My Old Man, Gargón and Buddha
First published December 14, 2013
The first story I ever read by Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions (The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah), and a half dozen other visionary books of metaphysical wonder fiction, was a piece titled “It is said that we have ten seconds.” Bach was and remains one of my favorite writers, and when he claimed to have “received” the short manuscript of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in a vision, that in essence he merely took dictation, I not only believed him, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
This was back in the early 70s, and Bach caught a lot of grief at the time for saying a voice from the Other Shore had whispered in his sleeping ear the words to what later became a national bestseller. Jonathan became for many the literary gateway to a whole new set of thoughtful introspective discussions, the kind best shared before a roaring fire in the deep, quiet hours of a cold night. My old man and I were two of those many.
Bach continued the title of the story, “It is said that we have ten seconds” by extending the thought straight into the story’s opening sentence. Continuing, he wrote, “ . . . when we wake of a morning, to remember what it was we dreamed the night before.” This came at a time in my life when my spiritual self search was especially intense- I have always been an introspective searcher, but my eyes had turned starward by this time, and a simple reading of the Bible or a platitudinous sermon struck me as shallow and missing the point altogether -and it seemed there was a spiritual wave washing over us that those who came to be known as “New Agers” fully embraced, and the rest of society viewed as a brief and harmless acid flashback from the recently ended 60s.
Anyway, if I were to write my own version of Richard’s narrative, I might say, “It is said we have only a few years to recognize the value of our parents.” Or something maybe not quite so schmaltzy, but you get the idea. My old man and I sailed mostly choppy waters as I was growing up, so by the time I was out of college and reading Bach, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Carl Sagan, and singing “Jesus Christ Superstar" in the car, there was little I wanted to- or felt I could -share with him. Certainly not deeply personal conjectures about “life, the universe, and everything.” He wouldn’t understand. He was an engineer, after all, and I was a budding writer, a rebel, a hopeless romantic, a dreamer and a traveler. Even so, every once in a while- and it seemed to happen most often at this time of year -he and I would find ourselves sitting in front of the fire in the den, nursing a couple of beers, and doing exactly what I never thought he and I were equipped to do: wondering aloud and to each other what we intuitively believed about “life, the universe, and everything.”
Our midnight conversations became something I genuinely looked forward to, and for years they continued to happen around Christmas when I visited my folks. Mom was a dedicated drinker, and either the old man or I would usually help her stumble up to bed, and then, insomniacs both, he and I would watch the last of The Tonight Show, or the tail end of a black and white “B” movie, and then we’d shut off the idiot box, throw some more wood on the fire, and find ourselves face-to-face in the dead of night, fumbling with the awkward silence like a couple of teenagers on a first date. The old man was usually the first to steer the ship toward open waters, and once he did, we were off: Jesus, Mohammad, Confucius, UFOs, channeling, death and the afterlife . . .
I loved those discussions, though I admit I always felt a little peculiar discussing such deeply philosophical/spiritual topics with the same man who whipped my bare ass with a hairbrush when I was six years old for placing a beer bottle under a neighbor’s tire and who held me under a frigid shower when I was sixteen for calling my mother a bitch. The same man who had sat me down in the living room in 1968 and made me promise that if I ever decided to try marijuana I would bring it home so he and I could “try it together,” even though I had already made the decision a year earlier.
But when it came to the stars and alternate universes and afterlives and aliens and quantum physics, he had another personality. He was as receptive to the possibilities of other worlds, other lives and dimensions, cloud vaporizing, and Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha and Gandhi as truly enlightened beings, not just stale religious icons, as he was to a thick Porterhouse steak. Sadly, though, as we grew older, and I moved away and started a family, those late night talks happened less and less frequently- even when I came to visit and we stayed up to all hours. Finally, they stopped happening altogether.
