Why I Won't Be Playing Racquetball Anymore

It happened like this: I was running backward, back pedaling, chasing the nasty little blue rubber ball. I was going to pivot and flick it or flick it and smash it. I forget. I was dreamily aware of Juan the Gardener to my left. It seemed, as I glanced off him, that I flew through the air.


Smack! My tail bone hit first. CR-R-ACK! A thundershot, as my head flew back and bounced off the wooden court floor. Hmmm, I thought, lying there. That smarts.


"Are you okay?" Juan the Gardener asked, peering down. "That was a nasty sound."


"I don't know," I said. 


Then I grunted, "Ice."


"Ice?"


"Ice."


I moved parts of my body incrementally. Other than a wicked headache, everything seemed okay. Sore. Juan came back with a plastic bag filled with ice. I sat up slowly and held the ice to the back of my head.


"Do you think you can finish the game?" Juan asked, half grinning. He had been winning.


"Absolutely not."


For the next few days I just wanted to lie on the living room couch and be still. Light seemed to pierce my eyeballs, and I couldn't concentrate enough to read more than a sentence. I slept. The headache intensified. Finally, the two of us looked up the symptoms of concussion.


I don't know why, but whenever I am sick or injured I have a hard time believing it. I need hard evidence. Sensitivity to light and noise. Check. Headache. Check. Confusion or feeling as if in a fog. Check. Fatigue. Check. 


"I think you should go to the hospital," Juan the Gardener said. 


"Okay." My mother had pitched face first onto the floor recently and had sustained a tiny bleed in the brain. It made sense to check it out. I still felt a vague sense of guilt, as if I were wasting someone's time.


"Or, we could wait until after the Red Sox play and go this afternoon," he teased.


I had a CT scan and some x-rays of my lower spine, and it was determined that I had sustained a concussion and cracked the tail bone.


"You need to rest both your body and your mind," the friendly ER nurse explained. "The symptoms could last for weeks."


I actually did as I was told. I lay on the couch, my feet propped on a pillow. I listened to a CD called Radical Acceptance: Guided Meditations by Tara Brach. I read selections from Wherever You Go, There You Are by John Kabat-Zinn. I skimmed a forgettable novel. I stared into my phone at the changing expressions on my new baby grandson's face. I slept. Other than occasional forays out to the garden to pull a weed or two, I mostly did nothing. 


Juan the Gardener cooked, and treated me with great gentleness. As I rested, I began to feel drifty, as if rising and falling on draughts of air that breezed in through the screen, and then, surprisingly happy. A touch of bliss. Without the driving lash of my thoughts exhorting me to get up get going get moving get doing, I began to relax completely. The present moment, foggy and out of focus though it was, was where I resided. What arose, as they say, was appreciation.


I began to suspect I had brain damage.


"I really like you like this," Juan the Gardener commented. "I mean, of course I love all of you," he hastened to add. "But," he wondered with his usual sense of tact, "Do you think you'll come back?" 


He meant the compulsive, obsessional me whose nose wrinkles in disgust when ant scouts scurry across the counter tops, or the me that washes our sheets every two days; the me that ferrets out sources of complaint.


"I don't know," I said.

*

"No, you don't have brain damage," my learned friend (well, okay, he's my therapist) Andy laughed. 

"No, I don't think you have a brain tumor either."

He didn't even think the concussion accounted for my unfamiliar state of mind.

"You mean I feel like this because I succumbed to being concussed?" I asked.

Yes, he did.

I pondered how it had happened that about a year ago, a proverbial portal had opened and I had been guided to a therapist who wanted me to focus on the present moment, upon perception and sensation, rather than the past. 


The moment, to paraphrase Kabat-Zinn, as it blooms.

How strange that the past few years of practicing meditation, and reading some dharma and engaging in long philosophical discussions with Juan the Gardener and listening to Buddhist teachers should lead me to this.

Bouncing my head off the racquetball court did cause me to stop. I ceased struggling against life - my life. Stopped battling and scrambling. I surrendered. What I found in my mind's foggy corridors was peace - moment upon moment.


It's not if the struggle resumes, it's clearly when. I like floating in my cirrus-filled thoughts. But, I do have a point of reference: a comfy couch in a sun filled room, a vase of flowers, luminous light bouncing off cream-colored walls, birdsong, humming insects, my grandson's beautiful face, Juan the Gardener checking in, kissing the top of my head.

Cereus Magic

We were sitting at the dinner table at our friend Tune's house, finishing off a mixed berry pie, tart and sweet. There were vases of flowers, lovely as paintings, arranged around the sun room that glowed in hues of yellow and salmon. Through the windows we could see gardens and rocks like giant dorsal fins rising from the earth. Wendy brought her dog, Ben, who was happily tethered outside in the cool summer night. Tune's mom discussed books and her recent trip to Tanzania.


