The Great Spring

  . . .

  I met Katherine in the late eighties, around the time my Zen teacher was dying. She visited him in Minneapolis. He was one of her teachers when he first came to America to help Suzuki Roshi in the early years of San Francisco Zen Center.

  “He was not a good example. He was too perfect.” She lifted her elbows to show how erect his gassho was.

  Or maybe I met her first after he died and she asked me to do a benefit for her small community. The money they made from the writing workshop would build a bathroom for the zendo, formerly a Chinese laundry.

  She picked me up in her manual-drive Honda at Yvonne Rand’s home in Muir Beach, and we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, continuing southwest, down to her shoulder of the peninsula. As we drove the long highways, her energetic foot pounced on the clutch.

  Five years later was my true meeting with her. I had taught writing for a week at Tassajara Zen Monastery and was given a week on my own, in exchange, to soak in the springs and stay in a new stone guesthouse. I was teaching myself to do abstract paintings. Form detached from meaning, meaning expressed in color. I had six cheap oil pastels and an even cheaper packet of 8 x 11 sheets of paper.

  Katherine was there that week at Tassajara, leading a Zen and yoga retreat. She had lived at Tassajara for many winters after the summer guests left. That’s when Zen students faced the wall for long hours, far away from city distractions, settling deep into remote silence.

  She leaned over my shoulder as I sat on the dirt path looking up at the waterfall. “Not quite abstract—not realistic, either.” She pointed her index finger along the blue line.

  “What was it like to study with Diebenkorn?”

  “I knew I couldn’t be great. I was pulled to Zen.”

  That week I sought her out. I practiced Zen with all of my heart but loved writing and painting. At that time they were still opposing each other. Katherine knew about both.

  She came up behind me on the third day, her fingers pointing up at the tree, my finger smeared with brown. “I like this line. But you don’t have it yet.”

  “Why don’t you paint anymore?” I asked her.

  She laughed and said nothing.

  I can hear her voice. Whenever she picked up the phone there was delight in it, ready to take on any person on the other end. No small talk—how was your relationship, your job, your feelings about your cousin? She wanted the truthful deep answers below polite chatter. She joined you in any challenge, always wanting to understand what it is to be human. Right until the end, at that January sushi lunch. “I don’t understand relationships,” I said. She gave me a jaunty sigh and a head shake. Nothing ironic. And then she asked the most surprising thing: “How do you know love?”

  Even that last visit, I could not keep up with her darting up the stairs. And she insisted on driving. She had another version of her old manual Honda, and we careened around the many corners of her tight neighborhood.

  We call back to the States the first night, the second night. Each day, Katherine is still in the hospital.

  A year earlier she had visited me in Santa Fe and popped up after each meal to clear her plate. “Don’t wash the dishes. You’ll make more of a mess. Katherine, you can relax and let me do the work.”

  “I want to be useful.” Always the Zen practitioner: when you can no longer work, you can no longer eat. We were brought up on the raw edge of Japanese ancient teachings, transmitted through great human effort, challenging all adversity.

  On that visit she brought a gift of not only Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter but also a memoir by Oe’s English translator John Nathan, whom she knew. “I wish John had written less about his life and more about what it’s like to translate.” She tapped the cover. “But interesting just the same.”

  It was typical of her. A fresh slant on the novel—the translator. She read widely, and it showed in the curious bent of her mind. No matter how nonchalant or vague you might be in a particular moment, she came back at you.

  That visit in New Mexico, her nose bled from the altitude. It was the blood thinners. The same ones that came to get her, even though she did not eat a drop of fat.

  We gather wildflowers in the French countryside to make a fat bouquet, plant it in the middle of the retreat circle with her name on a placard.

  Steve tells us, “Aunt Katie sent me Rilke, Charles Olson, Laurens van der Post, three of Natalie’s books, Jack Kornfield, Norm Fischer. My whole childhood she sent me books. I’m a writer today because of that.

  “She had a great sense of humor. Just three years ago I wanted to see her zendo. She showed me around—then, in front of the altar, she jumped up, kicking her heels together. ‘I’m the abbot, I’m the abbot,’ she sang out.

  “But she could also be tough. I wore a weird long, multicolored coat and she told me straightaway it looked terrible, that I didn’t need to freak people out.”

  I smile. Katherine had told me that conversation in detail and had worried she hadn’t handled it well.

  Back in January we had talked about her coming to this French retreat. “You could relax, look at cows, eat baguettes—no cheese—and once during the week you could give a single dharma talk to my students.”

  Three days into the retreat they take her off life support. Miraculously, she keeps breathing. Her students convince the hospital to let her go home and be on hospice, surrounded twenty-four hours a day by people who love her.

  Each night after the last class session, Steve and I stand in the stone courtyard, near tall grass pastures, clumps of brown Limousin cows in the distance, and try to call California in their early morning, almost half a globe away. Often our cell phone can’t make contact. We stand in the darkening shade, hearing electric noise, clasping the metal to our ears.

