Cross-Pollination on Shakedown Street

I’ve been thinking about the melting pot that is our own lives, and how our impermanence and everyone else’s impermanence is precisely what fuels interdependence, that thing that keeps our world spinning. I’ve gained and I’ve lost, and all of it makes my experience what it is. You can’t have one without the other.

In the winter of my sophomore year in college, I stayed at a hostel called The Beehive in Rome near Termini Station with a friend from high school. An American couple owned the place and kept it clean and cheerful. Our room had multiple bunk beds occupied by strangers and we shared bathrooms with travelers from around the world. People congregated in the kitchen to prepare food and linger in conversations at a long dining table. There was also a computer station with internet access, back in the days when we all waited for a turn to check our email. An American mother and her young adult daughter from somewhere in the Midwest were hogging it, frantic to contact their bank because their wallet had been stolen on the metro during rush hour. It was in this room that we met Scarlett Begonias from Seattle, Washington. 

Scarlett was friendly and confident, striking up a conversation with us two shy California college girls. She suggested we walk to the local market and pick up groceries to cook dinner together back at The Beehive. I was still living at home, so this level of adulting blew my mind. My friend and I agreed to accompany her, drawn to her worldliness like moths to a flame. 

At the store, Scarlett introduced us to pesto, which I had never tasted. She mulled over her options as she casually strolled down the aisles, grabbing a red wine to pair with the dinner, a crusty bread to go with our pasta, some fresh parmesan to sprinkle on top of whatever vision she had for the meal. As we got to know her, she told us about her life at university, and also how she lost a brother in a car crash. I felt a wisdom in her presence, the kind only acquired in the real world, the kind that felt as far away as the moon to me. 

She explained her unusual name: Scarlett Begonias. 

“My parents liked the Grateful Dead. I’m named after the song ‘Scarlet Begonias,’” she said. 

Just as I was clueless about the pesto, I also had no idea who the Grateful Dead were. Indeed, I had been born and bred in a bubble. 

After dinner Scarlett suggested an evening stroll through the ruins that were lit up at night, and it was something me and my friend would have never figured out on our own. At any rate I would have been too nervous to wander around a foreign city in the dark, and my friend was an even bigger chicken than I was. But Scarlett didn’t think twice, and because we thought she was cool and more grownup than we were, we eagerly agreed to her being our tour guide.

After our time in Rome came to an end, my friend and I continued on to Paris with our backpacks. We never saw Scarlett again.

When I got home, because you couldn’t just pull up YouTube back then, I looked up “Scarlet Begonias” on Napster. And then “Casey Jones”. “Sugar Magnolias”. “Truckin”. This elder millennial who grew up loving Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac—from my dad’s generation—was hooked. 

I met Kenneth at my new job teaching high school history 4 years after I learned about The Grateful Dead in Rome. It was right around this time of year, which may be one of hte reasons he weighs so heavily on my mind in October. He taught in the room next door to mine, but we didn’t exchange our first words until I had been there for a month. 

I stood outside of the classroom on Halloween, the giant hoop skirt of my Elizabethan queen costume barely able to fit through the doorway, partially blocking the entrance as I waited to greet students. I felt slightly dorky about my choice in costumes.

He came out of his classroom dressed like Indiana Jones. The movie soundtrack blasted from inside of his room, so loud the wall that we shared vibrated. He leaned against his door and studied me with a serious expression.

“Who are you supposed to be?” 

“An Elizabethan queen,” I said, diverting my eyes, feeling embarrassed but forcing a smile, the new girl not wanting to be offensive.

“Oh.” 

He ignored me for an entire three months after that brief exchange. 

Our next encounter happened after I presented at a workshop on our professional development day in the spring. Kenneth later told me that I looked cute while I talked about cooperative learning to a full classroom of teachers. He claimed that was the first time he really noticed me, and he decided to get to know me right then and there. I remember he talked to me throughout lunch, preventing me from eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I packed. Two years later, we were married. 

We used to go camping every summer. Our white Toyota minivan would be stuffed to the gills. The kids. Car Seats. The dog. The gear. Old clunky coolers that never kept the ice frozen. The quintessential American family vacation, something we both dreamt of having someday with our children. 

A debate would ensue about music on the long drive up the 5 freeway. Kenneth hated my Grateful Dead and Tom Petty. I wasn’t going to let him win the music war. We compromised on Madonna. 

Somehow that’s what happens in marriage. You step into the melting pot and bits and pieces of each of you swirl into something new, while other bits and pieces fade away. You’re a different configuration. I swore it wouldn’t happen. And then it did.

One April morning during the diaper years of our life together, I woke up before work to what I thought might be a sick kid with croup. I got out of bed and started checking each room to figure out where the noise was coming from at that hour. One of us would have to call in sick and request a substitute and write sub plans. But it wasn’t the kids. Instead, I found my husband on the floor of our entryway gasping for air. 

The night before, I fell asleep talking to him in bed. The rest of our lives were waiting. I never once thought it would happen otherwise. But hours later, my life as I knew it was over without any warning. I never got to say goodbye. The universe shoved me through that doorway of no return, and I became a widow and only parent to a 13-month-old, 3-year-old, and 6-year-old. 

