mrs tzaddik's boyfriend

She brought him up today, telling the tale to E, so I guess I can say something about it. It was a very long tale, mostly about Tibetan lamas. And the teachings they gave in the house when they'd just come into exile. A number of the lamas were living at the house, upstairs. They'd painted the main bedroom up there red and gold.

Everything looked very alive when they lived at the house. Between their contagious smiles, the almost non-stop traffic of folks coming to visit or confer, the teachings that were given in the grand room, the hundreds of shoes lined up outside the front door — the colors and banners and cheer —

He parked in the driveway for months at a time. Lived in his vehicle. Was it a VW camper? Something like that. The quintessential hippy dippy vehicle that you could live in. Parked in Mrs Tzaddik's driveway.

She doesn't use the word boyfriend, of course. For her, the word is paramour. A much more Sephardi word. My word sounds so — well, banal. And there was nothing banal about any of it.

Tibetan lamas upstairs. Paramour parked in the driveway. Yeah. It was the 1970s outside. Berkeley. Most likely you could have guessed that time frame.

He'd been a lawyer. A very good looking guy. Still is, actually. But he dropped out. I think the goings on of 'our' generation just got to him. Why should he bang his head against the wall in law, when society was changing right before his eyes?

The tzaddik would come home from a hard day's work, with the New York Times tucked under his arm. He'd unlock the door, and walk through the house to the back and into the kitchen. There would be Mrs Tzaddik's boyfriend cooking up macrobiotic soup.

"Hello, tzaddik," he would say (though not exactly). "Come sit down and have my soup!"

And the tzaddik would sit. And have soup. And read the New York Times while sitting with the soup at the dining room table.

My memory of this is vivid. I have no memory of Mrs Tzaddik at all in this scenario. Was she even there? But my memory is really of two men who've made very different choices.

The boyfriend chose the hedonic life. Why shouldn't there be pleasure? Why shouldn't he partake? Why the incessant labor? Why not just cook soup?

The tzaddik chose engagement. Commitment to the service of others. Encouraging them. Helping them achieve their goals. Without judgement. Mentoring them. Pointing them in the direction of funding. Of collaboration. And always it was about the arts. Bringing creativity into the world. New projects. New works.

The boyfriend was a piece of work.

Eventually, Mrs Tzaddik had had it with the boyfriend in the driveway. And she tried to shoo him away. He was not terribly receptive. I remember it as taking years.

The lamas told Mrs Tzaddik that the boyfriend was a great lesson for her. She explains that according to Tibetan practice, each individual receives his or her own Teaching from the lamas. The boyfriend was hers.

Does that mean that they responsible for this? For the paramour who wouldn't go away when bidden?

What she got to learn from her Teaching was patience. Endurance. Commitment to trying to make a change.

They had traveled together. Mostly to South America. And Europe too. When, after many years, she finally got rid of him in the driveway, there was nowhere else in this country he really wanted to be. He fled to Mexico — and stayed. Maybe in someone else's driveway. Dunno. But he reappeared on the telephone instead. And still wouldn't go away.

Patience. Endurance. Commitment to making a change.

He visited not that long ago. Same charismatic smile. Same glow of macrobiotic health — although he said he wasn't that healthy.

He wanted to come back, he said. Calling fairly incessantly. Again. He's ready to come back.

Forty years of this!

Patience. Endurance. Commitment to making a change.

She told the caregivers not to hand her the phone any more. When he calls, that is.

In Aikido, they talk about forty-year techniques. Fifty-year techniques. Practices that seem so simple, you just do them every day. But they're not yet right. You practice and practice — and only get a glimmer of what is really there, the potential of the exercise, the lesson, the Teaching — at the end of 40 years. And even that's just the beginning.

Just the turn of a wrist. The stroke of a blade. The cut. The chop. The throw. And you do it over and over and over again. A hundred strokes a day. A thousand. And each stroke is different. And each next stroke an opportunity to learn to do it differently.

That's the lesson of Mrs Tzaddik's boyfriend. The opportunity to say no differently. To send him on his way. Get him out of the driveway. Get him out out out of her life. Some kind of integrity. Holding your own and not caving.

I'm not judging it. No. No, this is her call. It's always been her call. Her practice. Her forty year technique.

She's getting it. Learning it. It's not like you ever master a technique like this. You just keep practicing it. A hundred strokes a day. A thousand. With proper breathing to go with it.

And each day she gets a little stronger. She walks a little further each day. Her spirit reawakens. Each day, her memory resurges.

Tibetan lamas in the house. Lessons they would offer. Healings, if you're paying attention. Forty year techniques, or more. But only if you practice. That's what she was given — an opportunity to practice. Pour la longue durée.

