Calories and Pain

About a week ago, a week early by the calendar, Meals-on-Wheels brought a Thanksgiving dinner to my father's house. Turkey, cranberries, and three pieces of Saran-Wrap covered pumpkin pie. It had been a long and sad day and my father insisted that I eat something. I did not want to but started into a piece of pie to placate him.

I think of pumpkin pie as a most reliable dish, the Toyota Corolla of holiday food. As long as there is some kind of creamy, pumpkin-like delivery substrate, the cloves and nutmeg and whatever other spices come from the “pumpkin spice” container do the heavy lifting. I was explaining this to my father, because he had asked if the pie was good and I had said yes and no, and he had started to chuckle. The long, sad day had been preceded by another just like it and we had not had much to joke about. “That's so perfect,” he said, “that's just the kind of thing you would say. It's not good but it's good for being not good. That's so Josh.” His chuckle became a laugh, a slap of the knee, and then wiping tears from his eyes.

I'm not really sure what he meant, but I laughed just to laugh with him. My step-mother was in the hospital with three-quarters of an inch of blood on her brain, my father's oxygen machine whirred in the next room, and I was still loaded on morphine from my own visit to the emergency room. None of us had any money for food or gas or fulfilling our prescriptions. Each day we awoke, attended to whomever was in the worst shape, and my father and I returned home telling one another we didn't need anything to eat anyway.

That was my Thanksgiving for this year, calendar be damned. I am not in the mood for counting blessings, not that I don't have a great many. I don't care to wrap anything into a metaphor, though they do come to mind. I awake each day and say here comes another one. It is not a matter of feeling good or not good, it is a state of suspended agency, of worn out fight-or-flight response, of the eternal scrambling of poverty.

I don't care if it this means anything to anyone or not, I just want to remember it as I remember last year. I see myself, then, rain-soaked and smelling of sagebrush, tromping through the redwood forest with a shotgun. I was hunting quail, alone but not lonely, soaking in the wet and spice and riotous wind of the mountain top. I gathered nothing to eat for dinner, but in the evening a rare owl came to hoot with me in the gloaming.

It was enough, that day. Enough for me. 

The Cedar Chest

In the process of preparing to leave the Cachagua property, my mother has been making a list of things to sell and come up with mortgage money for her house in town. One idea she has is to sell back her family cedar chest to her brother's side of our clan. According to family lore, the chest was handmade by my great-grandfather from cedar growing on his farm in Salisbury, North Carolina during the Depression.

That is unlikely the case. The legs of the chest were turned on a lathe, the rails worked with a router, and though the side-boards are warped and imperfect, they were run through a planer, not rough-sawn. The finish, though it might not be original, is pretty modern.

If I sound skeptical, it is because another family heirloom, a child's rocking chair, came to me with the same story. I never really questioned the story until I had the little oak chair in my hands and could see plainly that it was also fashioned with shop tools.

The region around Salisbury was once known for its furniture mills. There have always been outlets in the area where local folk and tourist alike shop for bargains. It's pretty likely that these were the source of my family heirlooms. Possibly my great grandfather cut the wood and had someone else do the shop work, or played some more direct role in their shaping, but that is lost in the yeast of my grandfather's rather doughy capacity for embellishment. The man was a liar; a trait sometimes heart-warming when it came to creating family myth but less romantic when it came to broken promises or anything related to money.

I find value in these heirlooms because, and not despite, I know they come swaddled in family history that has its roots in distorted notions of humbleness. My grandfather parked his butt in the little rocking chair and my son did too. I hope his grandson does one day and I don't especially care if ol' Papaw whittled it with a rusty spoon by firelight. But it got me to thinking, because my mother holds the notion that the chest is probably monetarily valuable, of how we try and sell these stories to ourselves and others.

When I was about ten, some friends were holding a big garage sale and invited me to bring a few items. Though I was loathe to part with any of them, I set out a box of books with visions of Skittles and six packs of Jolt Cola as my pay off.

The thing is, I priced the books according to whether I had enjoyed them. At some point in the day, after not having many sales, a lady came along and pulled a Hardy Boys mystery from my box.

“Ten dollars,” she asked, “for this?”

“Well, yeah. It's really good.”

“But it was only $7.50 new.”

Needless to say, she didn't buy the book and I went home with the same heavy cardboard box instead of a sugar high.

In some ways, I have been like my mother in recent months. The sense of connectedness, of emplacement I feel in these mountains is a vital, invigorating part of me. I don't want to leave this place and so I have run around trying to duct tape and bailing-wire myself into a living situation or land deal that might allow me to continue dreaming my dreams, making my stories.

I have set out my little visions on the table, sent them in to the appraiser, and have come up with no place to lay my head, no gas money to get to town and back. I have deluded myself into believing that my connection to this place, which manifests itself in the stories I tell about it, is a visible, concrete thing. I have tried to parlay my articulations into some sort of scrip for rent money.

My stories are worth what they are worth, but it is not to be measured in mortgage payments.

Beneath his sport coat and golf shirts, there was a hillbilly in my grandfather's soul. A little barefoot, redneck boy whom he trotted out to demonstrate just how far he had come in life. He was, indeed, a self made man, a successful one. And like many who rise from poverty to excess, he romanticized his meager beginnings to make for good banter out on the fairway back nine. But he still rose sometimes, early in the morning, to drive out to a country cafe where he ate biscuits and red-eye gravy with the farmers and construction workers before they set out to labor with their hands. He was a great storyteller, and I sometimes wonder which venue he really felt more at home in.

In my mom, there is a young southern girl still trying to believe her father literally. And it still hurts her when the signature on the checks he wrote turn out to be forged. In some ways, she didn't really rise in the material world, going from the leafy suburbs of Durham to scrounging for mortgage money at age sixty-two. But I love that she still loves these stories, and that she is incapable of lying.

I've only been to the South via airplane and Volkswagen bus. I have my family's love of story-telling, but I don't really know, sometimes, if I am telling mild lies based on little truths, whether I am whittling with wood from my own property or turning out reproductions. I only know that I don't know how to cash in on them either way. Maybe that's okay. 

Hot Springs and Money

Yesterday I went out to Tassajara for the second time this season. It was my mother's sixty-second birthday and one of what the San Francisco Zen Center calls “locals' days”. The definition of who is a local and who is not, according to the Zen Center, is a little hard to swallow. Last year my friend Kua, who is one of the monastery's closest neighbors, called for reservations and was told they had all been taken. Mostly by people from San Francisco, which about 150 miles and several million people away. When another friend and neighbor of Tassajara, Michelle, called to make reservations, a well meaning receptionist started explaining to her how bad the road is. “I know,” said Michelle, “I grew up thirty minutes away.”

“No one,” said the receptionist, “lives thirty minutes away.”

Okay, it does take most folks closer to an hour to drive from Michelle's place to the Zen Center, but you get the picture.

The first time I visited this year, I stole a $20 water bottle from the office in a fit of pique. Something in me bridled at spending $30 just to soak in the springs. Mind you, I have a great deal of respect for the monks of Tassajara. I appreciate the rich heritage of DT Suzuki, the center's founder, and Tassajara's esteemed place in the role of spreading Zen in America. And the kitchen, birth place of the Tassajara Bread Book and many important contributions to the now robust organic foods movement, is an inspiration. But I needed a new water bottle and I felt it made the situation more just. 

I have been going to Tassajara since I was fifteen and would clear trails in the surrounding area. I certainly don't mind pitching in a few dollars for use of the kitchen's coffee and tea service, a few dollars to help with the work of the monks. But $30? To soak in a hot springs? Really, you espouse a life of non-attachment and simplicity but want to pay for yours by charging me a stiff fee to soak in hot water that comes to us all free of charge?

Tassajara, though it often feels like a world apart to visiting urban dwellers, exists with plenty of help from its proximal and societal neighbors. It sits at the end of a heavily travelled, improbably steep and rutted dirt road. County road grading, paid for by county tax revenues, makes it possible for the place to do business. When fires threaten the center, and they often do as it is situated in one of the most breathtakingly flammable locales imaginable, heavy federal, state and local resources are needed to help defend it.

And then there is the arrogance of folks visiting the monastery and the effect on our local community. Stories of pulling well-heeled bodhisatvas out of ditches and being thanked with no thanks are legion. Yes, many are just the well-yeasted gripes of rednecks and hippies who don't care for city-dwellers, but many are true. Humorless, self-important zennies are just really damned annoying.
So I think Tassajara owes us, the actual locals, something. And I think that something is low or no cost access to a soak in the hot springs that they did not create. No one owns a hot springs, it can only be taken care of. I think that even a monastery has neighbors, that we all depend upon each other, and basic access to such an important part of our mutual community should be shared, not exploited. Whatever the Zen Center wants to charge for actual services it provides to visitors—the great food, lodging in the cabins, instruction in zazen—is their own business and fine by me.

My own rudimentary sense of spirituality is literally based upon the existence of hot springs. Who needs samadhi or heaven or miracles when the earth itself spouts pools of soothing hot water out of the ground? Who can take seriously the search for personal purity in the face of such impersonal perfection? Who would charge other people for access to the heaven that actually exists right here and now? Unless the San Francisco Zen Center changes its approach to stewardship of the springs, I will continue to apply my own belief system to the situation. I will pay the exorbitant fee for using the springs, but I will recoup the cost to the extent I see appropriate.