You step out of the melting pot a new configuration again, lonelier, scared, grasping at the familiar parts of you that were shared with him, but they slip through your fingers like sand. You are becoming somebody different and there is no stopping it, no matter how hard you try. This was my first encounter with the slippery nature of life. Every other signs of impermanence had been subtle, incremental. This was a pull-the-rug-from-beneath-your-feet surprise attack. It felt like a cruel injustice. 

And also: exactly like real life. 

When I go to the grocery store, I often run into one of Kenneth’s former students who has worked there since he graduated from high school. I don’t remember every student, but I remember this one because Kenneth complained about him. He was a handful: talkative, off-task, squirrelly, poor grades. He always greets me with, “Hello, Mrs. Shimogawa.” When I hear that name from anyone, I know they were from that specific chapter of my life, the one between Miss and Ms., the world where Kenneth existed and we were building a life together, a family, a future. These encounters are significant to me, because it reminds me that my husband was real. It wasn’t just a figment of my faded imagination. He was real. I think he is still here. He never really left. There are pieces of him still in the melting pot. 

I’m not the new girl anymore at work anymore. Almost two decades later I’m the department chair, and I hired a young man for our department to teach World and U.S. History. He ended up having to share my classroom the year we came back from distance learning after COVID disrupted our lives. Each day I taught my zero period class, and then I packed up to go somewhere else so the new teacher could take over. He was cool. I tried my best to ignore when he moved things on my desk, or how his students seemed to write on all of my furniture, unruly sophomores taking advantage of their very nice first year teacher at the helm. After each weekend, the new teacher and I would exchange niceties about what we did. For Halloween, he told me he saw Dead and Company.

“Who’s that?” I asked. 

“Like Grateful Dead, but with John Mayer singing for Jerry Garcia.” 

My eyes widened. How did I not know this? I had been living in a widow-solo parent- bubble while raising three young kids and teaching full time while emotionally hemorrhaging and trying to heal. I suppose I was bound to miss a few things happening in the world around me. 

At the beginning of my 8th grade year in school, Bob Weir from The Grateful Dead was interviewed a month after his bandmate Jerry Garcia died. 

Kurt Cobain died the year before and people were still wearing flannels in the popular grunge style. Selena died 4 months before Jerry did. I did not know of her, but some of my classmates cried over it. Nobody was talking about Jerry at school.  I’m definitely late to the party today.

Almost thirty years later, 42-year-old Teresa stumbles upon this interview. The interviewer discussed how the Deadheads were wondering where they would go from here now that Jerry, long considered the lead of the band, was gone. 

“Is it the end of the band?” the interviewer asked Bob. 

Bobby explained that they were still trying to figure it out. He said, “As to what Jerry did…that real special thing. It’s still there. I’m quite sure that if we get together and start kicking stuff around, if we listen in our hearts, inside somewhere, that we’ll hear that thread that we’ve always heard. And I’m sure he’s still singing. I can hear it. I’m sure anyone who was ever exposed to that joy and that creativity and wickedness and all that kind of stuff that he used to project, that mischief and the love, it’s still there. It’s in you. You can’t lose that. Once you catch that it stays in you. And so, it’s not like he’s gone. It’s not like if we get together he won’t be there.” 

I could feel his words.

A blank black and white paint-by-numbers picture appeared on the Sphere screen in Las Vegas as Dead and Company began to play “Uncle John’s Band” on June 22, 2024. Gradually the picture filled up with colors making a whimsical scene, and when it was done filling in each part, a rainbow appeared in the sky. Two turtles were off to each side, one playing the banjo and the other the tambourine. There were other people at the show closer to my age and some even younger. We were like John Mayer, who sang on stage in place of the long-dead Jerry Garcia, looking perhaps a little out of place next to Bob Weir with his white hair and beard, but somehow right where we were all supposed to be in this trajectory, part of something bigger than any of us, all of our threads intertwined in a shared energy.

I would have never been to that show if Kenneth were still alive. I was deeply aware of this fact. He’d for sure be complaining about how much I paid for the tickets, or how bad he thought the music was. Of course I would have given up the opportunity to have him back. But in lieu of that option, I get this. I call these moments of joy in this trajectory of my life—this direction that wouldn’t exist in my previous life with him—my silver lining. It taps into a part of me that lay dormant in my years of marriage. These moments remind me that our lives are full of doorways to explore; one door shutting doesn’t mean the end. It usually means new beginnings. Back into the melting pot. Come out dripping new colors.

Life can be so sad. We can experience tremendous loss that breaks us. Our suffering can make us question why and how anything could ever matter again. And also: there will be so much more happiness and joy. We can rebuild. We can start new. There is happiness beyond anything we can conceptualize and there is no limit. The only requirement is an open heart. An ability to see and feel the many threads—like Jerry’s thread that Bob Weir described— the many invisible threads that connect our past and present to our future. The threads that connect us to each other. In this way, we contribute a kind of energy into the world, and also in this way, we never really die. We’re still in the melting pot. 