Forty years!

The red and gold are gone from the house. The whole thing's shades of gray. Her hair is white — and so is his. The tzaddik's gone away. The blinds are drawn. The lights are low. The energy's calmed at last. And then — a gift an angel brought. A mighty French horn blast.

techno-bling and the demise of the Qigong master

Sylvester teaches Aikido to 80 year old ladies. And Qigong. And breath work. And energy work. Whole food nutrition. Color and aroma therapy. African-American pragmatism. If it's a healing art — he can convey it.

And the ladies at the North Oakland Senior Center love him. And so do I. He's my mom's personal guru (if I can be so bold) — and you can watch right before your eyes, her energy increase in his presence. He's also gorgeous, I might add. The salt and pepper dreads really work...

But not today.

Today I watched as the great master fell. He fell in the face of his very first powerbook, which he had with him in a nice shiny black case. One hand on the powerbook, the other on his cell phone. No hands with which to heal.

His energy, which is usually spot on on the client, was erratic. It was dissipated, chaotic, and disturbing.

He could not keep his eyes off the screen.

His struggle with the glorious new machine was where to find the copyright symbol in order to print up some flyers for forthcoming classes. My mom showed him how to take a plain envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail his own articles back to himself, to copyright it.

That wasn't the problem, however. He needed a © to be specific.

"Shut the case, Sylvester!" I ordered. I had never spoken to him that way before, but it was driving me crazy.

But the case was open again before you could count to five.

"Wait!" he said. "Let me write that down." And he opened a document in Word, and wrote: FIND SYMBOLS. I had just showed him how to find symbol fonts. But then, like an idiot, I said:

"You know, Sylvester, what you really need is a website..."

Driving home across the bridge there was an interview with a science writer on NPR. I didn't catch her name.

"Over the last 20,000 years," she said, "scientists have found that the human brain size has decreased by about 10%" — which is about a tennis ball's worth of gray matter.

You know the movie, Idiocracy? one of the scientists was saying. Well, it already happened — and is continuing to happen. Apparently, human brains have been decreasing in size since the Cro Magnon.

Well, today, thanks to Sylvester, I believe it. I watched intelligence and energy drain out of a mind right before my very eyes. Healing powers melted in front of me, stolen by glossy irresistible techno-bling.

To be fair, NPR tries to make nice with disastrous conclusions.

Brian Hare of Duke University says there's an evolutionary advantage to decreased brain size. I know that we anthropologists should stick together, but I'm not quite convinced on this one: He argues that smaller brain size is linked to cooperation and the lessening of aggression. His evidence: the bonobos, current darlings of primatologists.

And then there's David Geary, a cognitive scientist. He says we just don't need to be so smart these days. Nowadays, he argues, you don't need intelligence to survive or reproduce. This must be where the Idiocracy reference came in.

But that doesn't mean we have to like it.

I want to take Sylvester's new techno-toy and throw a few stone tools at it. And do it quick, before all of his magic powers drain right down the power cord.

And well shit, I guess the same goes for me. And you, too. Maybe we'd all be a lot smarter if we'd just close the lid and go um, make music or paint something. So. okay, this is me powering down. Right after I hit < save > and then proof read, and then hit < publish > and then check my email first, and then ...

By then, god only knows how many more brain cells we all will have collectively lost.

A kaddish for the Qigong master's brain cells — although he (unlike me) surely believes in reincarnation and therefore has nothing to worry about...

a kaddish for terry dobson

There's no reason for me to remember. There's no reason to forget. I knew the man for 15 minutes. The last 15 minutes, it turned out. Riki, his partner, told me at SF General Hospital that night, that in those 15 minutes, I had gotten the best of Terry Dobson.

Maybe it's the focus on the kaddish right now that brings him to mind. No matter. It's still a pretty bizarre tale.

I was told to go to his Teaching at Suginama Aikikai that night. It wasn't a request. It was August, 1992. I had no business being there. I was downright crappy at Aikido and was always going to be crappy at Aikido — although, for me, the progress was phenomenal. I was soaking it up — O Sensei's poetry, in particular, moved me. Wada-sensei's ritual stirring of the universe, was just that: stirring. I loved Aikido. Derived my sense of balance, aesthetic, and righteousness from this martial art. And more than anything else, I was moved by the physical acts of resonance that were possible to cultivate.

The only problem was that I couldn't really 'do' it. Or do it well. Or well enough. I was good at feeling sorry for myself. Spent plenty of time crying in the tiny changing area. Until I was told, more than once at that point, that crying in the changing area was just part of the discipline. It meant that we were still there. Trying.

