Some Assembly Required (22 page)

I had an informal co-op while raising Sam: his godmothers Pammy and Peggy, grandmothers Nikki and Gertrud, Stevo, Sam’s makeshift Big Brother Brian, Bill and Emmy, Millard, Neshama, four adopted and cherished gay uncles. I borrowed the rent from friends when I needed to. Some of them bought me a washing machine. Sam was playful, watchful, curious, filled with scientific wonder, a sweet, silly boy, too, but quieter than his son. Jax is louder joy, lifting, flinging, uncovering, discovering, bouncing up and down. I don’t think the world was quite as safe for Sam as it is for Jax, and this makes me feel terrible. But I’m glad beyond words that, because of the co-op’s great work, Jax has a father around.

Spring gets you every time. Every year it sucks me in, but then, I’m easy—a few cool blue skies, new grass, wildflowers, and I’m in love. You’re going to fall for that old magic trick again? Oh, yeah.

Today our green hills look like they need a haircut. There are daffodils sprouting, narcissus (and the smaller version,
paper whites) among the grass and weeds. The way the spring light falls on blades of grass can undo me. Of course, coiled up in all this beauty is horrible summer. The spring is bait, like babyhood. It’s how life keeps you hooked in. Just as the endless cold and rain start to gain the upper hand in the war for your spirit, spring comes out to hike up its skirts and seduce you.

Spring comes infinitely more quickly and often, the older you get, seemingly every seven months now. The faster the merry-go-round spins, the more blurry it gets, and the Viennese music begins to sound a little warped.

Everything is so lovely against the green—flowers and white egrets in the meadows, horses and cows in the fields lining the road on the way to the coast. The cows are the color of See’s lollypops. The sky is oceanic blue. You would need a lot of weaverly tricks to capture the spectrum of blue, from the bright baby blue of eyes, to pale blue, all the way to eggshell and white.

In summer, you just walk around making sounds like Lurch.

A young friend of mine from church, who’s now also close to Amy, took care of Jax. She e-mailed me this morning.

“Hi Annie: I loved babysitting Jax. We observed big kids at the park, two and three year olds and he sort of made
friends with a seven-month-old named Chloe in the baby swings. She smiled at him the whole time and he just looked at her so seriously and didn’t take his eyes off her once, not even to blink.

“Later we were at the grassy dog park in Fairfax when a baby squirrel fell from the sky and landed on a woman’s lap. We think a big bird must have dropped it because the woman wasn’t under a tree. It was healthy looking and very tiny. Jax made such funny faces when he saw it. Initially, when he first spotted it, he did a bit of a double take, and looked at the squirrel with big eyes, then looked at me with a half-smile, then back at the squirrel. This is what the expression was on his face for most of the dramatic squirrel experience: what the FUCK?

“The face he made gave me the impression that he thought it was somewhat pathetic, like he knew he was much bigger and more important than this squirrel, but he was still curious about it. The woman who had it fall on her lap walked around with the authority of Mother Goose, and the baby squirrel followed her around everywhere, hopping like a bunny because it seemed to have a broken back leg. Jax’s mouth was hanging wide open at this time and he made eye contact with me a few times to see what I thought. The woman would stop and kneel by the squirrel and stroke its back with a tiny stick, and the squirrel would close his eyes in bliss, with his butt up in the air and face burrowed in the grass while she did this. Then it would get back to following her around
the park. We were still there when the animal rescue van from the Humane Society came to take him to the hospital.”

Amy and Jax left for Chicago a few days ago.

This morning I went for a hike in the hills with the dogs. I brought Jax up here in his baby backpack last week. I won’t be able to carry him much longer. My back ached almost as soon as we started, and we had to stop often. Right below us was the yard of the school where Sam went for fourth and fifth grade, and around it, a very organized, rich-pink ring of plum trees was in full bloom, with a green doily of leaves holding it all up. It was crazy, like Bozo’s head or a circle of giant manicured poodles. It must have been a full plum orchard back in the day. Maybe it’s a landing strip for Alturians now. It’s as beautiful and intense as the stained glass at Mission Dolores.