  Katherine was the only one in the dharma world who, after reading The Great Failure—my memoir about finding out after he died that my Zen teacher had been sleeping with students—called me and directly said she didn’t like it. No one else spoke to me; they all silently disappeared. But after our call, Katherine and I did not see each other for four years. I was sorely aware of that rift and calculated from a distance her aging.

  Then one day the phone rang: “Younger students have been reading your book and telling me, ‘It’s really good.’ I thought: Am I not a Zen teacher? I must be open-minded. I reread it. I got it all wrong the first time. I was blinded. When can we see each other?”

  I was in Santa Cruz on a book tour soon after. We ate Japanese for dinner, as we always did, and she sat in the front row at the reading. I was grateful to be reconnected.

  Once I asked her to conduct a three-day meditation retreat in the solar adobe zendo I’d just built in Taos.

  Each day she gave a lecture. “I rented a car at the airport in Albuquerque. Getting to Taos was fine—only one highway pointing north—but then I had to follow Natalie’s directions on these dirt back roads. I got lost. I realize now that when I listened to her over the phone, I pictured in my mind what she was saying, and when the markers appeared in actuality—for instance, the right at an abandoned adobe—they weren’t how I’d pictured them, so I ignored them and went looking for what matched my vision. Isn’t that how we also work in our life? We don’t see reality.”

  The last evening in France, just before the students break silence, Steve comes up to me and whispers in my ear, “I just spoke to my brother. Katherine let go.”

  I nod and proceed to the zendo in a trance.

  I’m unable to recall anything I taught that night. But these forty students traveled far to be with me. I have to fulfill my obligation—garner my energy—even though someone I love has slowly been dying far away.

  So many times this has happened. I am teaching while something important is happening somewhere else.

  That night, after the ending ceremony and festivities, in the long early hours past midnight, alone in the third story of a French farmhouse, I fall into the unformed chasm of grief.

  Th
e next morning, still in my clothes, I hear a hesitant knock at my door. “It’s past breakfast and class is in five minutes.” Saundra, whom I twirled on that twelve-hour drive down, opens the door a crack.

  “I can’t do it,” I growl. “You teach.”

  A flicker of hesitation. Then she sees my face. “I couldn’t be with her,” I cry.

  . . .

  When I leave the retreat, I walk for seven days in the Dordogne Valley, through fields of corn; among walnut trees, sunflowers; and at the edge of a wide, swollen, meandering river. So much in bloom.

  We are no different from a flower, I think. It gives off its radiance—then dies. We don’t expect that same flower to come back next June. Another takes its place.

  But there must also be something else. My rambunctious friend, where are you now? Wherever you are, there is still so much to say.

  Bright pink zinnia

  my friend Katherine

  one candle burning

  16

  BJ

  Filmmaker Mary Feidt and I went up to Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Iron Range, a four-hour drive north of the Twin Cities, to see if we could discover Bob Dylan’s roots, to explore where he came from and how it influenced who he was now.

  We went in December. The filmmaker wanted to see the place at its peak darkness, to see the juxtaposition of Bob’s Jewish religion and Christmas lights. Film is visual, and we needed pictures. Besides, when you go that far north in Minnesota, life is about weather—the extreme cold and how you survive, how you make peace with it, how you make it yours. We met Bob Dylan’s childhood best friend and the drummer in his first band, when Bob was sixteen. We found the home he lived in, saw the synagogue where fifty Jewish families worshipped together in the fifties. We met classmates who still lived in Hibbing, and found the cousin of his high school girlfriend, Echo Helstrom.

  When we met BJ Rolfzen, Bob Dylan’s high school English teacher, Mary told me she knew we had a film. Bright blue eyes, eighty-one years old, sitting next to a decorated tree in his living room, he opened an old well-worn anthology and read us the poem by William Carlos Williams “This Is Just to Say.” The poet leaves a note to his wife: forgive me for eating the plums; they were so cold and so delicious.

  Then BJ gave us a lesson: “This poem doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you look at the title.” Then he went on his own riff of a poem: “This is just to say, Bill, I’m glad you are my son/ This is just to say, Leona, I’m glad you married me fifty-four years ago. . . .” We tasted what it must have been like to be in his classroom as he leaned over, his eyes burning into ours: “Thomas Carlyle called poetry ‘an open secret.’ Do you know what that means?”

  This English teacher loved poetry from the inside out, with his blood and muscle, not as some intellectual exercise. Robert Zimmerman, later known as Dylan, hadn’t been alone up there. He had been fed by this extraordinary human being.

  “Thirty-five years in the classroom. That was my life,” he said.

  “Did you miss teaching when you retired?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. I have a motor scooter, and in the spring and summer, I pack a lunch and ride out to the woods with my books. I lie under the trees and read poems.”

  Three hours later we reluctantly left him. When we looked back, we saw a small, light-gray clapboard house, deep in snow across from the Assumption Catholic School; but we felt like we’d been in some grand canyon with verse echoing off the walls.

  We returned to Hibbing again in June, wanting to see what it was like in summer. Mary wanted to shoot me riding behind BJ on his motor scooter. He’d had a stroke a few years back. His hand and foot were affected, but he had figured out a way to still ride his bike, adding a third wheel for steadiness.