So. Call it low self-esteem. I didn't feel I belonged at Suginama Aikikai, which seemed to wreak of more testosterone than any other dojo in the city. I certainly had no business training, even for one night, with Terry Dobson.

But I went.

And if you want to read what I wrote, you can find it at Aikido Today Magazine: the journal of the art of Aikido, Vol. 6, No. 5. If you can find it at all. Aikido Today is now defunct. And all 100 issues have just been made available through Arete Press at aiki.com.

So. Those 15 minutes that were mine. Yes, he was charismatic. Brilliant. Compelling. All those good words. Yes, I took notes on every word he said during his Teaching. Yes, I watched every single person listen, but not hear him. Yes, he spoke of nothing if not how to face your death. Aikido as a practice on how to meet death with integrity. Not to flinch, not to turn away. According to Riki, he had been immersed in some version of this teaching for at least a decade. But not like this. That night he was explicit.

And then he fell into a coma. Right afterword. Riki said he'd been waiting for that moment for years. Anticipating it. And here am I, Doctor Nobody, still thinking about Terry Dobson. The Terry Dobson I knew for the duration of that Teaching, and our 15 minutes afterward. It just doesn't make sense.

What he said was, "There you are! I haven't seen you in so long!"

"We haven't met yet," I replied. "We don't get to meet until next time."

Now, why did I say that?

I was called to the hospital in the middle of the night. I had his last words, his last Teaching. For some reason, no one had filmed the event. So my notes were all that remained.

In the middle of the night, I sat with Riki, and Terry's kids and read them my notes. Notes that I had taken just for me. Filled with attitude that was not just his. The first words of his I heard were:

"The only reason you came in here is to be able to meet your death with integrity and relaxation."

"The uke," he said, "the uke is there to bring you your death."

Which is a bit ironic, if I think of it now. For in meeting our uke, it is our uke who is always thrown, while we ourselves remain standing, having moved — only slightly — off line.

Were we supposed to meet our death and win?

"The uke grabs with sincerity," Terry said. "His ki pours through him. Honor his direction and his intensity. That's what draws him in. Take advantage of his imbalance and his desire to regain his balance. ... Make sure that he's going over nice."

"The name of the game is ki," he said. "Power and protection start very simple and direct, with working at making sure that your goddamn stupid ego isn't crapping through."

"We're working on stillness," he said. "Make a decision to be there." But as I recall, nobody was really listening. Maybe they'd all heard Terry Dobson's death spiel before. But I hadn't.

So. Okay.

Meet death with integrity.
Intensity.
Don't flinch.
Don't turn away.
Step slightly off line.
Use his imbalance.
Keep goddamn stupid ego out of it.
Be there.
Achieve stillness.

Fine. I'll do that. Now I know how to handle death. No problem.

So. Here's the troubling part. You've probably guessed it: It's that response I gave him:

"We don't meet until next time."

Which every one I know is quite clear about. And I won't even say it out loud here. I don't know why I said it. It just seemed true. I think I meant that I just wasn't ready yet for Terry Dobson. Or maybe it meant that he just wasn't ready for me.

My friend (who runs his own dojo), my friend who forced me to attend that night was pretty clear about it.

"Terry, he said, "had been waiting for release for a very long time. And then, he checked in with you, and he was gone."

What does that mean? Did I kill him?

"You know what that means," my friend said, rolling his eyes. "You know what that means."

And he explained (as if to a child) all about 'checking in.' About passing between the worlds. We said our hello, and we said our goodbye. And we would recognize each other. Next time.


Thinking about Terry Dobson makes me want to sit right down and sob really really hard. It's not really about him. And it's not really about me.

I just don't believe in next time.

compost stinks (aka: can I scream now?)

Each year I pick a quality to embody. I was taught this by my Sensei Wendy Palmer, sword mistress extraordinaire. Studying with Wendy was completely frustrating (for me, not her, I think. People come to her in part because they don't get it). And most of the time I just didn't get it. Not the first time, not the second, not the third. The problem being, of course, that I was trying to think things through. And she was trying to get me more into my body. The art of not-thinking. Thinking just got in the way.

She kept saying things like, "Compost stinks." Flatly. No affect. Just a commentary. A truism. While we're working on swords. I now realize that she was trying to reassure me. I studied with Wendy privately — she wasn't the Sensi at my own dojo — and I really needed her help. And she came up with 'compost stinks' and I kept not understanding her.

Compost stinks?

And so I'd think about that (instead of not-thinking).

It took many months — it took until I was working in my own garden actually composting — for me to get it. Get what she was after.

