Lost In Place (2 page)

I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was a fundamental difference between what I was doing and what most real Buddhists do. The Buddha himself abandoned a comfortable life because he could not stand the hypocrisy of being a chubby prince when there was so much suffering all around him. He made himself homeless and destitute first and then sought nirvana because he figured that it was worth seeking only if it was available to even the poorest person on earth. I, on the other hand, wanted to become a Zen master because I hoped perfect enlightenment would make me more popular—specifically, more datable. As the youngest and shortest boy in my class, I was convinced that I would go to my grave without having sex unless I did something extraordinary with my life. Although it may be true these days that you can’t throw a rock in America without hitting a psychic or a Tibetan lama or a yoga instructor, in 1973 becoming a Zen student in Ridgefield qualified as extraordinary. I hoped that if I became a living Buddha, I would never again have to hear the words “You’re just like a little brother to me” when I asked someone on a date.

Then there was kung fu. From the movies and television programs I saw, I gathered that one of the key benefits of being a Buddhist monk was that you could beat the crap out of bad people without getting emotionally involved or physically tired. You were always on the moral
high ground because you were a pacifist, but if someone was foolish enough to throw a punch at you anyway, surprise! Kung fu turned you into a cross between Sugar Ray Robinson, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mahatma Gandhi. My hope was to impose this surprise on at least one of the eighth-grade assholes who used to pick on me for being tiny, polite to adults and a cellist in a youth orchestra.

Last but not least, I wanted to become a Zen master because I thought it would impress my father. Like most boys, I wanted to prove myself by doing something my father couldn’t do, but also like most boys, I thought my dad could do anything. He could drive, paint, name the constellations, set up a tent and had been in the air force—what else was there? The answer came the first night I saw David Carradine, about to be ambushed by a gang of murderous cowboys, sit cross-legged on the ground and play his bamboo flute. I could hardly contain my excitement; this was definitely something my dad couldn’t do.

If my dad knew he was about to be ambushed by murderous cowboys, first he would shake his head with disgust and say that he knew all along that something like this would happen to him. Then he would pace back and forth for a while, muttering curse words and wondering aloud at the foolishness of people who romanticize the Wild West. Finally he would resign himself to the inevitable, consoling himself with the thought that his murderers, like everyone else in the world, would die soon enough, the sun would eventually grow cold and all of this madness would be mercifully consigned to oblivion. It was not difficult for me to imagine this scenario; my dad played out a version of it whenever a faucet leaked, the furnace made a strange sound or an odd smell came
out of the engine compartment of our car. You could almost see the first ugly thought when it appeared—“We’re going to have to buy a whole new sink/heating system/car now”—as if it were scrawled onto the muscles of his jaw, and then you watched it spread until his whole body was covered with despairing graffiti. My father experienced serene detachment only when he was asleep and not having nightmares about the plumbing, the car or being in college again.

I knew that if I became an unflappable sage my father would be both proud and envious of me, and he would have to admit that the baldhead wig and pajamas had been good ideas after all. So while most of my junior high classmates began asserting themselves through academics, sports or troublemaking, I decided to follow in the footsteps of the ancient masters, whose knowledge was described in the fifth century
B.C
. classic
Tao Te Ching
as:

When I read this passage aloud to my father to acquaint him with my new philosophy, he didn’t respond immediately. He pushed his coffee cup across the kitchen table, first to the left, then to the right, then tried to center it in
front of him. When he did this it usually meant he was about to deliver a sobering lecture. I steeled myself for his gentle but devastatingly rational critique of the unfathomable knowledge of old, but it never came. He found a satisfactory place for the cup, nodded in a way that I knew meant he wasn’t enthusiastic but wasn’t going to rain on my parade either, then said, “My son, the block of wood. Let me know if it works.”

My dad always saw things a bit too clearly for his own good. His gift for imagining all that could go wrong in any situation earned him the nickname Little Old Joe by the time he was five. One of his older brothers told me that my father did not seem to experience childhood so much as to bear it; his face seemed to have been frozen at birth into an expression of weary stoicism. He enhanced this reputation for seeming older than his years by spending evenings gazing out his bedroom window at the night sky, memorizing the constellations and watching for northern lights displays. He exhausted the library’s collection of books about the stars and planets, and subscribed to
Sky and Telescope
magazine before entering high school. This interest in astronomy mystified his parents, who were both decidedly earthbound characters. My grandmother once described herself to me as a nice girl from Texas whose job was to raise four boys, and my grandfather was a no-nonsense contractor who paved the first McDonald’s restaurant parking lot.

Unlike many prodigies whose gifts fade at an early age, my father never lost his talent for seeing things in a stark light. Fortunately he discovered painting, through which he managed to express himself with great success. Unfortunately, that same gift made him too disparaging of his
bleak paintings to promote them, so rather than starve in a loft he became a social worker. He reasoned that if he couldn’t do what he enjoyed for a living, he could at least do something beyond reproach, and in any case psychology had been the subject in college that interested him most. Not surprisingly, given his personality, he turned out to be a sympathetic listener and was highly regarded throughout his career, but if you asked him about his work, he would tell you only that social services were fighting a losing battle. He was often depressed himself in spite of all he knew about psychology and the mind, although he would say it was
because
of all he knew about psychology and the mind. Every morning he left the house looking as if someone had tied a hundred-pound sandbag across his shoulders, and every evening he came back looking as if the sand had gotten wet. He never mentioned his work unless he was asked about it, and we kids knew better than to ask.