  He drove me through the old Hibbing. The town had been moved in the thirties. Rich iron ore was discovered under the town site, so the mining company paid the residents to relocate. Old street signs, curbs, and the crumbling library could still be seen in overgrown green grass. We rode out to the taconite mines, the whole time shouting poetry to each other and laughing.

  BJ took me to his old classroom in Hibbing High School: room 204. He showed me the front row, third seat, where Robert Zimmerman sat. “He was a quiet boy. Very courteous. He got a good look at me from this seat.” He tapped the desktop. “And I got a good look at him.”

  “Did you know then who he would become?” I asked.

  “At that age it’s too young to tell.”

  Back at his house, in his basement office, he played Dylan’s music for me, loud. “‘Gotta Serve Somebody.’ I love that song,” he said. He jacked the sound up some more with the remote. “It was created to be played this way,” he yelled over the singing.

  Later we sat in his dining room over coffee, which his wife, Leona, served weak, with walnut bread and cookies on a white tablecloth, silver laid out beside them. Again BJ played Dylan songs, this time from Time Out of Mind. The music blasted over the fine dining setting.

  He quoted from a song of his old student: “‘I was born here and I’ll die here against my will.’ Me too.” He thumped his chest with his left hand. “I like it here. They can keep the other side. This side is for me.”

  Then he recited a poem he’d written after his stroke:

  Two Crows

  The road which once I traveled by

  Listening to the song of the meadowlark

  Now echoes with the cry of the crow.

  He finished reciting and stared at me.

  “That’s penetrating,” was all I could say.

  He gave me his self-published memoir, The Spring of My Life, which I read when I returned home. He’d been brought up in the center of Minnesota in a small town during the Depression. He slept across the feet of his three older brothers on a mattress made of straw that stunk of urine. A snowdrift often formed over him, blown in through a hole in the wall. Too cold to sleep, he’d get up and wander downstairs, but it wasn’t any warmer there. He did terribly in school. He was always hungry and never did his homework because there was no place at home to do it. Even at meals some of them had to stand—there weren’t enough chairs.

  “Did you read a lot?” I asked BJ when I saw him next, a few months later.

  “Never. I was trying to survive.”

  He began to read when he joined the military. He never drank. His father was a drunk who couldn’t keep a job. Once his father tried to commit suicide. He didn’t succeed, but he was disabled permanently and couldn’t support his family.

  When BJ was a kid, he lost half of his shoe in a snowbank, and he wired the two parts back together in the school basement. Referring to that experience, he wrote this beautiful poem in adulthood:

  Autobiography

  Walking

  in the snow

  wearing half a

  shoe

  searching for

  William Shakespeare

  He said he could have made a career in the military, but he wanted to go back to school. He wanted to become a teacher. “A teacher was a star illuminating a dark night.” In all of his years of teaching, he never took a sabbatical, because he couldn’t leave his students. He told me that he had never had a good teacher himself, not even at the university.

  His social studies teacher in college began each class by pulling down a map at the front of the room but never used it. As an eager young student in his twenties, BJ was waiting to be shown something there. “Then he’d put his notes down on the podium and lecture. If he got too far in front of the stand, he couldn’t say anything. He only relied on notes. It was disgusting.”

  We traveled back to Hibbing several more times and made the film Tangled Up in Bob. At the end I realized I couldn’t find Bob Dylan, the man I played on my stereo, in Hibbing. What I found in Hibbing was Bobby Zimmerman, who eventually gave birth to Bob Dylan. Hibbing was where he came from, but he left and went on to another life.

  For Dylan’s sixty-fifth birthday on May 24, 2006, Mary and I traveled up to
Hibbing again to show the film. BJ was nervous. I’d written to him that he had a large part. He wrote me several times, saying he was going to leave town. Mostly I thought he was joking about his discomfort.

  When we arrived in Hibbing, I found out that the whole last month he’d had trouble sleeping. He feared what his colleagues would think, this man with a wild heart and mind, an awake human being. He’d managed to survive in small-town America by working hard, attending church, caring earnestly for his four children, and trying not to stand out, not to draw attention, except by being a memorable teacher. And now we had arrived from another country, New Mexico, and were recognizing him, pointing him out, making him the star of our film.

  The first time he saw himself on the large screen, he was apprehensive, curious, astonished.

  We showed it again two days later. This time he was more relaxed and congratulated Mary on her professionalism. He told me the next day that people seemed to like it. He was relieved.

  When I said good-bye to BJ at the end of the week, he was not naive. We had been traveling a long way to a small town for a purpose.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he told me. “And the sound of your name will always bring back special memories.”

  I wanted to shift the uncomfortable moment and quickly say I’d be back. But I didn’t say it. I told him I loved him. He was now eighty-three. The year before he had fallen and fought for weeks to come back from the brink. The measure of time changes for a man like this.

  The film turned out gorgeous, and something large and unexpected happened to me in the process. I went up to Hibbing hoping to find home—Dylan’s, mine, somebody’s. But you can’t find a home in a house, a building, a place. Instead I found friendship, with the breath of poetry breathing us, both BJ and me.