that at last he has “plateaued” to a certain degree at Shogoji because he now understands all of the ceremonies and doesn’t have to constantly cram. But maybe it is better when I am always on my toes, always hyper-aware.
In addition to this, he has been given the responsibility of translating letters for Jisen-san, so she seems happy with him lately. The other monks have nicknamed him “Solar Man” because Jisen-san decided that no one can touch the solar generator except him. At the moment, it’s funny. But this privilege—this departure from rank—will likely get me in trouble in the end, he writes.
Also, Jisen-san has warned him about returning to the U.S.: Women everywhere! You be very, very careful!
~
I arrive at Cheryl’s place in the evening for an informal gathering of teachers. A blond woman greets me at the door in Japanese, and I respond immediately, before registering the improbability of this. We cycle through a textbook dialogue.
“My name is Carla,” she says. “It is nice to meet you.”
“Where do you live?”
“How long have you lived there?”
“What do you do?”
And then she explains that she teaches Japanese in the same high school as Cheryl.
“Your Japanese is so much better than mine—where did you learn? University?” I ask.
“I was married to a Japanese man for a few years, in Hokkaido.”
“They always say, ‘Take a local lover . . .’ Fortunately or unfortunately, that was never really an option for me.”
“Well, it is highly recommended!” She laughs—such friendly, open energy. I have no doubt that she is a very, very popular teacher.
“Hmm. Maybe our students should exchange letters.”
“Sure, pen pals—the next best thing to a lover.”
Tuesday, August 24
I have breakfast with Tozen at the same little diner as before. When the waitress delivers menus and offers coffee, I ask for tea. Tozen announces, “I am Japanese, so I drink coffee.”
I respond in kind: “I am American. So, I drink green tea.”
He tells me, “I hate Japan. Everyone is the same. NO individuals.” Then, “Do you know Ryokan?”
“Sweet bean jam?”
He lets out a BIG belly laugh. “No, Ryooooookan. He is a very famous founder of Buddhism. A real individual.”
After we finish our food, Tozen reaches into his bag. “I have something for you.” He produces two books for me to borrow, and two books “as a bribe” for me to come back and bring my husband.
“These authors understand Zen is no striving. Americans always want goals.”
Thursday, August 26
I am sitting on Cheryl’s couch in her living room. It is near midnight, and both of us are sipping wine and growing drowsy. We have been talking about her dating life, the difficulty of finding love after a certain age, with two children, in a small town, with complication and history. There is this hesitation, a tentativeness. Maybe we both sense that we are now moving into the past.
“It’s strange,” I say, “as teenagers we were always so raw and yet so guarded at the same time.”
“Absolutely, it was painful. Do you remember that summer we painted Chris with my little sister’s watercolors? We were on my front lawn, and his shirt was off, and we painted his body.”
“Yes—how could I forget?” I always felt that was a pivotal moment, for all of us.
Cheryl sighs, looks over at me. “I kissed Chris, sometime around then. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“I didn’t know. But it doesn’t surprise me.”
“He had something, didn’t he? A kind of sadness. It was hard not to be moved.”
“Yes,” I say, “I always felt he and I shared that, that we were the same person in some ways. And there was always a lot of anger there, too. He was my friend and he said he loved me, but I did not love him, not in that way. I felt that he shamed me into dating him for those few months, and then I hated him for it afterward. I hated myself.”
“I know. Maybe that’s why I kissed him. I think I was mad at you. For many reasons.”
“I probably deserved that.”
“Sometimes I think about that time, about those first relationships or encounters—or whatever they were.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “all those devastating sexual games. The boys high on the social food chain preying on the girls below. I did not deal well with any of that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I guess I had some issues. Maybe I was easy prey.”
“Maybe we all were, in a way. Even those on the top of the food chain. They were caught up in something. That’s kind of sad, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes, though I wonder how many of them walked away with the scars we walked away with. . . .”
“True. That church boy in Anchorage—do you remember him?” asks Cheryl.
“I remember how happy you were, and how sad when he stopped calling. But I didn’t know the whole story, did I? We didn’t talk a lot then.”
“No, you didn’t know the whole story. . . . Tell me, do you really think it is possible for people to fall in love in high school, when we were just kids?”
“Who’s to say that kind of love wasn’t real? It was immature and chaotic, it was overwhelming, and a good part of it was probably chemical—or the result of some misguided narrative. But we felt what we felt. We were moved in some way that changed us.”
“Yeah—almost like waking up, or seeing something that you couldn’t see before. Like some kind of recognition.” Cheryl swirls the last bit of wine in her glass before drinking it down. “Tracy, did you ever really feel that way, back then?”
“No. Maybe once. Though I think I didn’t know why until just now. There was an awakening, yes. But I was carrying a terrible burden. And in that moment, it broke me.”
“Adolescence. Everything felt so dramatic then—life or death. And we kept so many secrets from each other.”
“And from ourselves.”
“I wonder where Chris is now?”
“I don’t know. I hope he’s happy.”
“I do, too.”
~
Two girls painting the skin of a half-naked boy stretched out in the grass like a lion in sunlight. The girls laughing and teasing inside that last bubble of fading friendship. The boy pretending to tolerate the girls but also finding pleasure in the attention. And a darkness turning in him slowly, like a stone.
How we are marked. How we mark each other.
Friday, August 27
It’s been raining hard for much of the day and I can’t bear to leave the condo. It seems as if my mood has been translated into weather—an internal and external melancholy.
Koun finally breaks the spell by calling in the evening—he’s out on takuhatsu again, and he has many adventures to relate: stung by three bees while out working in the fields; poured gasoline down his back when he tried to burn a big pile of weeds and twigs; saw flying squirrels gliding between the trees at dawn, as he rang the temple bell. He says overall he’s feeling genki—happy because the visiting university students who just left said their three-hour Shogoji stay was hard but inspiring because everyone made it such a good experience. “Lately I’ve been struck by how easy it is to be grateful.”