The next morning after the Dead show, I went to check out the Las Vegas Buddhist Sangha, one of the many Shin Buddhist temples scattered in North America. I drove 20 minutes north of the strip into the regular, unglamorous part of the city. 

I never thought I would be a part of any religious group. I was sure I would die as an atheist. I agreed to let my husband raise the kids as Buddhists at his childhood temple in Orange County, CA, but when he died, I had to make a decision. I chose to drive them to dharma school. For him. Only as the chauffeur. I was a former Catholic who swore I didn’t need any religion in my life. But over time, accidentally, I listened in at adult study while waiting for the kids. I had no intention to commit, but eventually I found the thread. It felt like my husband left it for me to find, and it felt true. It connected me to him and to everyone else who came before me on this path. Then one day, I’m taking graduate classes on Mahayana Sutras and learning how to place incense and chant as a minister’s assistant. This is what the melting pot does: show you new versions of yourself beyond your wildest dreams.

The Las Vegas Sangha is located in an office building complex. You would expect furniture wholesale, but instead the door is in the back of the building and you step into their hondo, see the bell, hear the people, are greeted by their hospitality person with a clipboard to sign in so they can welcome you out loud at the end of service. 

An Air Force Major gave the talk that day. He found them three years ago, at the end of COVID closures, in the midst of a personal crisis. It was his last day there. He was transferring to Alabama, where there weren’t any Shin Buddhist temples. After he spoke, people said words of gratitude for the Major. They praised his kindness. His sense of community. They gifted him an obutsudan (a mini altar), onenju (prayer beads), and a monto shikisho to wear around his neck as a symbol of his dedication in following the path. 

I was struck by the gesture. The man had only been a part of their sangha for three years, and yet it had meant something to them, and the relationship was equally meaningful to the Major. Even though they all knew he was likely never coming back. Despite the impermanence, the sangha in Vegas honored their brief but meaningful connection. Somehow they knew it would have an impact beyond what they could conceptualize. I thought it was beautiful. 

I made the 5 hour drive back home to California listening to The Grateful Dead music. “Bertha”. “Morning Dew”. “Candyland”. I thought about these fleeting encounters, the people in our lives who leave too soon, the way their threads are forever bound to our own, and how we carry them forward and weave new colors into the rest of our lives. It’s sad without them, but it’s also infinitely more beautiful because of them.

At the end of the Dead and Company show, there was a final Haight-Ashbury scene. They incorporated old news broadcasts to make you feel like you were back in their heyday. The reporter said, “These free-spirited showgoers would prefer the music never stop.”

And it never does, not as long as we are still out there living and loving and being. How an encounter with Scarlett in Rome could make me a Deadhead, or how I could become a Buddhist after marrying my Japanese-American colleague—and then losing him—is a testament to the cross-pollination that exists in all facets of our lives. No matter where we are, who we are with, what we are doing, if our heart is whole or broken or glued back together, the impermanence and interdependence of this life we live is a great opportunity. We are better because of it. It fuels our joy, and also it can be a source of suffering. Both can be true. But in the end, it is all a rare and wondrous gift to behold. 

Kenneth’s birthday is next week, and this time of year I’m always seized with a sense of sadness. It’s his Forever 52 Birthday. There are no new pictures. No new memories. It feels like such a distant memory that I often wonder if it was even real. That’s happening more frequently as I lose more and more loved ones.

My favorite poem is Stanley Kunitz’ “The Layers.” 

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

I never really considered myself good with dates, but I’m good with documenting history, and I remember the birthdays and deathaversies of my loved ones like an alarm clock. My body feels it, his absence, the unfairness of it all pooling inside of my heart, the grief that asserts itself no matter how many layers have grown over it, buried it, tried to forget it. These are the things that can not be forgotten. 

We’re in the middle of election season. I remember how frustrated Kenneth would get about convincing other people to care as much as he did about the issues. It’s so hard. It’s like getting people to volunteer for anything. Soccer. Girl Scouts. Whatever. “It’s your kid,” or “it’s your livelihood” are facts that are not good enough. Or maybe it’s a communication or logistical issue; we’re all at different points. It’s not always possible to meet people where they are at, yet the show must go on. The work must get done. I feel his invisible thread as we work on the election. I know he’s here, giving us the spirit to continue, to try even when it doesn’t seem possible.

Dodgers are in the World Series. I wish Kenneth were around. He always made it known that he was a Dodgers fan and not an Angels fan, despite the fact that the only player he knew was Steve Garvey from when he was a kid. The same Steve Garvey running for the CA senator this election, and my goodness. K would have had a field day with that one. This is not a world he would recognize. Especially me rooting for the Dodgers. Gooooo Dodgers!

Each day we have this gift of submerging oursleves in this melting pot of life. Each day we come out of it a new configuration, not the same as the day before, not going to be the same tomorrow. I feel grateful to entire spectrum of the human experience. It’s truly a wild ride. I look forward to what comes next.

***

If you are interested, here are a couple things I’ve done recently:

I gave a talk at my temple last weekend. Sourdough Dharma. It was inspired by my new sourdough baking hobby. 

This summer I had an essay come out in Tiny Buddha: How to Deal with Worries.

More to come!