Wisps

This year autumn has been a slow burn. As I write this on 11/08/2021, the leaves are still changing and it is over 60 degrees. There has been one wimpy frost in Chicago that finally ended the tomato crop but there is still swiss chard and the last of the peppers.

This time of year, tea folk switch from the Furo to the Ro. The fire moves from the outer part of the room to the middle, so we can huddle around it for heat. Of course, living in America with central heat turns this into a symbolic gesture rather than a practical one. But there are other reasons for the move.

 

It breaks up the monotony of doing the same procedure repeatedly. It allows us with the blessing of having the proper utensils a chance to get them out of the closet. It challenges us to recreate ceremonies left behind 6 months ago. It stimulates the neurons and hopefully in so doing delays the onset of dementia in the older of us.

 

In the geometrically arranged tearoom, all the angles change. Now instead of sitting straight towards the furo and the mizushashi we are at angles to them. An added benefit of this is that we are closer to our guest. It seems cozier. The Ro ideally sits below the mats but in most of our homes, it sits above, as cutting a hole in the floor is not a practical solution. 

 

There are many boundaries in a tearoom. An outer and an inner frames surround the Ro. The alignment of our bodies to this frame denotes the level of formality: more formal the outer edge, less formal the inner edge.

 

The tea utensils cascade from the mizushashi centered on the host’s mat along an imaginary line created by the above with the outer or inner border of the Ro. It is a matter of centimeters in which a millimeter out of alignment is obvious. The placement of the tearoom in space is another topic in itself and one that I am only mildly familiar with.

 

When I am in my makeshift tearoom, I think of walking down the side streets of Kyoto. Unlike Tokyo’s disarray, Kyoto is based on a grid system similar to Chicago. Maybe that is why I feel comfortable there. The streets meet up at right angles and the addresses make linear sense. It is a well ordered city.

 

And tea is a well ordered pastime, though pastime is too casual of a term. Lifestyle may be better, but even that misses the mark. It verges on religion but that is not it either. The correct word is bouncing around in my mind but I cannot quite grasp it. In fact, it is giving me a headache.

 

I will let it rest for now and it may present itself in an intuitive flash. Besides, I have more important things to think about. Do I sit facing the outer or the inner border? Have I aligned the tea container and the chasen properly in space? Is the mizushashi centered and sixteen spaces from the front of the Ro’s upper border? Have I been able to fit my large kneeling self into the demarcated space?

 

I use to dread the coming of winter but tea’s natural cycle creates the excitement of change and renewal. Everything may be dark and gloomy outside while in the tearoom the Ro’s red glow beneath the simmering kettle of water warms the soul. Wisps of steam rise and infiltrate the space where host and guest are drawn closer together.                        

Shipshape

Carrie Rose, our 32’ Nordic Tug, has been put away for the winter. She is in a heated shed having long awaited repairs and upgrades done along with the usual season’s end maintenance. I am back to sitting at our Talman Ave. bungalow’s kitchen table partaking of the same breakfast I have eaten for decades: tea, toast with jam and peanut butter, yogurt, and fruit if available. 

It is the same meal on the boat; the only difference is that on the boat a mission follows the meal. Here at home it feels as if I have missed the last step on the way down a staircase. I rise out of the chair, move forward, but then stop and wonder what is next. It is an odd feeling, like I have lost my equilibrium.

 

When living on the boat for extended periods the body gets use to the constant motion and adapts. The brain compensates, dampening the yaw, pitch, and roll. It is when back on a firm surface that the above motions return. It seems the compensation has a built in delay. To readjust to the earth’s solid unmoving surface takes time. 

 

And so, now, several weeks off the water I find my first steps continue to be calculated and unsteady. I attribute this to age, since the transition was not such an interminable process years back. I also attribute it to a lack of mission. 

 

On the boat after breakfast there is a course to plot, pre-start checklists to follow, weather and tides to review, an anchor to raise, and the general work of making the little ship shipshape. These determinant steps are lacking on land. 

 

Other than finding my car keys, I do not need a checklist to walk out to the car and start it. Though, as I write this, I can feel the void quickly dissipating. Doctor appointments are scheduled, dinner plans with friends and family are in the works, trips for provisions are contemplated, and maybe, if the Covid variant allows, a jazz or classical venue will be visited.

 

This summer’s cruise exist only as reminiscence. The wind, waves, tides, and currents are a thing of the past. My mind has begun to relinquish control to the default of the stable earth. Soon my first steps will be without hesitation. 

 

So, I will cherish this time of hesitancy to move out onto a stable platform and continue to steady myself . . . as I search for a mission.

