Two weeks later four smiling people who had taken time off work to greet us, bobbed and bowed as our ship docked in Yokohama. We had been invited to stay with a family whose daughter I had become friends with in San Francisco. Having heard that fruit was expensive in Japan, I had arrived with a gift of forty pounds of oranges. It was a strange, humorous, bewildering visit in which both my brother and I failed at our missions, his to remain for a year and mine to undertake a study of Zen. While I very much liked being in a Buddhist culture, I couldn’t figure out how to begin a Buddhist practice. Visiting temples was a touristy must, but becoming a nun was not really conceivable.
Mike could actually speak Japanese because he had just completed a year of intensive study of the language at Harvard, but the lessons at the Free University hadn’t given me much fluency, which I needed just to be able to go forward with something as simple as taking the bus. Being in a place where I could neither speak nor read was bewildering and challenging. I found my way to and from Sendagi, the Tokyo neighborhood where our host family lived, by memorizing the sequences of neon signs— their colors, shapes, and sizes, and whether or not they flashed. When I offered to buy the vegetables for dinner at the neighborhood market, I glimpsed various family members following discreetly, ducking behind buildings to keep from being noticed, but managing to keep an eye out for me in case I got lost, which was easier than you or I could imagine. I appreciated that they were watching my progress from one vendor to another, then my return to their house. But it was embarrassing, too. I felt so incompetent.
My adventures were limited. I went to Kyoto. I visited gardens and temples. I sought out a shakuhachi, a bamboo flute, for Mel Weitsman and sipped green tea with its maker. In Kamakura I stood in line for a charcoal-grilled sweet potato. A Japanese man turned and spat on me. It was the war and the bomb, I was pretty sure, and I didn’t know what to say. For most of my teenage years I woke up in the night paralyzed in fear of the bomb. That day my heart felt broken. It wasn’t until I was sixty that I was able to meet a survivor of the first bomb and bow deeply to him at a Zen temple in New Mexico.
I spent part of the summer in Japan, then returned to Davis, my hometown, giving up for the moment on the study-Buddhism-in-Japan program. My parents had gone to Europe, leaving behind an empty house. Mike, who had had an even more difficult time making sense of Japan and who was unable to free himself from the suffocating kindness of our hosts when he just wanted to be on his own, had preceded me home. I found him happily camped on the back porch with an electric coffeepot, some zucchini, and a stack of books. He didn’t have a key to the house and it didn’t occur to him to ask a neighbor for one. He told me about his arrival in Davis. It was the day we landed on the moon and he walked to my parents’ house on empty streets as everyone was inside watching the landing on television. He didn’t know this at the time so it just felt extremely strange, especially after the crowded streets of Tokyo. That same day I was in a Tokyo department store where Japanese people bowed to me and said, “Congratulations.” I looked at a giant screen and thought I was seeing a sci-fi movie, then I remembered. My friend and I celebrated by eating little cakes made in the shape of fish, filled with red adzuki beans, in the basement of the Mitsukoshi department store.
As both Mike and I had returned so much earlier than we’d told people we would, no one expected to see us and we enjoyed the delicious sense of being invisible. It really felt as if no one could see us as we bicycled around town doing this and that. But this happy limbo state ended for me when a postcard arrived announcing a weeklong meditation intensive to be held in San Francisco. It was called a sesshin. I read and reread the card, turned it over, thumbed the edges until they had softened. I considered the larger picture: I had gone to Japan to find Buddhism and I had come home because I couldn’t figure out how to get started, and here was an opportunity to take part in a major Zen event, a seven-day sitting, with an English-speaking (sort of, it turned out) Japanese teacher in San Francisco. Obviously I should go. But I had read that sesshins required superhuman effort. Could I even get through one? And what if I couldn’t?
Of course, I went. The sesshin was hard, but not nearly as difficult as others I would sit in the future.
