Welcome to South Austin Aikido

The uniform of the martial artist. The dogi. You've seen them before, the white pajama-like pants and heavy-looking coat, wrapped at the waist with a belt. Sometimes the belt is white (designating a beginner), sometimes it's black (designating an advanced practitioner), and sometimes it's neither, but rather some Skittle-colored variation that indicates a rank somewhere in between.

On this, my first day ever of aikido training, I stand in the bathroom and examine myself in the mirror. My belt--like the rest of my uniform--is completely white. It's also--again like the rest of my dogi--ungainly and stiff. The gi overall is quite large, too long in the sleeves and legs and in general fits like David Byrne's suit in "Stop Making Sense".

I imagine martial arts demonstrations I've seen in the past. I imagine the flowing, graceful lines of the martial artists in the Japanese section of Epcot, whose demonstration included a couple of minutes of aikido and is arguably the proximate cause for my being here, now, in my very own uniform. I imagine the picture of my stepdaughter at age seven and all of 40 inches tall, and how imposing she looked in her tae-kwon-do uniform. The uniform you wear to say to the world, "Hey, I know a martial art!"

And I stand there, and I look in the mirror, and I realize my own uniform says something quite different. My belt doesn't hang in that limp and smooth way that speaks of the practitioner's hours of training. Instead, it is sticking out at the sides like a propeller on a spectacularly bad example of aviation engineering, something you see on those old movies of crazy inventors and their 16-winged flying machines. Instead of "Hey, I know a martial art!", it says, "Hey, I'm a big, dorky looking guy in oversized pajamas!"

I have, I realize suddenly, a long way to go.

For the first several classes, my aikido is a lot like my new dogi: stiff, awkward and uncomfortable. At the end of class, my dogi and I are soaked in sweat. The uniform goes into the washing machine (except for the belt, which accumulates the sweat and dirt of training, and displays each frayed thread and stain as a testament to your learning). The gi comes out ready for another class. My own aches, pains and physical inhibitions don't wash away in the spin cycle.

But I persevere. I struggle against my inherent clumsiness, struggling to maintain even the most basic poise and balance. I learn something of dojo etiquette, bowing on and off the mat, bowing to partners, bowing to the instructor. I learn to move my feet in unnatural patterns in order to perform improbable techniques. I observe how subtle movements of a person's body can greatly influence the energy of an attack directed against that person. Against the better judgment of my inner ear, I learn to roll, first to the back, then to the front, so when I provide the attack, I don't take as much damage as I might otherwise.

And I learn to recognize and pronounce words that do not, for me at least, fall trippingly from the tongue. Shomenuchi. Shikko. Bokken. Shihonage. Kokyu ho.

Dogi.

Three months later, my dogi has softened up a lot. It's not by any stretch of the imagination supple, but it doesn't stick out at odd angles. It shrunk considerably after the first two or three washes, so now instead of getting caught in my toes when I bend down, it stays up around my shins. Instead of dangling around my hands and whacking me in the face when I bring my hand up in front of my head, my sleeves now ride up on my arm a bit, exposing the skin and making it easy for my partner to grab my wrist.

My uniform isn't the only thing that's softened; my aikido has softened a lot as well. Like my dogi, it's not supple, not by a long shot. But neither does it have that painfully stiff, angular quality that makes it so difficult to feel the connection to your partner's center of movement. My technique has become ever-so-slightly more rounded, and I find myself moving naturally into positions that a few short weeks ago were as alien and uncomfortable to me as anything I've ever felt.

In a month, we have a seminar, three days of training with two classes on Saturday. When I asked around a couple of weeks ago, everybody said the same thing: "You need another dogi, you really don't want to put a wet gi back on." So I ordered one, and tonight it has arrived. I take it home and get ready to throw it in the laundry, and am struck by how stiff it is, how large, how uncomfortably rough. I can practically use the belt for a fishing pole, and heaven help you if you're on the receiving end of one of those pointy sleeve corners. But I realize that it will only take a short time for it to soften, shrink and be as familiar to me as my old gi.

Into the washing machine it goes, with my old, sweaty uniform from the night's class. By the time the seminar arrives, after a few more washes, I can no longer distinguish the newer gi from the older. I feel comfortable in it, and in the dojo, and on the mat, as I move through the techniques of aikido, searching for my center.