Granny Tales Part vi

A. Blinken…

Granny: In the early 1980s I went through a change in my life. I’d waited eight years, and it was finally clear to me that it was true, Aaron really did die in the creek in my arms, he really wasn’t coming back, that life was over for me. For a time, my soul cast about, empty. I was only a little over 60, too young to just die. I decided one night that I would follow the first sign out of my despair. The next day I was in town for beans and whisky and I saw a book in the store, "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism" by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. I read the book, and read it again, and read it again. I got stoned and read it. I read it in the sauna. I read it naked on the stone by the creek. I read it until there was nothing else to do but go to Japan and study Zen Buddhism. I left the cabin for three months, something I hadn’t done in almost 40 years. I went to Japan, made my way to Tokyo, and got totally lost. Ironically, I wandered in to a Jewish synagoge, and they took pity on me and directed me to a Zen monastery. There I found out they wouldn’t teach me. I stayed in hotels and ate raw fish and seaweed and finally found someone who would teach me about Zen Buddhism for a fee. It was bloody awful. She just wanted to teach me the rules and regulations, that isn’t what I was after at all. It wasn’t until I went to a park that I learned about Zen in daily life. I met a young girl, a student who knew English well. I told her what had brought be to Japan, and she introduced me to people in the park. I studied for two months, during which time I became friends with a variety of people, retired professors and doctors, business women, homeless people, cops, mothers and kit. I saw them almost everyday, studied the way they lived. I didn’t generally ask about Zen; I already knew more about it that most of them. What I did is what they did. One man, a retired professor with a bad heart, would never eat anything he bought until a squirrel and a bird had some. There were furry and feathery vermin of all sorts that knew him by name. Whenever he had chest pain, he would practice zazen. There was an old doctor who did a kind of moving meditation beneath the same tree every day. He also spoke English, and he answered questions I had about pain of all kinds, and it’s alleviation. There was a mother whose own mother had died of cancer from the American nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. Through the student, we talked about forgiveness. There was a crazy man who considered himself to be a monk. He ate only what rice and vegetables and fish one small cat food can would hold at each meal. He would only wash, he said, when he could reach the River Ganges. He stank famously. We talked about nothing, or nothingness, I suppose, and the futility of the search for pure nothingness. That really put the student through her paces, trying to interpret that. There was another person, a tall woman about forty, always well dressed but modest, even plain, whose name was Yoshimi, who let me know she spoke English, and let me know she wouldn’t talk to me. We really did talk about nothing. She was always there for only an hour or so, in the afternoon. There was a local character, a woman of middle age, who lived off a small government pension and duty free cigarettes a friend of hers got for her from a U.S. Army base canteen. She also sold pot, miserable, lung scarring crap, mostly leaves. She taught me about the flow of life. Eventually, I said goodbye to all of them at a small party we had in the park. I left everyone with my address, thinking some might write, at least the college girl. I came back, put my life in the cabin back together, waging a war against deer mice that resulted in my having a cat for a couple of years. Remember Cloudy, A.B., that pure black cat with the yellow eyes? Did a good job on the mice for a couple of years, until he stayed out too late and a coyote got him. Anyway, a year and a half went by and I did my Zen by myself, rolling what I liked of it with what I’d loved about Judaism. I couldn’t find fresh fish here, and I pretty much forgot about the people in the park in Tokyo. Until one afternoon in early spring, there was a knock on my door. I opened the door to find Yoshimi, the woman from the park who spoke English but wouldn’t speak to me, holding a piece of paper with my address on it. I said, "hello. What brings you here?" She said, "you invited me. Did you not mean I should come?" "No, sure, come on in. Is anyone else coming?" "No, just me. The others send their regards." She had followed that piece of paper to my cabin, showing it to people from San Francisco all