2. Sesshin
Think of it as a session, a very long session with you and your cushion, your aching knees, and your chattering monkey mind as the major participants. Then call it sesshin. It looks close to “session” but it’s pronounced “sesheen.” A sesshin is a traditional opportunity for focused meditation, or zazen. Sesshins usually last for a week and they consist of early morning risings, hours and hours of zazen interrupted by ten-minute periods of walking meditation (kinhin), a talk once a day, tea, formal meals, and of course, no talking at all or moving during zazen. Sesshins are hard, but they are also wonderful opportunities to focus and just sit.
This sesshin took place in a former Orthodox Jewish temple, so old that at this moment in 1969 it had already been owned for some years by the Japanese Buddhist community in San Francisco. Now with a Japanese name, Sokoji was drafty, dark, and decrepit.
Throughout the day we heard pigeons cooing and ambling around the rafters on their clawed feet. Suzuki-roshi, the Japanese Zen master I had heard about, led the sesshin and gave us encouragement. Sitting one forty-minute period after another was arduous and painful for a rank beginner. Meals came as a relief since they made it possible to stand for a while and loosen the kinks in my legs before returning to my cushion.
We got in a line, picked up a tray, then passed in front of the cook, a Chinese American monk named Bill Kwong, who was for a long time a Zen teacher in Sonoma County. Bill had this willowy look and gentle disposition that made him seem special to me, even spiritual, which is sort of a vague word, like “natural.” But then I was grasping at straws for something that would set this group of people apart from other groups I had visited—Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and his Hasidic followers, various yogic ashrams, the Gurdjieff people—something that made sense and, most important, was accepting. Spiritual would do. As we passed in front of Bill, he carefully set our meals on our trays—a heavy Japanese bowl full of white rice with a few sesame seeds sprinkled over the top, a smaller bowl of thin soup, and a third dish containing the same daikon pickles I had been eating in Japan just a week before. Chanting ensued, then we ate in silence.
I was always famished, but that wasn’t the only reason this food tasted as good as it did. Eating in a formal posture without talking but accompanying the meal with a long chanted grace conspired to bring unexpected flavor to what was usually regarded as fairly bland food. It turned out that there was much to be savored in the sweet starchy goodness of the rice and the occasional toasty flavor of a sesame seed, followed by sips of the hot, thin, salty soup, then another crunchy bite of a pickle, this time a cool one. How wonderful it all tasted. The meal itself passed swiftly by the clock, but it seemed to last forever, time passing slowly as it does in extreme moments.
I was fairly neurotic about food at that time and I pursued with diligence those tastes of comfort, mostly in the form of pastry. So the goodness of plain rice, miso soup, and daikon pickle was truly startling. It seemed to me that this goodness resided in my mouth and my attention as much as it resided in the food itself. It was my mouth that was the cook, my tongue the seasoning, and eating this way transcended food as usual, even an exceptional cheese Danish or a fresh warm donut. Hunger, simplicity, and attention, not special ingredients, were all one needed to put aside obsessions and anxieties concerning food and to experience it in a more deeply nurturing way.
Years later another student, David Chadwick, told me that Suzuki-roshi found Bill’s food too austere. When David drove him to lecture in Mill Valley, after another one of Bill’s meals of rice, pickles, and miso soup, they’d go out for a real breakfast of eggs, hash browns, and toast. Maybe even bacon. But for me at that time, the austerity was a revelation; it was so
plain and so good.
Many things happen during a sesshin, but this experience struck me deeply. Although I went on to sit many more sesshins with far more rigorous schedules and richer, more complex foods, it has turned out that my way through the thick and thin patches in life, the worldly and spiritual places of life, has been a sensual one, one that needs hands, soil, smells, and food for fodder, for direction. Looking back, I’m not so surprised that a bowl of rice, a few sesame seeds, the sour and salty tastes on the tongue, were what opened the world of Zen practice for me.