I loved the weightlessness of not having Jax on my back. Today the blossoms were fully opened, mauve, silver, and cool pink.

My friend Mary e-mailed me again:

“Dear Annie: you asked for more details on my day with Jax. After the incident with the squirrel who fell from the
sky, we went to the other park, where all the swings and older kids are. His face was just as rapt with the big kids at the park, as it was with the squirrel. I took him up close up to observe them at the climbing structure. Some of the kids gave me dirty looks because we were really up in their business, but Jax and I were very brave and stayed put. When Jax looked at the squirrel, he knew that he was bigger and cooler than it was; when he observed the big kids, he knew they were bigger, and he thought they were so cool. The seven-month-old girl, Chloe, had
no
teeth showing, she was all gums and smiles, with such a big mouth and a shiny bald head. She looked like my grandpa Earl, only uglier. I loved her, such a happy funny-looking baby girl. Jax didn’t smile at her once, even though that’s all she did for him.”

It is Mother’s Day. Amy and Jax are still in Chicago. They are having brunch with Trudy at the grandmother’s con valescent home; they don’t get back until late this afternoon, so Neshama and I picked Sam up at ten and drove to Los Altos.

There were only four people there when we arrived, and horribly, no Ragu, who is the main reason we come. Also, the nice elderly Jewish-looking harmonium player was not there. Instead, there was a beautiful, overweight Deadhead type playing guitar and chant-singing
Baba nam kevalam,
and two
young Asian women doing light harmonies. It felt nice and familiar and harmonic, like Peter, Paul & Mary during their early years. The guitar made you feel bouncier in the body than the harmonium did. The quality of the harmonium is sharp and wheezy, and otherworldly, whereas this guitar was
quite
worldly.

The young women were lovely and light, eyes closed dreamily.

I found it distressing that the ancient harmonium player was not there, but then he arrived, and went to the back of the room to take his place among the other latecomers. In front, the emaciated Indian man leading today’s service was dressed in saffron robes, and I did not feel any real contact with him. I thought of him as the Sub, like some math substitute who has to fill in for a history teacher. He was shifting vaguely from foot to foot, gently removed from us, like someone who had dropped in from another plane of existence, like Jax’s squirrel. He didn’t do it right, like we are big experts now.

Sam stood beside me in his most private stance. Watching someone in devotion is more private than watching someone sleep, which is so paradoxical, like most truth, since you see a person’s deepest interior landscape in community. This place is great because you get to mess up, to lose your balance a little, lose rhythm, get out of sync, and still be okay. I almost had to pinch myself that the three of us were all together here, on Mother’s Day, doing this for the experience of it,
even though we didn’t have a clue, really, what the experience was. Except that we were moving in the same rhythm, in a room where everyone had opened up to being together in the cluelessness, and in kindness. That doesn’t happen very often in our regular worlds.

Orange is a dominant color here and in India, vibrant, rich, and juicy, the color of the mangoes Indians love so much. It’s hot and bright, although you’d think they’d get enough hot and bright in India.

Here at the ashram, we had this ecstatic connection with that rare and elusive Orangeness, something bigger than ourselves, embodied in the ancient chants, and the side-to-side, and the soft, soft kindness.

The devotion of swaying from foot to foot is knowing that in life, we’re always shifting, and sometimes we can do it with a modicum of intention and planted harmony. Holding the two-footed stance was very tiring. I remembered (it being Mother’s Day) how many millions of hours I have swayed from side to side holding baby Sam and now baby Jax.

Chanting, you join your strand to everyone else’s, to the weave of the whole group. This must be what heaven is like, along with laughter and an excellent dessert table.
Baba nam kevalam,
love is all there is.

We moved on to the velvety silence of meditation time. Some silences are hollow, or many-layered, like echoes. But this one is slightly furry and inviting. You could drink it
down. And when Ragu arrived during meditation, my heart skipped. He’s a Love rock star.

