If you want to have a laugh, you
are really into Karate or you are my wife, you may want to read this….if you don’t
fit the bill for these then you probably should skip this post…and get a sense
of humor! Seriously this post is going
to dip a bit into my mentality, which is a strange place to go in the first
place, but humorous none the less.
So, the other night I was out with
my lovely wife, wining and dining at one of our local high end…okay we were at
the local subway eating our favorite sandwiches. We settled on this restaurant
as it was convenient and we were out running around when our respite worker and
Emma’s bestie was taking care of her. After a few minutes of reviewing what we
had to get done for the night out our conversation finally came to one of the
most common conversations we have…which is her asking “And what the hell were
you doing in your office today?”, a question you won’t be surprised is very
common when we chat.
See I work at home right now and
I basically live in my office, a space that we sort of share, her end of the
office is nestled in the “Library” end of the room and mine is a cold white
table with two laptops (one of which I use for stuff like this and the other
strictly work). Anyways the last few days I have been doing some spring
cleaning such as looking at books, magazines and old stuff to see what I can
toss. I am right now looking at lightening the load because we have been sort
of looking at moving into a new home in the next year or so and I don’t want to
haul stuff I don’t need to. Of course, I am wanting a home with a nice area in
the basement to train in and possibly a double car garage for a Dojo…er my car
to have room to stretch out…yah, that’s it!
So, this week I turned to the
old chest of drawers I have been lugging around for years, they were my
brothers when we grew up and I have had them for years. I normally keep things
in them that hold special memories for me. I opened the top drawer and found an
old Billy club that the city of Winnipeg gave my instructor for teaching them
self defense years ago, I inherited it from him. I also had a old New Yorks Knicks jersey
(Patrick Ewing) from when I loved the NBA. I also had a bunch of stuff I used
to use for tournament first aide and training. Ankle wrap cloth, Tape and such.
All of this stayed put, the next FIVE drawers were Old uniforms…..Karate Gi’s
actually (well two Judo Gi’s and 12 Karate Gi’s). This is what the story is
actually about!
I knew I would not have a tone
of time to go through the drawers of Uniforms but I also knew I had to toss out
a few, I have Gi’s from when I was in my teens that I cant wear for various
reason, which I will outline in a bit, and newer ones that I simply don’t wear
because I have been using a different brand of Gi. I took all the uniforms out
and piled their perfectly folded “bodies” up into three different piles near my
desk and started going through them. I picked up the oldest uniforms first and
opened them up, held the jackets open, inspected the pants and checked out each
rip, each stain and the color that the materials changed too. Each Gi had its
own history, the older ones…which were much smaller than I could wear now…were
white, had little wear on them and old ISKF Patches that were faded badly, one
I could not read clearly. They were light cotton, felt almost fluffy and soft
as time had not compressed them and they did not hold a lot of perspiration to
alter them.
The older ones held lots of
memories of the kid’s classes at the old JKA of Manitoba headquarters from when
I was a pre-teen and into my teens. I remember training under Tammy Sensei and
other assistant instructors as well as early classes with Sensei D filled with lots
of basics, marching back and forth on the third floor Dojo. The kid’s classes
focused on super basic work outs that made my tired and challenged but they
were not designed to kill us.
I dug deeper into the old
uniforms finding those that I accumulated in my late teens and early adult
hood, the Canvas uniforms that felt stiff, rough and had yellowed over time. They
were the ones that I wore when I went into the classes in East St. Paul and
when we moved to the first floor of the Albert street club. Those were the
classes that you needed three uniforms a week to cover you when you were in the
trials of the Dojo, beating up your body and challenging your soul in class. The
uniforms were all tattered, shredded and you could feel the wear on the once
thick canvas, thinned out in the elbows, knees, thighs, and the once pristine
collar and reinforced areas of the Gi were now worn and frayed.
Each uniform that I opened up
and held out had its own memory and as I told Mags about the Uniforms little
memories flooded back, weird ones that had nothing to do with the Karate itself
as well. The guy that had his tailor shop around the corner from the Dojo that
altered all our uniforms for us, the way his thick accent made it hard to
understand him, and his crooked smile with his one yellow tooth. How in the summer
you did not want a Gi mended, hemmed or patched because he never showered and
had no air conditioning in his shop, saying “In Trinidad this is winter”. The
way the bag from Mikado felt when you got it from Pat and the anticipation of
wearing a new Uniform for the first time in a class would feel like wearing a
tank! Each uniform I opened up held its own memory but it also opened the flood
gates for other memories.
The problem soon flooded in as I
was opening up and unfolding Uniforms, trying some on and inevitably throwing
them in one of two piles, toss or keep! The problem was…the uniforms ended up
feeling lifeless. I don’t know what I expected but I was not struck with some
mystic Ki ball of emotion or some thunder bolt of memory from the Gi itself, I
had the memories and they spurred them on, but I realized that the memories
were coming from me, not the uniform. They felt dead, they felt lifeless and
for the most part…they felt sort of gross! Some were so soaked in oils and
perspiration that had dried, been partially washed out and then reapplied in
classes long since forgotten and then redried. They had been tossed aside
because some were to small, old and in most cases, ripped up and in tatters.
They did not hold any answers to the questions I am constantly asking nor did
they feel like they would serve to motivate me at all. They were dead!
I had thought by putting them in
the chest of drawers that they would serve to motivate me and more so that they
would keep my memories alive about training with my Sensei and the many masters
he brought in and more so with the others in our organization whom I miss
training with. They did not! The piles and piles of Karate uniforms that I was
going to toss out became much larger and the piles of those that I was going to
keep very small, and made up of Gi’s I could still use if push came to shove.
I recognised different uniforms that I was throwing
into the “Toss” pile as a tournament uniform that I had purchased brand new
that I wore twice, the last time I broke my nose so bad that the front of the white
canvas was soaked in my own blood and the stain never came out. The brownish
blobs on the front to horrible to wear in regular classes and not acceptable to
wear when teaching. One of the uniforms so badly ripped up that the patches
were held together with other patches…in the jacket and the legs. One
particular rip being given to me by a senior as he demonstrated Heian Godans Mawashi
Shuto Gedan and almost ripping my pants clean off me! None of these uniforms
were in anyway going to be used other than to clean a Dojo floor.
As I put on old Gi tops were opened and I put them
on I started to think about how the old uniforms that I was trying on felt next
to the ones I currently wear. Admittedly it was at first me thinking how snug
they were, and how the material felt or how lose they were and how the canvas was
rough and not at all as soft as the ones I currently wear. However, my mind drifted
more to the life in the uniforms and how the old ones felt like corpses of lost
times and not something I want to hold onto! Most of the ones in the toss pile
were their because they simply did not fit, or they were stained and ripped up…but
some felt wrong. They had big round circles that once held ISKF patches, which
I have not been a member of for Decades, or they were from a time that we
drifted outside of any organization but trained like we had something to prove.
I put the Gi’s on looking for Daijina omoide or precious
memories, and all I found was lifeless cloth, so the old duck canvas, now
yellowed with time and missing the life force we imbibe into them…ended up on a
pile on my floor waiting to be put into a garbage bag and tossed out. This lock
down and the spring cleaning I am doing have really opened up my mind to the
important things, to not just remembering the old training but in focusing on
making new memories and new training memories.
