Some Assembly Required (7 page)

The ashram was a house with one large bedroom set up as a place of worship. Neshama and I felt at home instantly. The community of nine was so welcoming, many of the same people who were at the apartment where Sam went the night he had first met Dada and Ragu. Dada had gone to the orphanage that he and Ragu run in India. Ragu is the uncle who has summoned us all, young and old Indian people, other Asians, a few whites. He is the common thread. He’s stocky, ample, very vigorous and composed at the same time. His skin has a purple-brown twinkle, like an eggplant. He’s furry and he looks like a gypsy, the embodiment of the whole morning, which was also vigorous and composed.

The room was wonderfully modest, an off-white bedroom in a house way out in the hills. The thick caramel-colored carpet muffles the sound. There are beautiful plastic orchids on the altar—just a reminder of true flowers, but without a fortune spent on the trappings. Same with the cheap lace on the altar; it says: This place of worship is so beautiful that we don’t need to spend a lot of energy and money on saying
that. People don’t need to lose their eyesight embroidering cloths that will degrade. Store your treasures in heaven, and all that. Chant with us, be with us, help make the meal.

The service began with a man playing tabla, and an old Jewish-looking Indian man on harmonium: such a strange sound! If we could breathe loudly, this is the sound our lungs would make. It’s elegant and portable; he pumped and noodled it without virtuosity; he’s humble and lovely, just letting his fingers play, because they know what to do, without ego or performance. Neshama said later that it’s a community instrument—he’s the fingers playing it for all of us, he provides breathing and rest, while the drumbeat gives us the impetus to motion.

We danced, first taking slow baby steps and then upping the ante, going faster and faster to the blasting stomp; and then starting over, slowly, without exhausting ourselves, but still with the feeling of going through detox, breaking down pockets of stored toxins and expelling them through tribal stomp. It was gloriously ridiculous—Sam told me before we came that at first it’s as embarrassing as doing karaoke, but then he forgets about himself: which would be my definition of heaven. He was in front of me, dancing with such dignity I could have cried.

We all sat down to meditate, and even though I thought mostly about the food that was going bad in my fridge that I’d meant to throw out, and my achy knee, sitting amid all that was positive calmed me way down.

Ragu is what you’d like in a parent—he nudges you to participate. He encourages you with his devout twinkles, and he’s very safe—welcoming and grounded. He doesn’t lean on you and breathe on you the way your parents would; he lets you come to it. Lots of encouragement, with no hot breath. Note to self: Start being more like Ragu.

For once, I was not noisy niggles and snickets, in all that internal and external chaos and noise and thought; I just relaxed into the moment, and fell into the sweetness of the universe, as if I were snorkeling.

An older father held his baby, who was quiet and good during the meditation, as though taking it in directly, sensing he was in an absolutely marvelous space, with the chanting and the rhythms when his parents held him in their arms for the sacred dance. Or maybe they had dosed him with baby Tylenol, as I would have done.

When we got to our feet to do
Baba nam
, I watched Sam, his eyes closed and arms extended like Zorba in dancing prayer, shifting from foot to foot, and this filled me with respect for his ability to let go, to go within himself and find a center. I did not have this at twenty, not by a long shot.

We did this for half an hour, shifting, chanting,
Baba nam kevalam
. Watching Sam in worship, welcomed and respected by these great people, I was deeply touched at how much he has grown, as I am sometimes when I watch him casually change a seriously bad diaper on my couch. Sam talked with people easily over our simple lunch of rice and curried vegetables,
and salad with nuts and green olives. Later, Ragu gave us apples from the ashram’s trees to take home, and everyone crowded around us, but most of them suddenly wanted our e-mail addresses, and I thought, “Oh,
no
. Now I’ll
never
get rid of these people.”

