Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Dogi de no seikatsu

 


                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.

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