Bananas with Kimo

Kimo liked bananas. I'd run into him around one of the plazas in Old San Juan, close to the supermarket where he'd buy his fruit to eat out of the plastic groccery bag on a park bench. You'd run into him everywhere in the old city, white shirt, gi trousers, flip flops, shooting the breeze.

That was the thing about the sensei, you'd never know where you'd find him. Like seeing the priest outside the church in civvies, a bit unnerving at first. So he'd invite you to sit down, grab something from the bag, a grape maybe. Shoot the breeze.

It could happen on a Friday night. I'd hear a Jorge san over my shoulder and there he was, tropical shirt ironed and colorful, ask you to buy him a Perrier with lemon, sit at a table close to the pub door, sit there awhile with the sensei, taking in the bar scene and the passerby. I didn't mind except I couldn't smoke or drink all that much, didn't dare to.

Jaime sensei used to tell me that the custom was to look after your teacher, do his bidding wherever, the simple pleasures, to sit at his pleasure. That that was all part of it. It's true. I did it then and I do it now. So it was the custom for black and brownbelts to take Kimo out to his favorite Chinese restaurant, to talk shop every so often. It was no burden, really, he asked for little, fruit, a time at a table in a bar or sidewalk cafe, a walk through the cobblestone streets at dusk. It could happen at anytime, anywhere.

We all collected our "I ran into Kimo" stories. I remember one night going past a place and seeing Kimo doing kata in a pub and it turns out that a poet was reading something about a brother stationed in Okinawa. Kimo was game for just about anything.

What made the moments with him memorable was not that anything special was said or learned. Being around him was calming, almost soothing. Hard to explain. Because nothing really happened. You just felt good, at peace, a pause in the helter skelter of things.

I experience that now whenever I run into an old dojo buddy, how time sort of stops. How we can just sit there doing nothing. Sharing an old Kimo yarn or some other dojo tale.

Looking back, it smells like Zen to me.

A Master in our Midst

It was only years later that I truly knew who was just three feet away from me in the Ochoa Dojo. Seikichi Toguchi, founder of the Shoreikan school of Okinawa Goju-Ryu Karate Do, visited Puerto Rico in the mid to late 70's. Very short, even by Puerto Rican standards, dark complexion, and round like a basketball. I was told (never confirmed) that the sunflower seed-eating welcoming committee at the airport were stunned to zazen silence when they saw him alight Havana cigar in hand to greet them. Later that night (I was told) a scotch on the rocks was added to the props among the chosen few. They had mopped the floor with us a week before to razor sharp Sanchin state to avoid any dojo embarrassments from the white belt rabble. I even washed "my dirty old Gi" and backstitched a few errant tears, alas to no avail as I was told to hide in the back rows.

So one more reverence was added to the beginning of the class. I had never seen the senseis so uptight. Just in case, they ran a watered-down version of our normal exercise routine to keep us fresh for the katas. It was then that he jumped out of his zazen and walked around the class, effortlessly gliding around punches and kicks to correct a wrist here, straighten a back there, and with just a finger push back brown belts to test their balance. A young female brown belt caught his eye. She was as small as him. The girl had the lowest shiko dachi in captivity, enough to elicit an appreciative smile.

Then came the best part for us white belts: the humbling of the sensei. Master Toguchi sat on the floor in a half lotus as the black belts attacked him one by one. They became like dolls in his hands as he flipped one this way, another that way. I don't know how he did it, it all went by so fast. This was no staged show, for the first time in the dojo I saw Gusi sensei sweat.

It took me many years to fully grasp all I saw that day.

His calmness, deftness of touch, the girl brown belt, the sensei's dumbfoundness. This was a man who had practiced Goju practically all his life, it was his very skin. The girl, I suppose, was himself young. The sensei's fate, my fate; some things are fanthomless. I realize now that I could not "know" him then. NowI know, but cannot do. Recently I caught an old sensei of mine smoking. Why? I said nothing. I've become zen in my old age: I look and say nothing, marvelling at the twists and turns of life. I remember he did a basic kata and it looked classic. It was distilled through time, aged in amber.
But I did not know this then.

Now...maybe too late, I have an inkling, just that.