the way to town. Someone had told her how to get to my house; she’d walked all the way from the highway. That afternoon, she walked around the property and slept out on the rock. That night we had whisky and corned beef and blintzes. When we went to bed, she slept on the floor on a quilt, I asked, "how long will you be staying?" She said, "until you know what my visit means. Do you know what it means?" "Not really," I admitted. The next day Willie came up, and I had her take us to town. I showed Yoshimi all the cute little shops, but she had no money, only a ticket for passage on a boat home. In one of the shops there were some folded paper figures: the shop owner taught origami as well as flower arranging and pottery. Yoshimi smiled at the figures and asked me for the money to buy a piece of paper. She bought some pink and red paper and folded a cunning little flamingo. The shop owner gave her some white paper, she folded a stork. Orange paper, a goldfish whose tail could move. Gold paper, a jellyfish; green paper, a leaping frog. They spent the rest of the day making things of paper, and when they were done the counter was busy with animals and birds of every kind, like a zoo with rainbow animals, and Yoshimi had a hundred dollars in her pocket. That night as we went to bed, Yoshimi asked, "do you know the meaning of my visit?" "Did someone die? Is one of the people in the park dead?" "No, no one is dead. Good night." The next day she learned to swing a pick and pry with the bar, and how to separate out the color from the gravel. She learned quickly, and we did pretty well, high up the east fork, where the old burned cedar stump is. At the end of the day I got out a dinner plate and dumped the take, cutting it in half for her. She declined most of it, but took a tear-drop shaped nugget. "I will remember the day we had together each time I look at this." I asked her, "what do you do in Tokyo?" "I am head dietician in the geriatric wing of the hospital not far from the park." "Oh." "Does that help you understand the meaning of my visit?" "No, sorry. I can’t imagine it was to come all this way to eat the bacon and Danish sandwiches we had for breakfast." "For a time in the morning I thought I might die. I had to reassure myself that eventually it would leave my body. I will fast when I get home." "Tell you what, you make breakfast tomorrow." "Thank you." The next day we read Thomas Jefferson, and she told me about Confucius. She cooked once in the morning and once at night. I didn’t have rice, she had to use barley, so we had barley with onions and cabbage. In the afternoon she killed a chicken, and she sang a country song about a chicken while we plucked it. She cooked it with oranges and grapes, since that’s what I had. That night we listened to music, salsa on an FM station down on the south coast. When we went to bed she asked, "do you know the meaning of my visit?" I said, "ask me again tomorrow." I made fried spinach omelet with potted meat for breakfast and for a time she was literally green, but she kept them down. That afternoon we went fishing and caught four nice trout, and she gathered some duckweed and watercress and wild onions and made a fantastic dinner. We played liar’s dice that night, and got drunk on plum wine Henry Halter had made the year before and given me for Christmas. We did a sauna, and we meditated there for a long time. That night, she asked me, "do you know the meaning of my visit?" I said, "yes, I do." "I’ll be leaving in the morning. I’ve enjoyed our visit." The next morning she left; I got Willie to take us to the bus station in the city. Turns out she had relatives in Salinas to visit before she left the U.S. OK, that’s the story. Now, who’ll tell me what it means? A.B.? Take a shot.

A.B.: You mean, what was the meaning of her visit?

Granny: Yes, the visit and the story have the same meaning. What is it?

Tally: I don’t think it means anything.

Granny: Right! You’re absolutely right, Tally, you have an old soul. You got it.

A.B.: Nothing?

Granny: That’s right, A.B.! It didn’t mean anything, it’s just something that happened. Sometimes in life, people just do things. Sometimes, things just happen. There is no grand plan, things just happen. Elbert Hubbard said "Life is just one damn thing after another," and was more right than folks know. That’s an important lesson for you, A.B., because, even at your age, you still think things have to make sense. They don’t, they just happen, the sense is something you make after the fact. Well, I’m tired of talking. Shut that damn thing off and get the hell out. We girls need a sauna.

A.B.: Do I have everyone’s permission to use their voice in the transcript?

Tally: Sure, just get it all!