Sam came by for dinner and to do homework at my big table. He hasn’t heard much from Amy, and I didn’t pry—much. Trying to be like Ragu has not been going quite as well as I had hoped, but I managed to offer Sam a little more silence than I have in months. Silence brings you to a place where all of a sudden you’re not in the mental ping-pong game. I made us an organic cornmeal pizza, and read while I ate; he was watching a whaling show out of the corner of his eye on TV, while drawing something on his sketch pad for class, and I let him be, although of course I was having tiny thoughts about good study habits. Sometimes you can see around the edges of what’s right before you, instead of what you are fixated on, specifically how Sam is doing with Amy and Jax gone. Message to self: Step
back
, because then you can pick up stuff that is actually going right. He was working on a drawing of a 3-D pyramid, which I bent in to admire. This pleased him, and helped me abide his sadness without needing to fix it; and so I saw the beauty of his contemplation. Maybe what we say to each other is not so important
after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best as we can be.

Sam called and woke me up late tonight, to say he will not be in church, as he has a ton of homework, plus he needs to clean the house before Amy and Jax get home. I couldn’t get back to sleep; I was too keyed up thinking about seeing Jax again, but even more energized about Sam’s getting to see Jax. This is sort of pathetic.

Sam seems reasonably grounded—overwhelmed, and excited, and worried. I was truly desperate with fretfulness and guilty ambition at his age, although I looked happy and accomplished. There are so many things I did right as a parent: times we spent playing and building with Legos and blocks on the floor; all those card games at the kitchen table; creating a relatively low-stress home, without a man with whom to quibble about arrangements, money, and whether we were having sex enough. I was derailed from the cradle by the stress of my parents’ unhappy marriage. I had no self-esteem during my youth, no matter how much I achieved. This is common for children who were raised by wolves. It was like the parents were
trying
to be terrible. Or were punking you. You realize at some point that your parents did their best and that this should lead to forgiveness. For me, it led to awe. Bad awe. It was part of the global realization that the adult world
was about falsehood, appearance, mediocrity, and precarious mental states.

I said to Sam before we hung up, “I know you haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks, but what is the difference now in how you experience Jax?” He replied, “When he first came to us, he was a little lump of a guy, and we were very tired. I felt like I’d known him for a while. Now he’s a person, and I can’t remember not knowing him.”

I went to church crankily because it is stewardship month, and I hate the shakedown sermons, but I had to go because I was teaching Sunday school. Also, Sam wouldn’t be there, or Ragu, or the harmonium guy. I was comparing St. Andrew with the ashram, and coming up short, like we were tense southern snake-handler types.

Is it really true that everyone, including me, is growing and healing spiritually, whether we experience that or not? It sure didn’t feel that way. Bonnie and Tom both think so, although they point out that growth is not fast, clean, cute, or comfortable. It would be great if God were up there shoving ever-resistant people like me through the maze, toward presence and serenity. But noooo. It’s Free Will 101. This does not work for me at all. Still, I went to church—bitterly— because of the Sunday-school kids.

Only there
were
no kids, except in the nursery. I hung out
with Jax’s colleagues, Isaiah and Cooper, and their teacher, until Jax’s absence began to feel like a cavern. I came; I pined; I headed back to church for the stewardship sermon.

And everyone there conspired to ruin my best efforts to wallow in self-pity. The four oldest women with their walkers, wheelchairs, and wigs in the Amen corner snagged me first. Billie Johnson’s hair looked especially pretty, and when I commented on this she said, “Oh, I just found this old one in the hamper.” She made me hug and kiss her for so long that I remembered Sam at age five, unable to part with me one night, heartbroken that I was going out; he said, like a sad old man, “Let me keep kissing you until I can stop crying.” The gentle, tough, crying, laughing, singing congregation is such an unfair advantage on God’s part; it really sucks. Then Ranola sang the lead in the choir anthem, and her voice was as peaceful as the pristine silence of the ashram—it’s just the other side of it, of what carves out space, so we can rest into what’s bigger than us. Her voice, the choir, the quietness at the ashram, are paradoxically like burrowing into the snow to make a shelter that covers and surrounds tiny you and keeps you warm.

I girded myself against Veronica and her stewardship sermon, and then she preached one of her best sermons ever. She began by talking about the German word for “sin,” which she said means “to separate, to sunder”—so that instead of seeing our divine nature, we see our separation everywhere, from one another, from God, from our own
souls. It reminded me of a line I’ve had taped to my wall for years: “We aren’t a drop in the ocean, but are the ocean, in drops.”