Next to our places, small pieces of paper had been placed, face down. When it was time, I opened mine and found a question: Describe a time you spent with one of your grandparents.


"First thought best thought," Tune said, meaning don't take time to think, just respond.


"I remember sitting on my grandfather's lap on a porch, probably at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. We were in a rocking chair and he had his arms around me. I felt safe. He died soon after of Parkinson's."


Someone else was asked to describe an earliest memory. Wendy remembered sensations and light and being outside on grass that was parched white from the sun. Tune told about taking a match and trying to light her younger brother's trundle-bundle on fire, just to see if she could. Juan the Gardener remembered sitting in his dad's lap, picking splinters out of his dad's face.


"Splinters?" We cried.


"His beard was scruffy. It must have been a weekend and he hadn't shaved."


I remember climbing out of my crib using my teddy bear as a stepping stone to reach the bureau, and having the bureau tip over on me so that I was holding it up with two hands, like a baby super child. Now I realize it was a co-mergence of memories. At a later time I had climbed up the bureau by pulling out the drawers and it had tipped over and I had to call for help and Arnie, the nanny, was not amused. I had to climb: up into closets, into kitchen cabinets, up into the dancing tops of trees.


Juan described being at a party at his parents' house. He and a little girl were running naked from one end of the room to the other, laughing as they passed, not touching.


"So, that's the origin of our special game!" I laughed.


"Do you think it's true that men are led around by their peckers?" Tune's mom asked.


Then Tune said that tonight might be the night when her night-blooming cereus, a sprawling spineless climbing cactus opened its buds to produce pure-white flowers.


"It's so amazing," she said. "It only opens once all year and the fragrance fills the house."


"Maybe we ought to check." I said. 


Tune quickly left the table and we heard her exclaiming,"Oh! Oh! Come see!"


We raced into the den, and there framed by the window, dangling from snaky, green, glossy stems, two enormous white buds had begun to open; a magnolia-like fragrance spilled out into the room. 


We murmured ooos and aahhhs, and examined the flowers from underneath, from behind, from outside; we shone a flashlight into their creamy depths; we inhaled their perfume.  

"Oh!" Wendy called from outside where she was walking Ben.


"What?" We answered. On a mid-summer night like this, anything was possible.


Suspended in the silky near-darknesss, visible between pine trees, round and pumpkin-orange, was the full moon.

I realized as we stood together like rapt children all grown up, that to truly connect, one must dare to open from the heart bud, to open constantly, to burst into flower like the magical night-blooming cereus. 


After that, anything is possible.

Sinking Ships & Desperados

"Hello! Hello!" My mother sang out, opening her front door to admit Tripp and his mother and me. She led us into the living room for iced tea and cake with white frosting and pink flowers. Vera, one of my mother's aides, leaned in to view the baby.

"I wasn't here for his first visit," she said.

"Well, Tripp meet Vera," my daughter smiled.

"So, you're a great-grandmother," Vera told my mother.

"I know that, Vera," my mother said crossly.

"You're GG," Vera said. "Little boy, that's your GG."

"We call my grandmother Gogs, and Tripp will too," Katherine explained.

"Oh, why not GG?" Vera asked. "I like GG."

"Vera, would you pour the ice tea?" my mother asked.

"I did," Vera said. 

Vera lingered, eating cake, and then disappeared into the kitchen. 

"Thank you, Vera!" Katherine and I called out. Vera is charged with keeping my mother safe, which includes guiding her to bed at a reasonable hour. Although she will grudgingly acquiesce, mostly on her own terms, Mom will often sneak out of her bedroom and back to the pale azure lure of the computer screen.

"What did you do today?" I asked as Tripp slumbered in his car seat, emitting the occasional uh  or guh. 

"Well, I went to the beach for lunch with the Sages, and on the way back in the car Andy and I suddenly broke out into song."

"Song?" I repeated, fork in hand.

"Song," my mother laughed. "I used to sing it you and your sisters," Mom said to Katherine. 

"I think you mean to me and my sisters," I corrected.

"Well, it goes like this:  A big bold man was this desperado from Cripple Creek way out in Colorado, and he came to town like a big tornado and everywhere he went he gave his WA-HOO!"

As my mother sang, gesturing with her hands like a band leader, I remembered.

"Wasn't there something about how he came into Chicago just to give the West a rest...?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Wasn't there a song about the Titanic?" Katherine asked. "You sang me a song about it," she said to me.

Without pausing a beat, my mother and I immediately launched into the Titanic song: "Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue, and they thought they had a ship that the water would never go through, but the Lord with his mighty hand said the ship would never land. It was sad when that great ship went down..."

"It was sad," Mom sang.