Also, Jisen-san says that in November Docho-roshi, the abbot of the head monastery in Zuioji, will come to Shogoji to hold a precepts ceremony, in which laypeople take up basic Buddhist vows:
(1)Not killing
(2)Not stealing
(3)Not misusing sex
(4)Not lying
(5)Not indulging in intoxicants
(6)Not speaking of the faults of others
(7)Not taking credit or assigning blame
(8)Not withholding the dharma or materials
(9)Not indulging anger
(10)Not slandering the Three Treasures (Buddha, dharma, sangha)
To participate, I’ll need to sew a rakusu—that bib-like mini version of Buddha robes—with some of the other laypeople. Our rakusu will then be passed on to Docho-roshi before the ceremony, so that he can inscribe a new name—a dharma name—on the back of each. After that, we will formally receive the robe from him during the ceremony.
Which of the vows, I wonder, will give me the most trouble?
Saturday, August 28
My mother and I have dinner at Thor’s place—pasta with shrimp, scallops, and a white wine butter sauce. It is all too rich for my now Japanese-y palate. I rub my aching belly while Thor expounds his Theory of Everything: “In our bodies we get to experience a limited perception. Otherwise we are just in the vast flow of everything—we have omniscient perception, but there is no way to experience the individual bits and hone in. I came up with this theory when I was just a kid.”
Later, in the middle of the night, there is a horrible, intense pain in my gut. I try to get up, but can’t move. Sweat drenching me. Falling into and out of consciousness.
Sunday, August 29
After today’s zazen, the Anchorage Zen Community gathers for tea at the aptly named “Middle Way Café.” I still feel unwell but am grateful for the distraction of human interaction. There are many new people in attendance—a testament, perhaps, to the rapid change in season. Clutching my tall mug of green tea, I settle in next to Loren, a second-generation Japanese from Hawaii. I have known him for all of an hour and he has taken to teasing me for constantly bowing—I laugh and then bow again, unable to stop. He begins to tell me the details of his family, tracing the history of the one temple on the small island where his father lived, and how his family struggled later during the Internment—losing a fishing boat, all hard-earned property. “But, you know, they got through it and here I am.”
With coffee in hand, Tozen and a petite Japanese woman take seats at our table. They begin chatting away in fast, fluent Japanese—something about the woman’s recent trip to Hiroshima, about it being her first time home in many years—and Loren joins them in his nisei Japanese. I do not know what, exactly, is different in the way each of them speaks, but there is something there, each of them perhaps offering up a language colored by geography and history and time spent away from their places of birth.
Abruptly, the petite woman stops talking, looks me in the eye suspiciously. “Ahhhh—do you understand me?” She asks this in Japanese. Tozen and Loren laugh and introduce me to Rie. She came to Alaska many years ago “for adventure.” It is the same reason I so often give for moving to Japan.
After tea, I drive to a walk-in clinic. The pain from the night before stays with me as a dull and sluggish ache and I am worried that something is really not right. Stretched out on white paper, I nervously explain what I’ve been feeling while the doctor presses her fingers against my abdomen. “Hmm,” she says, “let’s do an X-ray.” A short while later we review the pictures. “Severe constipation—full to the brim,” she explains. “Has your diet changed significantly?” Before, I had steady meals of very healthy Japanese food—and now a lot of bread and wheat pasta and dairy. So much for paying attention. How could I miss even the most simple and essential process of the body? How stupid could I be?
I explain the diagnosis to my mother afterward: “I guess I’m just full of shit.”
Monday, August 30
In the early evening, Mom, Thor, and I walk around one of the neighborhoods near downtown. Thor names all of the builders of all the houses we pass. He seems to hold knowledge of everyone, of everything about this place. We stop at one of his friend’s houses—really just a renovated old log cabin from some distant era. Amazingly, though, it is set in a huge, beautiful, Asian-inspired garden, all of which is surrounded by a high wood fence. “From the outside, you never would guess would ya?” says Pat, the friend, obviously proud of his handiwork. His buddy, Bill, is lanky and tall—unlike Pat, who is bald and tough looking. Both men sit on tree stumps in the garden, drinking beer from cans. They are in their late forties, but in their demeanor and mannerisms they remind me very much of the boys I knew in high school. There is something distinctly Alaskan about them and also something wonderful about this roughness held in such a refined and elegant space. When Thor mentions that my husband is in the monastery, Bill tells us that he is deeply enamored with Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. “That book changed my life, man. I tell you, that’s the only book anyone ever needs to read.”
After zazen this morning, I stand in my mother’s spare bedroom gathering various items into a backpack—my ever-present notebook, a few Japanese study materials, and a couple of books and articles that Tozen gave me. My mother has already left for work and I’m feeling aimless and lost. My first thought is to walk down to the park and sit on a bench with a view of the ocean, but there is a chill in the air today—that first strong hint of the season to come—and I opt instead to hang out at a café, someplace where I can be insulated by a crowd while I read and write and study. I aim downtown toward a congregation of what look to be both tourists (identifiable by their well-matched caps and bright windbreakers) and locals (identifiable by their ambivalence to all manner of weather and temperature).
The café I choose is really a full-on restaurant down the street and kitty-corner from my mother’s condo, and it soon becomes clear that it isn’t the sort of place where people grab a pastry and an espresso and hang out for hours, poring over kanji and old Buddhist poetry and scribbling into a notebook. But I stay anyway, much to the annoyance of the waitress, who keeps asking if I need anything else.
I may need something, I want to tell her. I just don’t know what it is. Please bring me what you think I need.