When I was six-years-old, sitting at my desk in Mrs. Bushnell’s First Grade class, I became aware that though I had the brain and body of a child, I was also a conveyance for an ageless, genderless, and fantastically wise consciousness that had been around long before Todd was born.
I remember being unsurprised by the
presence of this consciousness in six-year-old Todd, and for several minutes I
observed and understood my classmates and teacher and the objects in the
classroom with this newly revealed consciousness and not with the consciousness of a child.
I understood that my body and brain and self would continue to grow and change over time, but this other consciousness, this ageless consciousness, would remain unchanged throughout my life. I also understood that I could access this consciousness and the vast reservoir of knowledge and experience it possessed, but I might not.
And then, before my awareness of this other consciousness became submerged again in the sensations and thoughts and feelings of a six-year-old human child, I was informed that I would become aware of this other consciousness a few more times in the course of my life, and each time this awareness overtook me, I would remember the moment in Mrs. Bushnell’s class when I first encountered this ageless, genderless, fantastically wise consciousness that existed long before Todd was born.
And just a few days ago, this
ageless consciousness made itself known to me again, and I had a vivid recollection
of that marvelous moment in Mrs. Bushnell’s class sixty-five years ago when this
other aspect of being alive was made known to me.
Starting when I was about nine, and for a few years thereafter, I would be sitting quietly, usually outside, and I would see the myriad pieces of the great cosmic puzzle coming together. And I was certain if I could sit very still and give my undivided attention to this coming together of the pieces, the puzzle would complete itself and I would understand how the whole incredible construct of life worked.
And time and again, just as the
final pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, something would interrupt
my concentration, and the nearly complete construct would collapse.
One time it was my mother calling,
“Dinner’s ready!” Another time it was my dog barking at a squirrel.
Eventually those close calls with perfect understanding ceased to occur.
I
am in my office with an old friend and his young son. We are looking out the
window at the metal gate in our deer fence and my friend’s son asks wistfully,
“Can I go out that gate and go all the way around the house and come in through
the gate of ten thousand things?” And I know he means our front gate with the
two old bells.
Then the alarm went off and I woke
up.
The gate of ten thousand things reminds me of my short story Ten Thousand Things, one of the forty-two stories in Buddha In A Teacup.
∆
Ten Thousand Things
Esme watches herself in the mirror putting on
lipstick. She frowns at her myriad wrinkles and snorts at the absurdity of the
thought that she has grown old. She is eighty-six.
∆
Esme is standing in front of her house when her
son Bill arrives. He is fifty-eight. Before he can get out of his big blue
pickup truck, Esme barks at him. “Move the garbage can out to the curb. Sweep
up these pine needles. They’re unsightly.”
“Ma,” he says, working hard to stay calm. “How
about saying hello?”
She flounces around the nose of his truck to
the passenger door as if nothing has been said by either of them.
She climbs in and puts on her seatbelt. “I
don’t know why I bother,” she complains bitterly. “They haven’t had a decent
fair in twenty years.”
“We don’t have to go,” he says, gripping the
steering wheel. “This is supposed to be for fun, Ma.”
“Of course we have to go,” she says, sneering
imperiously. “It’s a tradition.”
∆
Inching toward the fairgrounds, traffic
snarled, Esme shakes her head and says, “I told you so.”
Bill turns to her. “Ma. How old am I?”
“Horrendous heat,” she says, fanning herself
and making a spluttering sound. The day is mild, the truck air-conditioned.
“Why do they always have the fair when the weather is so awful?” She sighs.
“Worse now, of course. We never had
smog like this.”
Bill resists the temptation to point out that
she is part of the current We. He closes his eyes, wondering again why he
bothers to do anything for his mother.
They come to a dead stop. Esme sighs—an audible
moan—exactly as she has sighed ten thousand times before, but this time, this
ten thousandth time, something gives way inside of Bill, something in his
heart. He touches his sternum with the middle three fingers of his right hand
and for one stunning moment he feels such overwhelming pain that his vision
abandons him in a flash of light—and the pain is gone.