"It was sad,"I echoed.

"It was sad when that great ship went down (to the bottom of the) husbands and wives little children lost their lives..."

"More cake, Katherine?" my mother asked after the last verse.

"I'd love some, Gogs, thanks."

"Oh, look, the baby is waking up!" Mom exclaimed, brandishing the cake knife.

Katherine lifted Tripp in his car seat throne as he stretched and snuffled, and brought him close to his great-grandmother, who touched his tiny feet.

"They're so soft," she said, gently tickling them. "Ticky ticky." 

Conversing with Little Gobblets

We were all hanging out in the kitchen: Yeh Yeh (Grandpa) was making his special blueberry pancakes breakfast with yogurt and fresh berries and maple syrup, and Oliver had pulled himself up onto the kitchen island by his elbows to explain the finer points of a game called Gobblets, a game of strategy not unlike tic-tac-toe.


"First, we do rochambeau to see who goes first," Oliver said. 


"Okay," I agreed.


"Once, twice, thrice," I chanted, as my mother had taught me a good fifty years before.


"It's not once, twice, thrice," Oliver corrected. "It's rochambeau." He shook his head, as if having to explain something to a child much younger than himself, say a three-year-old.


"When I learned, it was once, twice, thrice," I said, feeling ancient, "But, let's just say rochambeau."


We counted off and I threw rock. Oliver instantly formed something that looked like a peaked roof with his hands raised at eye level.


"Volcano!" he crowed. "Volcano beats everything."


"Volcano? What do you mean volcano?" I asked. "There's no volcano in rochambeau." 


"Well, let's say there is."


"Let's say you throw lava," Oliver elaborated, making a wavy motion with his hands. "Volcano would beat lava."


"Or dinosaur," Maggie suggested. "Volcano would definitely beat dinosaur."


"I see your point," I said. "Why don't you just go first, Ollie."

*

"How about a game of I Spy?" I suggested later as we drove towards the politically themed Bread and Puppet Museum in Glover, Vermont. "Maggie can go first."

"I spy with my little eye something blue," Maggie said,

"Is it in the car?" asked Oliver.

"Yes, it's in the car."

"Is it Yeh Yeh's shirt?"

"No."

"Is it Maggie's fleece?" I guessed.

"No."

"Is it the cover of the Map of Vermont?" Yeh Yeh tried.

"No."

"Is it the sky?" I said absently.

"No, in the car," said Maggie.

After a few more rounds of incorrect guesses, it was determined that what Maggie had spied was a thin line of blue writing on an envelope just barely visible poking out from behind the sun visor on the passenger side.

"Are the puppets we're going to see scary?" Oliver wanted to know. 

"I think some of them could be scary," I said, "But, I've never actually seen them. They're pretty big."

"How big?" Maggie asked.

"I'm not sure," I said, not realizing that some of the puppets are actually 15 feet high, described as some of the largest puppets in the world.

"What if I don't actually want to go in?" Oliver asked a few minutes later.

"What if I just want to peek inside from the front door to see if they're scary, and not actually go deep into the heart of the museum?"

"That's fine," said Yeh Yeh reassuringly. "You don't have to go in at all. You and I can wait outside while Maggie and Amy go in."

"But, if I change my mind, can I still go in?"

"Of course," we said.

"It's okay, Ollie, if you don't want to," Maggie said.

"Just because I don't want to doesn't mean I'm not brave," Oliver said emphatically.

"Of course not," we said. 

"Because I am brave."

"You're a brave warrior," said Yeh Yeh. "Like me."

We all peeked inside the entrance of the Bread and Puppet Museum which was housed in a large old barn with a wide-planked wooden floor. An elderly woman, her long white hair pulled back, wearing an apron, long skirt, faded lavender blouse and black shoes greeted us and suggested we might particularly like to see a flying pig puppet. She had wisely deduced that some of us might be feeling a bit timid.

"See?" she said, as she rapped gently on a large puppet face. "They're all made of papier mache - paper. There are some interesting ones down this aisle," she smiled at Oliver.

The puppets were thrilling and frightening and brilliant. The Bread and Puppet troupe, which performed in New York City during the Vietnam Era, travels throughout New York and Vermont, participating in parades and performing live theatre. We found the flying pink pig and then Ollie and Yeh Yeh waited while Maggie and I tiptoed upstairs to where the truly GINORMOUS puppets were.

"It's okay, Ollie," Maggie called down to her brother. "They're not too scary. You can come up."

So, Ollie and his grandfather joined us, Ollie safely ensconced in his grandfather's arms, and we explored and touched cautiously and imagined what it all might mean, and told stories. We spied George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and the Devil.

"Let's go now," Ollie said.

"We were all brave," said Maggie.

"We were all brave warriors," Yeh Yeh echoed.