September 2021   

Jumping

Maine’s heat wave broke. We were lucky that Mt. Battie, which lies northwest of Camden diverter the severe thunderstorms. There was a little rain and a lot of black clouds and distant thunder but the worst skirted by. More importantly, we did benefit from its cooling effect.

It was time for Carrie Rose, our 32’ Nordic Tug, to leave Camden. The first anchorage, Barred Island, was ruled out due to exposure to the NE winds that were to predominate for the next few days. Sir Tugley Blue, our cruising companions, suggested a well protected unnamed bay between Holbrook Island and Smith Cove, so off we went on an 18 nautical mile cruise northeast on East Penobscot Bay. 

 

The bay is approximately one mile from Castine. Castine is on the swift flowing (especially in an ebb tide) Bagaduce River, which is in reality a tidal estuary. It is a classy village and is home to the Maine Maritime Academy. Their large training ship, the State of Maine, cannot be missed.

 

Castine’s European history begins in 1604 and ends with the British leaving in 1815. Between those years, it was fought over by the French, British, Dutch, and Americans. For its remote location Castine has been the site of many battles including America’s largest loss of life in one battle before Pearl Harbor (474 men) during the ill fated Penobscot Expedition of 1779.

 

The turn from East Penobscot Bay is between the northern tip of Holbrook Island and Can “1A”, which protected Carrie Rose’s bottom from the barely submerged Nautilus Rock.

 

As an aside, cans are always green and nuns and always red. Occasionally, there are multicolored buoys, which usually demarcate a junction on the watery road of life. One such buoy, the red and white “CH” (it also has a bell) exists just north of us at the junction of the Bagaduce River and East Penobscot Bay.

 

Once past the entrance, the bay opens up, and I noticed many grey mottled black heads and noses of the local seals. They are most often solitary creatures but not here. I even saw one with a large silver fish in its mouth, a first.  

 

We motored straight in and set the anchor on the 17 foot mark on the chart. The tide eventually lifted us to 29 feet and in anticipation of this I had let out 110 feet of chain. Dave, from Sir Tugley Blue, came by on his dingy to invite us for dinner and to discuss the coming rainy days strategy. As I grabbed his line, a large bald eagle soared past us and perched onto a small shorelines tree.

 

The surface of the bay came alive with jumping fish that were no doubt being chased by the legion of seals. And then to starboard a pair of dorsal fins appeared, one smaller than the other. They surfaced several times always next to each other leading me to conjecture that they were mother and baby spending a pleasant afternoon gorging on the plentiful fish.

 

Charlotte and I took the dingy to the granite gravel beach for a walk and on the way passed close under the eye of the eagle. The beach is on an isthmus between our unnamed bay and Smith Cove. The dinghy’s varnished wood bottom scratched as we dragged it up on the beach. The flood tide is relentless and soon the dingy was floating again, so we took the hint and motored back to Carrie Rose. 

 

Now we had seen eagles, seal, osprey, porpoises collectively feeding on the jumping fish, so Charlotte named our unnamed bay, Jumping Fish Bay, a wholly appropriate name. 

July 2021   

 

               

 

Frantic

Prior to Covid I had an active social life: visits with friends and family, music venues of all types, restaurants to try, art exhibits and movies, music lessons, travel, small boat cruising, etc., etc. And then there was the tea ceremony world: lessons, demonstration, making and procuring tea ware, and always the next event or anniversary celebration and trip to Japan. When I look back at it some 18 months later, it was frantic.

 

Frantic is an odd word. It derives from the Middle English “frenetik” which means temporarily deranged, delirious. In my medical practice, I came to understand that a delirious patient was not long for this world. It is hard to put that in the context of the above activities. 

 

Chado (The Way of Tea) and the Zen Buddhism it stems from is about living in the moment. This moment will never come again. Experience it to the fullest, forget about the result of your labors and perform each gesture with mindfulness, and only then will tea be made and served to your guest with the potential of enlightenment.

 

Of course, this image of chanoyu as a quiet but intense spiritual practice belies the frantic preparation that takes place seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months before the tea is whisked and presented to the guest. New tea students, after being drawn into tea by a stirring demonstration, are often perplexed to find that much of the training entails the mizuya, the kitchen.

 

I suppose it is the same for my musical pursuit of the shakuhachi. The first introduction to playing is folk and children’s songs. They are short, just a few lines of characters long. The tempo is straightforward. The tune is recognizable and even cute as opposed to the heady repertoire later encountered.

 

There is a frantic rush, mainly on the student’s side, to progress. To discover and delve into the esoteric world of komuso monks freely wandering the countryside totally devoted to the music (with maybe a little spying on the side) and to nature. 