In fact, for some time I was confused about what he did during the day; the misunderstanding came about one winter morning when, after having gotten up before dawn to put an electric heating blanket over the engine of our Volkswagen (otherwise it wouldn’t start in the winter) before his hour-long commute, he came into the house to savor a final moment of warmth and said to no one in particular, “Back to the salt mines.” I overheard this and went on to announce during show-and-tell that my daddy worked underground; on the back of my report card that year my teacher, who knew that my father was not a miner, wrote, “I worry that sometimes Mark seems to be in his own little world.”

She was right. I
was
in my own little world, and it consisted mostly of daydreaming to pass the time until Daddy
came home from work. For me that was when real life began, because I adored my gloomy father. He was fairly strict, did not care for board games, owned no power tools and had no interest in sports, but he was great company. Aristotle observed that melancholy men are the most witty, to which I would add that they are also the most fun to confide in. For much of my young life I enjoyed nothing better than to help him forget about his awful day at work by telling him about my awful day at school, and this usually led to a good meandering conversation. Sometimes we talked sitting on the living-room floor because that was where he painted, with half of his materials in boxes scattered all around him and the other half ground into the rug. On weekends we talked in the car on the way to the town dump, to the hardware store, to the Volkswagen dealer or to my Youth Symphony rehearsals in Norwalk. If the weather was too awful, he would declare it a Green Blanket Day, pull out an ancient, tattered green blanket, throw it on one of our collapsed sofas, make cinnamon toast and tea for Erich, Rachel and me and spend the day napping there with us and telling stories. Occasionally I joined him for his morning walk around the dairy farm near our house because I could count on his wanting to chat rather than keep his mind on exercise, which he hated. Most of all, though—and most enjoyable of all—we talked under the stars during our astronomy sessions.

Sensing I might be an eager disciple, my dad started me on the hobby as soon as I was old enough to stay awake past eight o’clock. My earliest childhood memory is of his taking me out to a cold field in the middle of the night to see comet Ikeya-Seki. This was in 1965. From its bright starlike head to the end of its frosty tail it measured over
thirty million miles, which represents one third of the distance from the earth to the sun. The comet glowed so brightly in the cold night air that the cows standing near us looked like ghostly worshipers, forming icons of their deity with their own breath. As we stamped our feet to keep warm, my father told me that comets were really not much more than snowballs, and that each time they passed by the sun they melted a little. “In a few hundred million years,” he said, “that comet we’re looking at will melt completely, and the dust from the tail will be blown by the solar wind out into the space between the stars.”

One reason, I think, that conversations while stargazing can be so memorable is that you can’t really see your companion’s face. You can only hear his voice while staring up into the darkness, which brings the words into unusually sharp focus. When I asked my dad what would happen to the dust from the tail after it got blown out of the solar system, he said, “Well, gravity might catch it and pull it into a huge cloud of other kinds of dust, and then it would become a new star or planet. Or it might drift out in space forever.”

“How can it drift forever?”

He paused before answering, “Nobody knows, really. But you’ll have a better idea once you get a job.”

Ironically, the one job my dad talked about with enthusiasm required drifting in space; he knew the names of all the astronauts, and considered every one of them a hero. Not surprisingly, when I was seven years old (around the middle of the Gemini program) I decided that I had to become an astronaut. I didn’t mean when I grew up, however; I meant right then, preferably by the end of the month. When I told my father this he said, “You’re too
young to be an astronaut right this minute, but if you keep working hard at your schoolwork, you could have a chance at it someday.” This advice discouraged me, but my mother saved the day by suggesting that I write a letter to NASA asking for information about the astronaut program; who knows, she said, maybe there was something I could do right away, even as a seven-year-old.

“Oh, Martha,” my father said, shaking his head. “They don’t have time to answer mail like that.”

“It doesn’t hurt to try,” she countered angrily, so I did write a letter, and three weeks later received a large manila envelope from NASA stuffed with color photographs from space and pamphlets about the space program. “You see?” asked Mom, who never seemed surprised when her long-shot suggestions worked. “You should never be afraid to try something!”

Taking her advice, I began my astronaut training immediately. One of the pamphlets showed an astronaut tucked inside a cramped mock capsule, and the text below explained that the astronauts had to get used to spending many long hours without being able to move. In an early display of what was to become my trademark habit—the obsessive pursuit of unrealistic goals—I decided to set a record for sitting still in a cramped space. I was sure this would get NASA’s attention.

I found a cardboard box that I could barely fit into, drew buttons and gauges all over the inside of it and outfitted it with a blanket, a thermometer, an alarm clock and a periscope made with two of my mother’s compact mirrors. I set up the space photo from NASA against the wall so I could look at them through the periscope and imagine myself on a real mission. My ground crew—Erich and Rachel—prepared Dixie cups filled with sugar water
for me and passed them down through the periscope hole when I needed more energy. I began the program by sitting in the box for half an hour, and increased my time every day by adding ten minutes. When I got to over an hour a day it started to get boring, but I knew I had to push on. If I was chosen for the real thing, a trip to the moon, think how long I would have to be prepared to sit!

I knew it was important that I not be comfortable, so I did not allow myself a cushion to sit on, and kept the box closed at all times so that it would get stuffy and overheated. Once a training session began I did not let myself out to go to the bathroom. After a week or so, when I felt my determination waning, I started pointing the box toward the TV so I could watch my favorite program—
Lost in Space
—through the periscope to counteract the boredom.

I did this for several weeks, building up to over three hours per session before the training came to an abrupt end. I remember the last mission well: