Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

Tonight, we sit satiated by food and listen to the kids’ laughter as they dance about in the room.  One of my nieces already has on a princess dress when I arrive, later in the night I see another change into a terrible idea for a dance costume, and I really see how much they dream up life and it makes me think about drama class in summer camp where everyone dug through the chests of old costumes to be something else for a little while.  I have always been a person in love with imagination.

*

One week earlier…

Today I head over to speak with my Kung Fu teacher.  He is an important person in my life.  He has called me and told me he has a brain tumor.

I am walking around Chico, the leaves are turning.  The pepper trees and sugar maples are filled with anthocyanin and the carotenoid from the black walnut and sycamore ignite the streets with color.  The crape myrtles have already dropped their leaves.  This is the season for senescence.  My home town doesn’t have the fall colors the same way.  The seasons are more subtle.  They are always there.

Ah, to be in love again, not with a person, but with the world.  Love senesces and buds again.  Everywhere I look I see with eyes of a lover, the newness, the amazement, the fascination of a world in harmony and balance.

*

I am thankful for the laughter of my nieces and nephews, my family and friends.  I walk with my Aunt Martha, my father’s sister along with my mother out from her sub-division that used to be English walnut orchards over to a new sub-division waiting to be built where the last of the walnut orchard once stood.  They are gone now, a few here and there on the lots all numbered and for sale.  It is great to see my Aunt Martha.  She is a unique person in my life.  In a time when I needed to escape, she took me in barely knowing me and I moved to Alaska to work at her fishing lodge.  In Karluk, the tiny native fishing village where I flew in to meet my Aunt, I found bears, salmon, friends, and a part of myself.

*

Anh, my Kung Fu instructor, is from Vietnam.  His instructor was from China.  She fled during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution to setup a temple in Vietnam where Anh found her.  He lived in the temple for almost 15 years learning the entire Shaolin form of Wing Chun from her.  He says he was allowed to leave only if he promised to teach.  He has tried.  None of us have been good students.  When I left, I told people Anh wanted a disciple and I could never be that person.  Many people tried at different times, only to fail.  When he called me on the phone last week and told me the diagnosis, I knew I had to go see him again.  It is daunting to go see your Sifu after so many years away.  When I left Kung Fu, Anh pulled me aside and told me I was doing too many things; he said, “you are doing 5% of 20 things.  You need to do 20% of 5 things.  You need to quit some things to be better at the others.”  I walked away from Kung Fu.

*

My Aunt Martha left for Alaska in the 60’s.  It was a Wild West Alaska filled with drugs, booze, and fish.  When her southern born husband found a fishing lodge to buy, they jumped on it and started a remote life with the bears on the Karluk River.  Someday, I keep prodding her, we will tell her story.  She is dying and I admire the courage at which she too tackles death.  I picture death as a fly-fisherman fighting from shore.  She is in the deep the current and running back to sea.  She turns her head to look, tries to shake the hook loose, goes back down, and runs down river more.  I can hear the reel scream as the line goes out.  She is the Chinook we dream about, running from the river back to the sea where death stands on the bank and fights as the Shelikof sits at his feet.  He reels us all in eventually, some never fight.

*

When I walk up to Anh’s house, the gate is closed and I call him on his phone.  He comes out to let me in.  He looks the same only a bit more tired.  He calls to me, “Net.”  I have always liked the way he tries to say my name.  I think of fishing nets.  I think of the sets I would make with Cecil and Dale on the Karluk River.   As we would pull the net to the shore, the silver flashes of fish would bubble and churn in the water.  We would scour the net for the biggest to pose with for pictures.  We would pull the fish from the nets and toss them into a boat where they would gasp and shutter into death.  I would push it out of my mind.  This is the paradox of life.  We can’t live it without death.  Anh was caught up in the Vietnam War, and as a POW he lived off of bugs while in prison.  He never spoke much about it.  Today, he talked about death.  He said he wasn’t scared.  Many times he has been close to death.  We talk about yin and yang.

