“For A Minute There I Was Worried”

I found some zen in my garden today.

But that’s no trick.

I find some every time

I enter my garden.

It’s a beautiful place filled with love.

Summer or winter.

Dawn or dusk.

Empty and quiet,

Or loud and full of life!

My garden is loaded with good zen!

After all, 

Zen and love

Are the same thing.

Or perhaps two sides of the same thing.

So I use it extravagantly while I’m there,

Blowing it all on the good life!

Wasting it like it was money

Or something equally valueless.

And I take all I want

In a huge doggy bag 

When I leave, too.

Ha! Ha!

It’s like I was

A zen-dog millionaire!

Hmmm.

Now I’m worried.

Is this a sustainable practice? 

Should I be conserving my zen?

Am I possibly using too much?

How much is there?

Will it last?

Will there be enough zen to keep me

And comfort me in my old age?

Yikes!

At the rate I’m going, 

(Extravagant fool  

That I am!)

There won’t be enough 

To last me more than,

Let’s see… multiply by eight, carry the two,

Hmmmm,

About four trillion years!

Give or take a few hundred millions.

Phew!

For a minute there

(A very un-zen-like moment!)

I was worried.

But I’m okay now.

Four trillion years.

A four followed by twelve zeros.

Four thousand thousand thousand thousand.

4X10 to the power of 12.

Anyway one looks at it,

That’s a lot of time.

More time (by far) 

Than the universe has existed,

So they believe.

But just to make sure,

The way time flies around here

And the way I go through the stuff,

I’d better get to my zen garden again pretty soon.

And stock up now for later.

Hmmm. 

Now, where did I

Put that

Doggy bag?

Prologue to the 11th Re-Write

Being a writer isn’t easy.

Some writers work and struggle all their lives for their art, yet never find what you or I would call ‘success.’

Not me though.

I found mine on the backseat of a NYC taxi in 2007. 

Almost sat on it. 

It lay on the backseat, gleaming in the watery light which filtered through the taxi’s windows. 

A typewritten manuscript. 

“Where to, Mack?” asked the taxi driver.

“Lafayette and Bleeker,” I answered.

The driver grunted and put the car into gear.

As the taxi began moving I picked up the manuscript beside me. It bore no title. No author’s name or address anywhere on it, either. It was dogeared and well thumbed, with notes scribbled on the margins in soft blue pencil.

Over 500 pages. 

I hefted it. 

Heavy… with promise?

I turned down the volume in my earbuds and leaned forward. Dylan’s wail reduced to a whisper in my ears. 

“Hey!” I said to the driver through the thick plastic barrier that separated us, “This yours?”

“Huh?” he replied.

“You a writer?” I asked, raising my voice to get through the plastic and lifting up the manuscript for him to see in his rearview mirror. “You write this?”

His eyes in the mirror shifted to meet mine. Without turning around, he barked, “Do I look like a fucking writer, Mack?” 

I couldn’t see all of him from where I was in the backseat. Just his shoulders and the back of his head and of course, his eyes in the mirror. He had crazy eyes, wild yet fiercely focused, but every taxi driver in NYC had those. 

Occupational hazard, probably. 

He grunted again and his eyes in the mirror returned to the road ahead.

No, he didn’t look like a writer. From the back, with his pointy little head atop massive sloping shoulders, he looked more like an axe murderer. Especially with those eyes of his. But I couldn’t be sure, never having met one that I know of. This was New York City, though, where I lived on and off for twenty years, I could’ve met any number of axe murderers by now and not known it. 

New York City.

What a town!

Hell, I thought, I should write a book about it.

But that was my problem. 

I couldn’t write a book about anything.

I was a writer who couldn’t write.

Writer’s block, fear of failure, creative incompetence, call it what you will. It was that and more. As an author I’d spent my entire career farting around on the edges, never unleashing the artistic greatness I was sure was within me.

“You’ve got to shit or get off the pot!” my ex-wife used to say, for she considered my problem to be one of commitment. 

My lack of it.

Or was it that I ought to be committed?

It doesn’t matter now, she’s finally happy. She got tired of waiting for this great defecation of mine she so strongly urged, and soon after left to join the circus as a bareback rider and part-time fortuneteller (two occupations she was by nature ideally suited for), eventually becoming the mistress of The Great Scarletti.

He was the lion tamer.

He’ll need to be, I thought at the time.

But that was long ago.

We’ve all passed a lot of water under the bridge since then.

Now I’d found an abandoned, unpublished book.