Veronica said that no matter how painful and wrong things seem, Jesus is always playing the music softly in our lives, and we can dance around, because when we dance with one another, everyone feels happier, and chosen, and we are dancing with the godhead, of which we are a part. Then she made us get up and dance around.

I am not making this up.

All forty of us danced—Evelyn in her wheelchair, Marge Cortez with her cane. A sleeping baby was danced in his mother’s arms; and the rest of us held hands or hips in a conga line, or did the foxtrot, or, like me, the Bolinas hippie tribal stomp. Ike danced with his oxygen tank.

I went home and danced around as I cleaned the house, too happy to contain myself, because on top of it all, coincidentally, ha ha, almost three weeks had miraculously passed somehow, and Jax would be home tomorrow.

I didn’t know what the mood would be like when the three of them came over for the first time again, late this afternoon. When they came, Sam and Amy were not getting along; Sam was being a poophead, nagging, napping, and then going out to use his cell phone, and Amy was frustrated and
stuck with Jax, who lay on the couch in his perfection and slept, while I watched a little TV with her and made snacks. Then I sat on the porch with Sam and laughed a little about what morons the dogs are, and went to my study and got a little bit of work done while Amy watched judge shows, and then we had grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, with baby carrots and slices of autumn apples. Against all odds, it was kind of okay, with friendly moments of conversation around the TV, about the baby, the news, the filling and de licious food. We laughed a number of times, and having come out of a tense, miserable place earlier, I found a surprising peace in that. This family business can be so stressful—difficult, damaged people showing up to spend time with other difficult, damaged people, time that might be better used elsewhere—yet out of that, some accidental closeness, laughter, some pieced-together joy.

“Sam, what are the main differences you see in Jax, and yourself, after weeks of not seeing each other?”

“Before he left, when it was milk time, that was it. He’d be buried in the boob, obsessed. Now, if something even slightly interesting happens, he’ll look up, detach from the nipple, see what it is.

“When I come along, he’ll look up like he’s a businessman, and this is not a good time for him—can we talk later?

“And he’s crazily more vocal. More basic vowel sounds. He’s convinced he’s communicating with us. His understanding is that there is no real organization to speaking—there’s nothing to it! You just call stuff out and then the other person just randomly squawks back at you.

“We’re on different time and years. I have to orbit a much bigger planet, so time is slow, but Jax’s planet is tiny, and he makes a complete orbit in a few hours. In one hour he can go from no coordination with, say, his pinkie, and in a couple of hours, he has the beginnings of control—or at least the concept of what control of his pinkie might be.

“When he watches me and Amy dance around the room, he registers how complexly we are moving. We put on music because it’s good for him, to let him see the complexity of motion and also us being close and happy—and we think he knows how simple he is compared to us. But when he dances with us, he gets a direct connection to that complexity. He strives for what he sees us doing.

“I think he understands that he is not like us yet—that he still needs to be cared for, that he can’t just walk around. But also, he knows he is evolving every day. Watching us dance, I think he’s thinking, ‘Wow, that looks cool. I would like to do that. Maybe we learn that next week.’

“One day I’ll be playing with his arms and dangling stuff in front of him to try and get him to grab it—and by the end of that session, he’ll have come a tiny ways, and then the next
day he slowly starts from where he finally got to the day before, the slow reaching.

“Before, his arms were tight and tucked in, and I would unfold them so he could have the experience of length. Or I would encourage him to unfold his arms, but before, he could only grab his face.

“But now he can freely reach for nothing.”

Amy and I celebrated Jax’s three-month birthday today with a feast of rice and beans, with lime-juice bars for dessert. Jax is a good baby. He almost never cries, just looks around, and into our faces, and makes his funny baby sounds. I said to Amy, “We have all loved your son’s time on earth with us so far, and want only continued health, growth, and comfort. However, rules are rules, and at this time we are required to review what he has learned so far in his first three months.”