He turns to look at his mother. She is glaring
at the road ahead as she always does, but he sees something in her face he has
not been aware of before—nobility and strength.
“What could it possibly be?” she asks, her voice no longer grating but musical—a viola
taken to the edge of sharpness. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
“It’s the Grand Coulee Dam, Ma,” he says,
feeling a gush of love for her. “They brought it in last night with sixty-five
thousand blimps.”
“Don’t be absurd!” she cries, trying to contain her mirth, but the word blimps unglues her and she bursts into laughter.
∆
In line to buy tickets, Esme scowls at the list
of admission prices. “This is an outrage,” she hisses. “This is robbery. Why… when
I was a girl it was practically free.”
“Free love,” says Bill, stepping up to the
ticket window and beaming at the sweaty young woman glued to her stool. “One
outraged old woman and her suddenly euphoric son.”
“She your mom?” asks the young woman—two
tickets emerging from two slots in the metal counter.
“From her womb I came,” says Bill, feeling
downright reverent.
“Then she’s in free. It’s moms in free this
afternoon.”
“You here that, Ma? Free.”
“Don’t believe it,” says Esme, her eyes
narrowing. “They’re just trying to sell us something.”
∆
In the beer garden, Bill sipping stout, Esme
having lemonade, three knobby-kneed men in faded lederhosen play a peppy little
polka.
“Shall we dance, Ma?” asks Bill, nodding. “I
think we shall.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she says, frowning at him.
“With my hip? Are you drunk?”
“I’ve had a conversion,” he says, seeing
everything as if for the first time. “I stepped over a line or my heart broke
or I forgave you or I forgave myself. I don’t know. But I’m not mad at you
anymore. I actually love you.”
She shrugs. “Well la dee da.”
“Shoe bop shoe wah,” he says, bouncing his
eyebrows.
She looks at her watch. “It’s late. We haven’t
seen the quilts yet.”
∆
Making their way through a flood of humanity,
they are momentarily separated—Esme crying, “Bill! Don’t leave me!”
Bill makes his way to her and says, “Here I am,
Ma.”
She clutches his arm and stamps her feet. “This
is awful. I hate this. They ruined everything. It used to be so nice and now
look at it. Garbage everywhere. No place to sit. The restrooms are filthy.”
“Do you want to leave or do you want to see the
quilts?”
“I want
to see the quilts,” she groans. “But how will we ever get there?”
“We will sing songs,” he says, taking her hand.
“From all our favorite musicals.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, allowing him
to lead her along.
“We’re off
to see the wizard,” he begins. “The wonderful wizard of Oz.”
“Judy Garland was a drug addict,” says Esme,
nodding emphatically. “I could never forgive her for that.”
“Why not?” says Bill, giving his mother’s hand
a gentle squeeze. “Let’s forgive her.”
“Oh, look,” says Esme, pointing at the sign
above the pavilion. “We’re here.”
∆
“I never gave a hoot about quilts,” says Bill,
sitting beside his mother on a cushioned bench to take a long look at the grand
prizewinner. “Now I’m in love.”
“These are nothing,” says Esme, dismissing
everything in the vast room with a wave of her hand. “When I was a girl, we really knew how to make quilts.”
“This is phantasmagoric,” says Bill, gesturing
at the giant blue field dotted with stars and sheep and bubbles and clouds. “I believe in this.”
“It’s big,” says Esme, nodding. “I’ll give it
that.”
“You’re just you,” he says, looking at her.
“And I’m just me.”
“I’m out of gas,” she says, leaning against
him. “Take me home?”
∆
He walks her to her front door. “Shall I come
in? Cook you dinner? Rub your feet?”
She turns away and fits her key into the lock.
“Not like it used to be,” she sighs, opening the door. “Don’t come in. Place is
a mess.”
“Ma?” he says, deftly sending the word into her
heart.
“Yes, dear,” she says, turning to gaze at him. “That’s me.”