I stared out the taxi’s window into the wet afternoon, wondering who had left the manuscript behind. And when? Only moments ago? And why no title? Who was the author? What was their story? Did they think so little of their work that they left it on the seat of a NYC taxicab?

To be found by me, a writer who’d give his soul for a good story.

Ha! Ha! How the gods love a laugh!

Outside, it was the usual afternoon traffic jam on Seventh Ave, compounded by the icy rain. We were going nowhere fast, so instead of telling the driver I’ve found something back here, and hearing him croak “Whadaya fucking want me to do about it, Mack?” I thought I’d just read a few pages of the thing and leave the driver to his driving.

I’d tell him about it later, when we arrived at Bleeker and Lafayette.

Besides, my curiosity was killing me.

So I started to read. 

It was a novel about a boy. 

There wasn’t anything remarkable about this boy. No great heritage or lofty ancestry. No display of childhood genius. Nothing to foretell of his accomplishments to come, if any. He was just a daydreaming kid from California who liked to draw. 

And then, just before his fifteenth birthday, he and his family moved to New Zealand. 

The other side of the world.

“Lafayette and Bleeker!”

“Huh?” 

“Lafayette and Bleeker. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

I looked up from the manuscript. 

“This side of the street okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Thanks. What do I owe you?”

“Eight and a half bucks, Mack.”

I gave him a ten and took the manuscript with me.

Goodbye Again

Part 3

   (It may help to remember that I was an eighteen-year-old married man working for the Ministry of Works (M.O.W.) at road construction in New Zealand when this story takes place. 

   It is 1970. A gray wintery day at the depot where we'd gathered for morning smoko.

   I’d been called to the phone and made a joke about it with my workmates.

   It was no joke, though. It was my sister on the telephone.

   That morning, Mom had collapsed and been rushed to hospital, could I please come right away.)

   My mother had had a stroke. 

   It was a few days before they let me see her and when I did, it was a shock. Her hair had turned white. Her unseeing eyes stared straight ahead. She chewed her tongue constantly and didn’t speak or smile, didn’t change her expression. 

   She didn’t even know I was there. 

   It was a bad stroke they said, triggering an aneurism that destroyed most of her brain. We think, we’re not sure because there’s no response but we know she’s blind as well as paralyzed blah blah blah because I couldn’t hear what they were saying to me by then, nor barely see through my tears, all I knew was that my mother wasn’t there anymore.

  (She survived for six months in this condition, driving my father nearly insane from grief and lack of sleep, until she departed this world peacefully one night while Dad held her hand and cried. She was thirty-six-years-old.)

   Her illness meant the end of my time at the M.O.W., for within a month of Mom going into hospital, Dad asked me to come help him at his little animation studio so that he could have more time to attend to Mom. He went to the hospital every day and back again every night.

   There was another reason that he asked me to work for him. 

   Mom had made him promise.

   "She wanted to get you out of the ditches," Dad said to me. “She wanted you to be an artist.” Unknown to me, they’d spoken of it only a few months before she had her stroke. (A mother’s intuition? Did she know she wasn’t long for this world?) My mother was worried about me becoming too rough and tumble working where I did, where the men were men with plenty of cursing and smoking and drinking and such, and she made Dad promise that if I showed ability and desire, he should help me get started as an artist.

   “With her being sick, I thought she’d like to know that we’ve begun,” said my father. Dad referred to mom as being sick, as if she merely had a cold or the flu, and wasn’t laying in a hospital bed paralyzed with half her brain destroyed. It was his way of dealing with it. He reached up (I was taller than he, had been since I was fourteen), and placed the palm of his hand against my cheek, studying my face with his soft, Texas sagebrush eyes. His eyes weren’t blue as they used to be, they were red as they’d become lately, for it’s impossible to look after two teenage children at home (my younger sister and brother) and animate films singlehandedly while visiting your dying wife twice a day, without getting a little red-eyed. 

   He said softly, “She was thinking of you, son. She loved you dearly.” 

   I think when my father said that something fundamentally changed between us. Like it was okay for him to love me, and me to love him, with the dying woman we both loved showing us the way. It wasn’t easy, for my dad and I had somehow got off on the wrong track since coming to New Zealand. We were always at loggerheads. We never seemed to agree about anything.

   Now we stood together pondering a dying wife’s last request, a mother’s hope for her son. 

   And with this pondering came understanding. 

   Of course, every father and son that ever was or ever will be, if they’re lucky enough reach such a moment together and come to terms with who they are, but I believe with all my heart that my mother reached out with love from beyond her deathly illness to help cure the illness between my father and myself, and, incidentally, set me upon my course as an animator.

   Love is that powerful.