 

This may be fanciful, but I have heard that certain groups of shakuhachi players only play one tune in their search for the truth. I find this hard to fathom as my book of sheet music becomes thicker. 

 

The past non-frantic year gave me time to rethink the value of my chanoyu and shakuhachi practice, and more fundamentally, of how I live my life. 

 

In chanoyu, there is ryaku-bon, the simplest preparation of tea. The utensils used fit on a small tray allowing tea to be made anywhere at any time. In shakuhachi, close equivalents are the doyo, children’s songs, and the minyo, folk tunes. Both the above provide examples of how to live a simpler post pandemic life.

 

I appreciate the pie-in-the-sky aspect of this. I am not a mendicant monk living in a wilderness temple making tea and blowing sounds into an ancient forest. I am a Chicagoan who in the future will endeavor to be not quite so delirious, so frenetic. Wish me luck!

June 2021

Tana

Rikyū (1522-91) is famous for codifying chanoyu, the tea ceremony. He was an innovator who popularized the aesthetic of wabi/sabi. For adherents of Chado, The Way of Tea, he is considered the founder. Though, now that I say this, he is a distant, almost mythical figure. At least for us in the west, we learn the basic chronology of his life but not many of the details. 

 

Much of what we do know was written years after his death, so there are questions of authenticity. But this is common with many historical figures and does not distract from his significance. 

 

One point of contact for us is a compilation of aphorisms mainly attributed to him. It is called Rikyū Hyakushu or Rikyū’s Hundred Verses (1). The verses resemble waka poetry in form. They were compiled by Gengensai, the 11th Urasenke Iemoto from works by Rikyu himself and from one of his teachers. 

 

The verses are mainly instructional, and of interest to students and practitioners of tea but a few have a wider context. They begin with: To have the mind to enter this path is, indeed, to have an inherent teacher. One must want to learn to gain an understanding of the art or craft being taught. I am afraid many a childhood piano lesson is squandered due to the student’s lack of interest. 

 

Another favorite verse is: In that chanoyu is possible as long as you have one kettle, it is foolish to possess numerous implements. If any of Rikyu’s dictums has been egregiously ignored this is the one. Chanoyu lends itself to collecting. There are multiple levels of formality and seasonal changes. Each requires a stash of utensils, and that brings me to the purpose of this commentary, tana or shelves.

 

Tana are shelves that are used to display tea utensils in the tearoom. While not a requirement for making tea, they are often used. Early in my study of chanoyu, in pre-internet days, the availability of tana and tea utensils was limited. And since I inherited the handy gene from my father, I endeavored to make several tana. Three were made from rescued southern Illinois hundred year old oak barn wood. 

 

At that time, I had no notion of the parameters that tana conform to, or just how many tana designs exist. When I introduced the tana to my teachers, certain peculiarities in my design were graciously brought to my attention. The orientation of the grain; the location of the nodes on the bamboo posts; the ratio between the width, height, and depth; the materials used and in the simplest of terms, their usability. 

 

As I think back, it was beginner’s luck that each of them, with a little forethought, worked well and brought a sense of the builder and of the land (Southern Illinois) into the chashitsu/tearoom. The provenance and knowledge of how to use them will need to be passed to the next user for it will not be written in a formal text.

 

And this brings me back to the multitude of tea ware. A book details each tana used in the Urasenke tradition of tea. It explains the appropriate use of each tana in terms of the season, the level of formality, the compatible utensils, and includes a photograph. Though the book is in Japanese, it is a visual treat for anyone interested in design, in architecture, in woodworking, and in fine finishes. 

 

The pandemic has given me time to ponder my tea life. I have made tea ware from the beginning of my study. When the tea season recently changed from Winter (Ro) to Spring (Furo), I saw an opportunity to go to my basement workshop and construct a tana. There were pieces of wood and bamboo saved for such a project. 

 

I had a design in my mind’s eye but confronted by the materials, and limited by tools and skill level, the final shape eluded me. Over the years, Professor Emeritus Shōsō Satō of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has inspired me with his vast knowledge of Japanese arts and crafts. He is a true Maker in the modern sense of the word, so when I am confounded I look to his example and carry on.

 

The tana took form and will soon be put to the test. Rikyu also stated: Keep tea rustic and, through your heart, give warm hospitality; for the implements, always use items which you have at hand. This I will endeavor to do.

 

(1) The quoted verses are from Rikyū’s Hundred Verses by Iguchi Kaisen with translation by Gretchen Mittwer. The book is available from Tankosha Publishing Co., Kyoto.