Away from my simple family life of food, my own austere college meals, and postgraduate meals of peanut butter and brown rice, I had been finding pleasure in getting as many of the sweet, soft foods in my mouth as I could. But what about that family life at the table? It hadn’t prepared me at all for what was to come in my life.
3. Family
Our parents influence us enormously, even when we think we’ve finally gone out on our own. It takes a while to see that influence, though. Thanks to my parents, I have come to conclude that my past experience with food is oddly bifurcated. I grew up a jerky girl, a girl yanked between plenty and scarcity. There was pleasure and abundance at one parent’s table, tension and lack at the other. How could two parents be so different from each other when it came to food? The reasons probably run as deep for each parent as they now do for me. It was not surprising that I began life with a schizoid inheritance: one that said there was never enough (Mom) and one that found there was plenty (Dad).
My father had wanted to farm since he was a boy, and he began once he returned from World War II, in 1945. First he and my mother had a farm in Avon, Connecticut, then one in upstate New York, and later one in Ohio. To me these different places are merged into The Farm. All were farms, none was exactly like the others, but there were cows, goats, chickens, orchards. The Farm was a wonderful place to be a child in, but an isolated and lonely place for an urban woman like my mother. I try to imagine living far from others without the Internet to connect us however flimsily, and I have to admire my mother’s courage. I suspect that it was a grand adventure at first, but one whose excitement soon wore off. As for me, although I was just a toddler, then a young child, I loved living on a farm. I wheeled a bantam chicken around in my baby carriage, snuggled up to the soft, caramel-colored cows, their breath sweet and vegetal. I recall with pleasure the smell of water flowing over the flat rocks of a creek and the smell of grass being mowed for the cows on our dairy farm. And the cows themselves. It all left a strong impression and I suspect it’s one reason why farms still hold such an allure for me.
When lightning struck the last barn and burned it down and the cows within, farming ended for my father. After this trauma and loss for both my parents, I don’t think that there was enough emotional or financial reserve to recover and start over. Instead, my father took advantage of the GI Bill to go to graduate school. He moved his small family into graduate student housing in Ithaca, and eventually got his doctorate in botany at Cornell.
A graduate student’s life in 1950 was not an affluent one. There was not a lot of money, and there wasn’t a lot of food either, at least the way we know it today, and the way my parents had known it on their farms. For them, the good foods must have simply gone away, because I remember squeezing the dye into a plastic pouch of dead-white margarine to give it a buttery glow, and items like roasts and “real” butter appeared only when grandparents came to visit. I clearly recall a cat being thrown out into the snow for licking a precious cube of butter that had been set out for one of these rare company dinners and another cat who was nailed for dragging a liver off to a corner for her own private feast, a liver that was supposed to be our family supper. There’s a photo of my mother shucking corn in the yard, a bunch of small kids playing around her. She looks happy, but later she told me that her truly happiest moment was saying goodbye to her pressure cooker and canning equipment when we all left for California. She did what had to be done until she didn’t have to anymore.
* * *
—
After my dad got his PhD we got into our canvas-walled Willys Jeep—my parents; my infant sister, Jamie; my brother Mike; and I—and drove to our new home in Davis, California. We camped along the way. Each night my dad set up a big, heavy green army tent and that’s where we slept, often in the company of mosquitoes, with trains roaring nearby, and highway sounds tearing into precious sleep. I was eight years old when we made this move.
When our Jeep at last emerged from Donner Pass and headed down toward Auburn, Sacramento, and finally Davis, there was that first place where we caught a glimpse of the Central Valley and its broad, flat expanse. I was thrilled, curious, and drawn to it. My mother, however, was not. To her, as she told me later, it just looked dry and way too flat. It was nothing like the green rolling terrain of the places she had always lived. She didn’t have to say anything then, for I could see doubt on her face, and anger too, to think that she had been brought to live in this horrible place. It was summer. It was hot and the wild grasses had turned from their brilliant February green to gold. For a long time I thought that’s why California was known as “the Golden State.” It was only later, when we took school field trips to Sutter’s Fort that I learned about the Gold Rush.
* * *
—
My parents were born within a day of each other. Both went through the Depression and both had fathers who kept good jobs and neither had a family that stood in breadlines. Yet my mother embodied the Depression mentality of insufficiency—that and an immigrant mentality, although her family had been in America for at least three generations. She cooked and ate from a sense of scarcity that was largely imagined. Still, she loved to have people over for dinner, often made gifts of food, welcomed new neighbors with a loaf of bread and salt, and cooked for herself and others into her mid-nineties, when she finally died of old age, not disease, not hunger. But at no time in her life was money squandered on things to eat. Even when she was very old, she spent less than twenty dollars a week on food for herself, shakily walking from Safeway to Longs because the eggs were a few cents cheaper there. Never mind that my brother Mike was an organic farmer and brought her eggs from his chickens, real food that nourished.
Years earlier, on shopping forays to San Francisco, my mother and I would stop for lunch at the Woolworth’s on Powell Street. I learned to read menus by scanning down the price column, my eyes poised to catch the lowest number, instead of reading the menu items themselves. Invariably the cheapest lunch was an egg salad sandwich, not something I was terribly fond of since I had so many of them in my lunch sack. Our conversation would go something like this:
“Have anything you want!” my mother would offer. She was generous and upbeat, but a trifle anxious. I could hear it in her voice. She was probably afraid I’d want something expensive.
“Umm.” I would scan the menu carefully. It was true, I was looking for an adventure.
“I think I’d like the crab salad.” I’d never had crab.
“Oh? Crab?” my mother would say, her voice more clearly nervous. The crab is expensive, even at Woolworth’s. “Are you sure you want that? Wouldn’t you like an egg salad sandwich instead?”
I knew it was about the cost, so I ordered the egg salad sandwich. It was fine. And I also suspected that she might have wanted something other than egg salad, too. While ordering by price wasn’t a method for encouraging adventurous eating, I understood my mother’s situation, that everlasting imprint of the Depression and at this time, the competition from other areas deemed more important than food, like art and music. Money was tight and lunch wasn’t for adventuring but to keep us going. Still, I would have far preferred that crab, or better, to go to Blums nearby on Union Square for a slice of coffee crunch cake.
Even today I still tend to order what’s least expensive when eating out. It’s a hard habit to break. I learned my less
on well.
* * *
—
My father was a roller of pie dough, a generous eater, and a good cook in a meat and potatoes way. He embraced butter, cream, lard (olive oil came later), and all the foodstuffs that make food melting and succulent and desirable. My father’s way with food—his appetite for it, his botanist’s knowledge of taxonomy and plant characteristics, his affection for old varieties, his passion for growing plants, and the pleasure he took in searching in the wild for those that resisted cultivation—shaped my own interest in cooking, farming, and foodways. I didn’t notice it as it was happening, but over time his actions quietly ebbed and flowed in and out of my life until one day I looked up and saw that I was indeed, at least in some respects, my father’s daughter.
My mother had a different sort of appetite than my father, one that never allowed for much pleasure around food, although she very much liked the idea of food. Food, plants, and flowers were entwined subjects that filled my mother’s colorful paintings and batiks—figs and their articulate leaves, little schools of fish perched on ice in a market, melons, lemons hanging off leafy branches, glossy eggplants—the luscious foodscapes of the Mediterranean, of California farmers’ markets, even of our yard.
Not one to be described as a person with a lusty appetite, my mother, when offered something to eat, usually muttered a modest refusal, her hands fluttering up to her face in a faint gesture of protection, as if to push the offering away. When she finally came to Greens, where she could order whatever she wanted as my mother and our guest, she had a cup of soup and a green salad, completely ignoring the rest of the menu.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 2