*

We walk the dogs over to the old stacked stone house on the edge of the Arroyo Grande Creek.  Where it once stood surrounded by stately walnut trees and rich top soil, there remain square lots.  It is ugly with wrought iron around the watershed.  And when I think about the houses that will be crammed into the area, I get more disgusted.  We grow and grow and grow, and think it can go on forever.  There is no balance.  My Aunt Martha asks about places.  She is disorientated.   She lived her as a kid, but so much has changed it is hard to imagine the same place now.  She talks about fields she once rode her horse through.  They are mostly gone now, gone to fences and subdivisions.

*

Anh gets tired and weak. He tells me he has to lie down.  He is treating the tumor with herbs from his knowledge of Chinese medicine he learned while living in the temple.  He tells me, so far, he has had some limited success.  The growth of the tumor has stopped, and he started a medicine program to shrink the tumor now.  Last MRI showed a slight reduction, but he knows it might turn at any second.  He tells me he has had a good life and he doesn’t fear death.  I try to tell him how much his teaching has meant to me over the years.  He haunts my dreams the way so many people do whom I love.  They come to me when I most need them.  They are always there pushing me to do more, to be better, and to live the life I can imagine.

*

When we return from the walk, my mother brings out my grandmother’s varsity letter.  My grandfather sent it to my mom recently.  We all marvel at the giant “P.”  On it are metal medallions, one for class president, one for valedictorian, one for volleyball, one for cheerleading, one for editor of the school newspaper, and one we don’t know.  My love of learning comes from my grandmother.  She was the jack-of-all-trades I aim to be too.  My mother tells the story of how my great-grandfather bought his first car, not even knowing how to drive, and loaded up 7 people and everything they owned in the car and headed to California in hopes for work.  When the work would run thin, they would all drive back out to Missouri.  My grandmother moved a lot, but those final two years of high school they stayed in one place, and look at what she accomplished.  Sure, there were only 20 or so people in her graduating class.  We joke that she cheered for her own volleyball game.

*

I hug Anh when I leave.  I don’t’ believe I ever even tried that before.  You don’t hug your Kung Fu Master, but I did anyways.  He walked me and Chico out to the gate and I waved goodbye.  I believe I will still see him again, or I hope so.  As the gate shuts, Chico and I walk around the neighborhood.  It is the same neighborhood I have spent much time around: the old Diamond Matchstick Factory.  We stroll back to my friend’s house, past houses I lived in, houses I loved in, and we stare at the changing and falling leaves.

*

As Thanksgiving winds down, the music my step-dad makes stops and the kids go from dancing to putting on pajamas.  While some plan out strategies for shopping, I plan to leave to go out to a friend’s ranch for the weekend.  I have tried to avoid the holidays for the past few years.  Not because of family, I have tried to spend it with family or friends each year, but I want nothing to do with the buying of crap.  Last year, I bought only one Xmas gift for one person.  This year, I will try to make them all.  After everyone leaves, I sit with my Mom for a while.  We don’t talk much.  She has done so much to try and keep our family together and I love her for that.    For now, I can feel the dormancy in my own body.  I can feel the senescence that slows us all down a bit, but also the energy of spring building.  Chico and I eventually get up to leave.  We head back over to our little warehouse.  I start to go inside, but stop.  We decide to go for a walk.  We walk around the cemetery.  I strangely talk to the dead and the living inside of me the same way.  I hold them inside of me as part of the past even as that moment falls away, it buds anew inside of me.  I carry it around.  I think sometimes the lines between death and life blur; the yin and yang contain each other and swirl.  I hear my mother, my Aunt, my Dad, Anh, my family, my friends, all of them talking to me inside of me.  I think I only exist as parts of them.  My grandmother has a grave marker in the cemetery, but I whisper to her inside of me.  I try to imagine how it would have been to have her there today and how much she would have loved to watch the little girls dance around the house.  I try to tell her thanks.  I hope I convey my thanks to all of you.