May 2021

 

Hopeful

It is 9:30 in the morning. The usual breakfast of tea and toast has been consumed, and the day is before me. It is Monday, a free day without chanoyu lessons (Tuesday) or shakuhachi lessons (Friday). Both, of course, are still on Zoom and Skype. 

 

So, today I have to come up with a plan. There is enough bread so I cannot fall back on that. There is enough wine and groceries stored to take us into May. It is too early and too cold to start picking weeds out of the garden. What’s a guy to do?

 

I wander to the front of the house where Charlotte is busy managing her father’s finances and look out the window. The same cars parked there for the last year are still there. The usual litter of fast food wrappings and smashed plastic bottles is absent, so no need to venture out front. Then I notice a slight rustle in the bare bushes below me. 

 

On closer inspection, I see a meticulous female cardinal. She is olive brown with a feathery crown and a striking orange beak. Then there is a flutter to the right, and it is another female, this one slightly smaller. Is this the child come back with its mother or a competing female, it is hard to know. 

 

Now the front windows have my attention. I sit and wait and hope to catch a glimpse of the striking red cardinal male. Instead, a plump robin scurries from under the bushes, and runs straight into a squirrel as it descends our doomed ash tree.

 

Thirty years ago, we moved into a neighborhood inundated with squirrels but over the decades, the forestry around the house has changed.  Many of the large maples rotted and were taken down. The next door neighbor deforested her backyard, and we removed a large stringy conifer that was mistakenly planted too close to the porch. And with the loss of the trees was the concurrent loss of squirrels. 

 

Last summer we spent quality time with the above critters. We got to know some of them individually. There was the put upon mother robin with a mass of unruly feathers that got skinnier as her child became plumper. There was the acrobatic squirrel with the chopped ears. And the pair of downy woodpeckers that had to fight the sparrows for their turn at the suet hung from the pergola. 

 

It is late March as I write this, and I think back to the warm days in February. I stepped outside into the sun and heard trumpeting geese as they flew low in two perfect V-shaped formations heading north. This was before the climate gremlins decided to dump five feet of snow in the backyard. The snow blower and me had quite a workout. Knock-on-wood, neither of us had a malfunction.

 

When we practice tea in Chicago there is conflict synchronizing our seasons with the seasons in Kyoto. Chanoyu and Japan take particular pride in the changing seasons. I have experienced this during three visits to Japan. The trips have alternated spring, fall, and spring; or in Japanese parlance, sakura, koyo, and sakura.   

 

It is Shubun now, the vernal equinox, and the middle of spring in Kyoto. Of course, here it is cold and spring has barely begun. Only a few hardy ground hugging flowers have immerged. So, when we discuss the factitious flower arrangement in the tokonoma during tea practice, which flowers are appropriate?

 

In Kyoto, there are myriad flowers and flowering trees to choose from. Not so in Chicago: possible candidates are scillia, crocus, or maybe if I am alert, a few forced bright yellow forsythia.

 

2020 was overwhelming and despite my initial hopes, the beginning of 2021 was equally so. I remind myself to be hopeful each morning, and watching the buds and green shoots break through the soil is part of this regime. Soon Chicago’s flowers and trees will catch up with Kyoto’s flora, and the tea conversation will move onto other topics . . . And I find this hopeful. 

 

April 2021

Morte

I have never been religious. As a child, I flirted with religiosity, captivated with what the priest was doing at the altar with his back to the congregation. Curious about the incantations in a dead language; curious about the wine and the water, the gold and the crystal; curious about the unleavened bread that was turned into the body of Christ and the meticulous care with which it was handled. 

As it turned out my first experience with wine (the priests had a wine cellar in the basement), and my first experience with lying (sneaking to the bakery on Lincoln Ave. before going to class) are probably the lasting memories. 

 

I was not cut out to be an altar boy. The Latin prayers were impossible for me to memorize and I never got in the rhythm of ringing the bells during the mass correct. I stuck with it until the mass lost its magisterial mystery by reverting to English and guitars. It was as if they had shown their hand in a game of cards and it was lacking.

 

I am not sure why I bring this distant memory up. What I am really thinking about is morte/death, the impossible notion of the pandemic’s dead. I watched death during my career and it was never easy. If anything I was astounded at how hard it was to die. The spark of life would in most cases linger on much longer then I imagined it could.

 

Of course, this was not the case with traumatic injuries. Despite the incredible energy of the hospital’s staff, it was impossible to reverse the inevitable. I would stand next to the corpse and try to recreate the events to understand what had occurred. A certain amount of introspection is healthy just not too much. 

 

Most of the time, the circumstances did not allow for navel-gazing. There were other pressing problems to address for the living. Time cannot be reversed but of course, you know this. 