But when she said that everyone should have a quality, I knew instantly what she meant, and I knew what mine would be. Her practice is to select a quality to embody for one year. Every action, then, is enacted from the perspective of this quality. Every minute, every day, for the entire year.

My first quality was Mystery. I mean, what else would it be? It made everything exciting, everything something I'd want to know more about. Everything something that I could never know everything about. (and yes, I know, that's not a real sentence). These were followed by more banal qualities like Patience, Tolerance, Self-Discipline, and the like. Tolerance was by far the worst. It made it impossible to grade papers. Until way into the depths of Spring Semester, I realized that what I needed to discover were the limits of — not just be tolerant of any muck around me.

So. This year (this very very difficult year) my quality has been Laughter. While dealing with hospitals and hospice, caregivers, and schedules and meds and oxygen tanks and dysfunctional wheel chairs, walkers, and hospital beds — there's always something to laugh about. Funeral arrangements, grave diggers, manicured lawns, old faces I haven't seen since high school. Now, that last one is pretty funny. I've not been laughing at death and dying, per se. But the industries that we've built up around them are hysterically sad. The bureaucracy of dying. Bank forms and notaries, lawyers. Death certificates (everyone wants one!), Power of Attorney, Advance Directives. Lost car titles. Forms to retrieve lost car titles... I've found a place where laughter and being of good humor have helped. I've been smooth, and calm, with little laugh lines in the corner of my eyes. Not all the time, but enough of the time. And of course, I've also cried. But essentially, the quality of Laughter has served me well.

Until now. Right now, I have failed miserably in the embodiment of laughter. And what is it that has done me in?

UPS

And I realize now, it's not even the first time. UPS was supposed to deliver an 'overnight' letter to me six days ago. At first they claimed the delay was due to a wrong zip code. So they sent the letter back to somewhere. Next day, same thing. I mean, what's the matter with them? They fixed the zip code, and managed to add an apartment number. Following day, didn't deliver the letter because (they say) they came to the address and there was no 'apartment 5.' And then it was the weekend. And then it started all over again. Another two days, and now they say they give up: come pick up the bloody letter yourself. You have a window of a half hour this evening, if you want it today.

And I'm not laughing.

So. All that death and dying business, Aikido training, private Wendy Palmer, years of meditation. Whatever. And I'm done in by a late overnight letter.

This is the compost of which Wendy spoke. And compost, as she reminded us so often, stinks.

The letter I'm waiting for consists of a shitload of money (to me, anyway), (note the unintentional compost reference here) a check, not made out to me, but a 'rollover' to my so-called pension plan that I hope to depend on from now on. It's not the State's money, it's mine, just needing to get to the right place at the right time. And the deadline is fast approaching. And this is me just falling apart over it. And why aren't I laughing?

While most people might think of compost in terms of methods of production, I'm more concerned with its distribution.

Compost is scattered (excuse another bad pun) over the garden, mixed into the soil, and helps provide the nutrients needed for planted seeds to grow. The compost period is the duration it requires from the time you plant until the first shoots begin to come up. This is the time that Wendy is talking about. The time period during which all the growth is taking place underground where you can't see it.

All the practice. All the doing. All the preparing. And still not seeing the results manifest. Yah, that really stinks. And it feels like nothing's happening. 'Cause there's no visible sign, even after months and months of preparation.

So. I started all this retirement prep years ago really. That's what they say to do. Save for retirement, 'cause no one else is gonna take care of you when you're no longer working, right? And that letter — that letter that UPS won't deliver — is the very last step to having everything in order.

Now, that's pretty funny.

If I believed in a sentient universe, I might think the universe was sending me a message. You sure you want to do this? Or maybe the message is, you're really not there yet. Or, let's just make this as difficult as possible. Or, let's see if we can give you a heart attack before your retirement date, and just save all that money and give some of it to your kids or something. The State, of course, will want the rest.

So. It's not a conspiracy or anything like that. Not stupidity. Not incompetence. Just a misprinted label on a letter that has me at wit's end. And I'm thinking that I'm over-thinking this. Step back, head for the trails on the cliff above the ocean. Let the dog run free, and laugh. While I'm waiting for the buds to peak through the soil. But it's summer already, wasn't this supposed to happen months ago?

Next year, maybe I'll pick the Quality of Serenity or something else equally incomprehensible. That should be something to laugh about.

When all this UPS waiting is over, and all the bloody papers are filed, and everything's worked out for the best, then I'll be willing to admit, that compost doesn't really stink so bad after all. Like labor, we forget all about that part when the flowers begin to bloom.