Even though he tiptoed in, he managed to make a sloshy, swampy, big-loud-engine arrival. I always forget how dark he is—and more than anyone I’ve seen, he looks like pure love, like God in a denim jacket.

The Sub, on the other hand, seemed spectral, compared with Ragu, as if he had risen from a gurney. Or maybe orange just wasn’t his color.

Ragu looked like a cheerful shopkeeper, very much at home in this world. The lower voices of the men, chanting—Ragu, Sam, the Sub, the regular harmonium player, who was still in the back—were like bellows, while those of the women, the Asian women and Neshama, were clear, as if they came out of a pure, thin water pipe, and they spread like a glaze over the other voices and sounds.

Sam was centered and quietly happy on the way home. He said:

“I want to tell you two things I got from you. One is that my first response is usually to make sure I am not doing anything wrong, or anything that stands out or is offensive. I hate this. The other thing is that I am able to enter an experience, and love it, and get it, and find myself surrounded by the least likely angels. I always saw you do that, even when I was a little kid. Like now, I can see you being friends and laughing with Tea Party people, or bikers.”

Mother’s Day is my new favorite holiday.

Sam said he liked that the guitarist sounded so mortal. “He had a cold, like I might, and was quietly hacking and rasping and coughing, but he still led us, some regular person. I guess I get liking this from you, too.”

“Hi, Mom. I really wanted to cancel yesterday because I had so many sketches due, and wanted to get the house ready for Amy, but I knew there was no hope for me, because it was Mother’s Day and you’d been urgently reminding me for days, and were, let’s say, in some sort of state, about wanting me to go with you.

“I had so much inner resistance, till the very second we stepped through the door where kirtan is held. I even took my shoes off at the front door in this deep resistance. But as soon as I got into the room, by the third sway from side to side, I was totally disarmed. Swaying from side to side gave me my balance back, and that helped, so I knew I could work effectively on my homework later. It happened instantly—or in three steps, anyway. You correct your physical balance a lot of times here, like, Oops, I stepped too far over, or too slowly—okay, now I’m back, and happy, and free, because I’m balanced.

“The last time I was in Chicago with Amy, we had a fight, and we decided to go our separate ways, so she drove off with
Jax, and I was downtown, without a clue where I was. But by the time she came back for me, half an hour later, I’d made friends with all these scary penitentiary types, black and white, and they were hanging together, laughing, and they had become my guardian angels. I got this from you, and I appreciate it.”

Amy is back, and the mood is tense and stressful, because she had to leave her best friends and relatives behind again. I was trying to
Baba nam
it, but the fact is, Amy does not want to live here. Nothing I do changes this. My blinkered, cheerful vision and armored habits are not helpful. I do not know how to get with what I know to be true, that life is change, and that we need muscle, flexibility, and awareness. Unfortunately, these are not my strong suits. My strong suits are held breath and false good cheer.

Jax, on the other hand, makes me laugh just by virtue of his being a baby, a radiant love being. Maybe we all are—Amy, Sam, and even I, inside these fat suits of personality and protection. I know we were once. It’s a little harder to see in people over the age of four.

Today was hard, or at least a mixed grill. There is the loveliness of people at the ashram, and the spring, both of which convince me that everything comes from God, even we do: Tom said once that in incarnation God enters into everything,
and I can see that. Yet at the same time, there is the nightmare of other people, both their damage and their having such influence in my life. In spring, in Resurrection, everything comes back to life, theoretically. In my thinking, it all dies. Perhaps this is something I should take a look at.

John Muir once said that to see the face of God, you do not need to open a book or go to church or temple; you have only to go to Yosemite. And you are part of the world’s beauty. God, and the beauty of God’s creation, and you complete a circuit. I am not sure that my parents remembered to mention this to me. But I told Sam, and he believes it, and will tell Jax.

I would say that my deepest spiritual understanding is that God also sees and forgives my smallest detail, even my flickery, prickly, damaged, jealous, vain self, and sees how I get self-righteous and feel either like trash, often, or superior, and like such a scaredy-cat, and God still understands exactly what that feels like. Because God has had the experience of being people, through Jesus.