 

At the time of writing this, there are approximately 400,000 dead from Covid-19. It is probably not a mistake to add another third to this figure. And this number only takes into count the mortality not the morbidity. Millions have suffered weeks to months of pain and suffering due to the infection, to say nothing of the despair of their families and friends.

 

Early in the pandemic, my household on Talman Ave. decided on caution. Several years back I contracted the flu, and spent 10 to 14 lost day on the living room’s only comfortable chair either shivering wrapped in blankets or sweating pared down to my underwear. It is times like that when I realize how finely tuned our biology is to keep us at equilibrium with the world until a minuscule demon enters our body.

 

When it came to death, my Italian family had well honed rituals. We always had a calendar with the bleeding sacred heart of Jesus in the pantry. The families designated morticians provided it. Many distant relatives died while I was a kid. We would get packed up and spend three or four nights running around the funeral parlor with our cousins. All the while, the departed would quietly supervise our shenanigans.

 

Emotions would ramp up the morning of the burial. Old women clad in black would begin to wail. Occasionally someone would try to hug their love one as the caskets lid lowered. Us kids were like the Greek choir in the back of the room giggling and receiving the designated enforcers evil eye.

 

As the years went by, people lived longer, and our extended family grew farther apart, these events took on less significance and finally ended. It seemed that grief became more personal than collective. 

 

My father funeral was an unplanned (by us at least) affair in a packed church complete with an opera company singing his beloved Italian arias. I am not sure about my mother, but my sister and I were overwhelmed by turnout. Riggio’s Italian restaurant was also overwhelmed with the hundreds of post funereal friends and family that showed up to pay their respect and have pizza.

 

My mother outlived the vast majority of her friends and over three years slowly faded away with dementia. Her send off was a quiet affair in the beautiful chapel at Villa Scalabrini where she spent the last year of her life under the care of a compassionate order of Italian nuns.

 

I beg your forgiveness for burdening you in this time of plague with yet another diatribe. It is February now and the days are lengthening. Each day that we are not buried in snow or wallowing in below zero temperatures is a blessing that brings us closer to spring, glorious spring! Spring is when the glass is have full, and if we have been lucky we can leave morte behind and watch the tiny shoots burst forth with life.

 

March 2021

Shame

Shameful moments are hard to displace. Memories surface at the oddest times, in random fashion, and then leave me in a hot flash. There must be a chunk of the brain’s white matter devoted to retaining each indiscretion. I believe I have comported myself well since my mother, Theresa, bore me in 1953. Though there are moments - decisions and actions - I regret. 

Shame drives many of our actions, whether right or wrong headed. This is happening to our country. The USA has been forced to confront the shame of our past: slavery, internment, unjust wars, and misogyny, to name a few. They hide undetected and occasionally surface to test the waters but seeing a storm develop, seek safety in a dark space once again.

There are few dark spaces to hide in any longer, so this will have to play out. I was going to say, it is gonna be ugly, but no need to look to the future when the present is starring us in the face. 

 

Many years ago, an old flame unexpectedly called me to request a meeting. I suggested we meet at Berghoff’s basement restaurant, a wonderful (and neutral) place that I sorely miss. After a few sips of beer and as lunch was placed before us, the small talk ceased and the real reason for the meeting commenced. Up to that point I was clueless as to why we were meeting, which was probably the original sin in the first place. 

 

She was there to apologize for her behavior twenty years ago. As I looked back, I was as much to blame, but nonetheless I quietly listened and resisted the urge to implicate myself. I do not know how much time elapsed but when I finally looked up there stood the entire black and white clad staff looking at us, the only people left in the restaurant. We quickly went our ways. It was an odd moment that shame had provoked, and forced me to evaluate my past behavior.

 

The country needs to reconcile, and it might not be a bad idea to do it over lunch and a beer. It has been done in many places: South Africa, Vietnam, and Europe after WWII. We need to do this before it becomes necessary to have a repeat of the Nuremberg trial.

 

In a way, the lies and conspiracy theories remind me of the hysteria before the Millennia. I certainly understood that there might be a software glitch but I failed to see how this was going to lead to the rapture. About three months before the end of the world, I received my new Visa card with an expiration date of 3/2003. If I had any doubts about the earth continuing to orbit the sun on New Years this allayed my fears.

 

And speaking of the Millennia, I have faith in the Millennial’s and in the generations that follow them to force their parents and grandparents to deal with their shame in a constructive, no matter how grudgingly, fashion. Who doesn’t want a better life for their grandkids, a life full of joy and not hate, a life full of hope and not shame. I’ll drink to that!

February 2021