I’m fascinated by how we learn things. I recently read that there seems to be a strong correlation between the elimination of handwriting from the American school curriculum and the steep decline in academic test scores. I have also read that many children with learning disabilities have overcome their learning disabilities by developing handwriting and memorization skills.
memorize:
commit to memory, learn by heart
Mr. Nail was my English teacher for my senior year of high school. If I ever knew Mr. Nail’s first name, such knowledge is lost to the sound and the fury of the intervening fifty-four years. I want to call him Hank Nail, but that’s just a funny guess.
My sister Kathy was one of Mr. Nail’s star students a couple years before me, and she also starred in the Shakespeare plays Mr. Nail directed. However, Mr. Nail’s fondness for my sister did not extend to me. Why? I had a long-established habit (since First Grade) of occasionally making unsolicited comments during class, which comments often got laughs, and sometimes big laughs.
And though for the most part Mr. Nail tolerated my spur-of-the-moment comments, he clearly preferred being the one who got the laughs. Thus my friends and I were under the impression Mr. Nail didn’t like me. However, in retrospect I think there is a chance he secretly did like me, and he appreciated the lift in the collective spirit my occasional verbal intrusions imparted to our academic experience.
Also in retrospect, I think Mr. Nail was a very good teacher, though much of what he taught was lost on me as my mind was frequently elsewhere during those long hours of incarceration. He was little interested in right answers and very interested in the elegance and power of good writing, and he was always keen to discuss the deeper meanings of words and stories and plays.
Once a week (and we all wished he
would do this every day) Mr. Nail would open his big dictionary at random and
read an entire page out loud to us, a practice I found delightful and
instructive and inspiring. I began reading the dictionary on my own, learned
many fascinating words and factoids that way, and eventually purchased a fat
two-volume version of the Oxford English Dictionary which makes for great
random page reading.
When we undertook to study a play by Shakespeare, Mr. Nail’s specialty, he would spontaneously cast class members as the characters in whatever Shakespeare play we were reading and have us read a scene aloud. At scene’s end, to demystify the bewildering passages, he would pontificate on the historical or symbolical meanings of particular words and phrases. He thought Shakespeare was terrific and wanted us to think so, too.
My favorite thing Mr. Nail did was give us weekly updates on his hobby, which was entering contests sponsored by magazines and newspapers and manufacturers and food purveyors and towns and cities and churches and non-profit organizations. I don’t know if these kinds of contests are a big deal nowadays, but in 1967 there were so many such contests that Mr. Nail subscribed to a weekly newsletter to keep up with the thousands of contests happening year-round. And he entered dozens of these contests every week!
In his contest updates he would tell us how many contests he’d entered in the last week, which contests he was most optimistic about winning, and if he’d had any wins. Many of these contests merely required contestants to fill out entry forms and send them in. But some of these contests required little essays, and those were the contests Mr. Nail excelled at. He’d won many prizes over the years including a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, a bicycle, groceries, lawn mowers, gift certificates, and a considerable amount of cash.
The crowning glory of my time with
Mr. Nail came shortly before the end of the school year when Mr. Nail told us
he’d won an all-expenses-paid two-week trip for two to Europe. Through the fog
of time, I seem to recall he won that trip by writing a five-hundred-word essay
about unique uses for a small canister propane torch, but maybe not.
In a recent exchange with Max about
poems and poetry, Max inquired of two poems I wrote in the early 1970s that are
the first poems I published, both appearing in the delightful Santa Cruz free
weekly newspaper Sundaz. I received
no pay for these poems but was thrilled beyond words to be a published poet.
The first of my poems to appear in Sundaz was that clicking sound? A year or so after that clicking sound? debuted, the poem was included in a chapbook anthology of Sundaz poems called the the. I no longer have a copy of the the, but I still have my poem.
that clicking sound?
we
have a hundred men downstairs
each
employed
in
some
part
of the process;
breaking
the
backs
of crickets
The second poem of mine to appear in Sundaz was pilgrimage. Coincidence or not, pilgrimage
also mentions insects. Well, more than mentions. In each poem insects are the
denouement.
pilgrimage
went
to see the saint,
the
martyr,
found
him
sitting
by a wall
his
tears falling on
ants
Reading that clicking sound? fifty years after it appeared in Sundaz, I remember the moment I saw the poem in the paper.