Then, in 2003, my mother died, and the old man was left on his own to wonder where she had gone and how he was going to survive without her. This, I realize now, was his test, his karma: did he actually believe his own stuff, the ideas he had shared with me for years in front of the fireplace? I had already failed the test in 1986 when my beautiful, beautiful Cassandra died, and I died with her. Failed, but learned too that karma demands you go on; you’ll be rejoined all in good time, but for the balance of this lifetime, you’ll have to do without. The craziest thing is, I could never remember to tell that to the old man in his moments of starkest grief. I don’t know that it would have done any good- he’d have probably considered my words to be hollow platitudes meant to make him feel better but ultimately groundless, as most expressions of condolence are -but it might have made sense to him, too, I don’t know.
He stumbled along anyhow, though, my old man. With many visits from me, and some from my brother when he could make time, the old man survived. But that was all he did. He merely survived, and not well at that. He was a resident of a nursing home and then an Austin hospice for a brief time, and was often only half coherent, so my wish to ask him questions about how he viewed his rapidly approaching finish line remained just that, a wish. Those last months were a cruel time for him, for me, and for my younger brother. Eventually, the old man’s vehicle for this life quit working and he was allowed to find out for himself how accurate his beliefs about the afterlife were. He died, leaving me to continue my search without the benefit of sharing any more thoughts with him, or he sharing anymore of his with me.
And that’s the way it’s been for the last six or seven years. The road has begun to narrow, and my search has once again intensified, though with emerging, believable, deeply fulfilling results. No, I’ve had no “road to Damascus” shock treatment; no, I have not sat starving myself under a tree waiting for enlightenment; and, no, I’ve heard no ethereal voices in my sleep (though I did see my mother in a vision one night exactly two weeks after she died, younger and happier than I ever remember seeing her in this life).
Because of this, I’ve awakened to some new truths about the man who took it upon himself to abandon many of his own wishes to suffer the slings and arrows of me, a headstrong smartass who demanded justice and change, who was more interested in rock and roll, books, and his girlfriend than he ever was in school. A closet writer who supported his family as a salesman of industrial pollution control equipment thirty years before it was politically expedient or socially hip, and who introduced me to the outdoors, the comedy of Rocky and Bullwinkle, W.C. Fields, Jonathan Winters, and dozens more. Who said he believed he was going to heaven- if there was such a place, and he wasn’t sure there was, not in the traditional sense, certainly -because he had lived a good and decent life, not because some frocked monkey in a pulpit declared “it is written.”
It bears mentioning, by the way, that the old man was actually a former collegiate wrestler, and a tough one at that if his physique was any indication of what his stamina and strength had been in his youth. Panglossian in his beliefs that hard work and attention to detail would earn him gold stars from the Company, he had an opinionated, sarcastic wit. His mind was excellent for mechanics and stochastic mathematical problems, but it also enjoyed the stupidity and sarcasm of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. He had a wife and two sons, a 1965 forest green Mustang hardtop with four on the floor and a spiked V-8 that ran like a two-year-old on Tobassco sauce. He would never cop to it openly, but I am convinced my old man was eternally seventeen and was mistakenly convinced that it was somehow wrong to feel that way.
It was his worldview that was ancient- his mindset -that vacuous psychological whatever-it-is that seems to be the indefatigable toggle switch that, if flipped to the up position, sets into flawless operation such machines as Saul/Paul of Tarsus, Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, and Bob Dylan, and which, when flipped to the down position makes use of the darkness to grow pods the likes of Judas Iscariot, Genghis Khan, Josef Stalin, and Eddie Gein. The old man’s rocker, it seems obvious to me now, was not in either position, but rather, was loose and tended to rattle so that sometimes there was a positive connection and sometimes a negative, and oftentimes no definitive connection at all. He was searching too.
He was my old man, and while all fathers are prone to lean in this direction or that as disciplinarians, he demonstrated in painfully obvious ways that he and Gargón, the medieval dungeon master, had a lot in common. Yet, he also demonstrated in wonderfully endearing ways, that he and Buddha also had a lot in common. And because he was a human doing the best he knew how to do and looked forward to starting his next life when this one ended, I offer my own प्रार्थना: may I give to my sons half the good things Dad gave me and my brother.
