Reflections of Big Sur

Now the fog is burning away and with it the worries. Bars of sunlight puncture the clouds. The ocean appears again, down steep cliffs, with diaphanous wisps of white vapor foam. I study the shore and the coastal stone monoliths of Big Sur and feel a pull deep inside me. Visions from distant memories come flooding back and I know I have visited here before, this place like in dreams, and with my family sleeping soundly, away in their own lands, and me just driving with a thrumming tickly feeling in my guts and heaven all around and the sea and the sea cliffs and the world wide sun god radiant jubilation everywhere; I recall, in fragments, little moments of my life: laughter, singing, dancing, crying, fighting, loving, giving and forgiving and no one can say if it’s right or wrong, not gods not men and the shadows creep back into the deep forest of the redwood giants going where shadows go when they can’t hold their breath any longer…it’s right here, man; it’s not any place else but right here, the big man on the radio says and I pull the car off the road in a little gravel turn-out, lock the doors with no one even stirring; running now, down the embankment, across the rubbery flower vines in the sand, and the orange flowers and the blue flowers crunching under my shoes, running as hard as I can, the ocean with its resplendent astral fabric and shore birds dipping and sand birds scattering and this is exactly a place I have visited before in a causal world of my own creation and as I run, for a moment I am not sure if I really am alive or if I have died and am now running in heaven, free, sublimely free, and filled with love, baby, big love and big freedom, and I am a voyager, a spark of energy in the cerulean landscape of subatomic dynamos, just merging, ever merging, with the space-time-wonder-love-bliss, the whoosh and roar of God out there past the breakers, me running madly skipping with childlike idiot laughter and my lungs alive with the salty refreshing sea-mist explosion of light...I had arrived.

Some of the Things That Make Me Cry

Before I had a near-death experience, then, I could never cry. My wife would ask me, “why don’t you cry?”
I didn’t cry at my dad’s funeral, or my grandmother’s or grandfather’s funeral. Or when I knew my wife was sick or from the joy at seeing the birth of my kids. I just couldn’t cry. I didn’t know how.
I grew up holding in my emotions. My brain was not hard-wired for crying. The only time I remembered crying was as a child in moments of extreme pain or anger.
Now I cry and am moved to tears often. And they are not tears of sadness; when I am flooded with immense bliss, I cannot help but cry.
Sometimes I will cry at the site of a bird, or hearing my children’s laughter, or hearing a great piece of music, or sitting in church, or watching an inspirational show, or simply reading about some of my heroes: Whitman, Jesus, Buddha, Poe, Beethoven, Yogananda, Dr. Seuss, Fellini. Or when I simply think of Mahavatar Babaji, I am moved to tears. I cannot help it. The mere thought of Babaji crushes me.
I cried recently when a friend mentioned his enjoyment of Lao Tzu’s work or when another friend discussed the Dalai Llama.
I recall going to see Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed by the L.A. Philharmonic and when I was sitting in the audience, without a single note being played, I couldn’t help but weep uncontrollably because of the incandescent meaning of the great master’s work -- one man’s connection and inspiration directly from God, expressed with such profound and infinite clarity and brilliance.
My family still doesn’t fully accept the fact that whenever I hear “Moonlight Sonata”, tears will unfailingly run down my cheeks. It is even a running joke when we go for long drives, they will sneak in the CD and wait for the tears to flow.
I can only describe the feeling as being “overwhelmed by the immensity of the divine” or a deeper love that fills me up with an all-pervading sense of joy and beauty in creation.
These are not tears of sadness. I cry because I feel touched deeply by something I can’t describe that moves me beyond description.
I cry because, for a brief instant, I feel in touch with the ETERNAL. I feel in touch with whatever it is, way out there, across the universe, that is also right underneath my nose.
You will know you are close to acquiring a heart of compassion when you see a bird and can’t help but weep or when you think of Jesus and his immense sacrifice and feel it deep in the pit of your soul. When a child laughing and running at the park takes you back to a time when you were closer to who you really are, and closer to God.
Some of the other things that make me cry now, not in any particular order are: the sparkle in my wife’s eyes; my daughter’s laughter or singing; watching my son play sports; attending mass or visiting a church, temple or synagogue; listening to certain music, usually classical (esp. Beethoven’s Ninth and Moonlight Sonata); seeing a parent’s love for their child; watching a bird or small animal; seeing emotional movies; hearing “The Star Spangled Banner” sung at sporting events; passages in books, mainly Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (esp. Song of Myself, number 20); some of Jack Kerouac’s poetry; seeing the look of wonder in my son’s or daughter’s eyes when they watch a butterfly or a hummingbird or a horse run through a meadow or fish swimming in a stream; a sunset; watching the crowds of people go by at the mall or at the fair and feeling their struggle and sorrows and just wanting to take it all away...

Just Love

I found myself in confession the other day. My son was taking CCD classes and when I went to pick him up, I realized there was a pennant mass with confessional following immediately after the service with twelve visiting priests from other parishes. I saw it as a perfect opportunity to slip in and get some of the guilt off my chest.
I rarely attend confession because it is usually at a strange time of day, maybe three to four p.m. on a Saturday, and it’s not like I’m overflowing with so many sins I need to unload them any chance I can get. Alright, these are bad excuses. I need to go to confession more. Bottom line.
I do believe confessions are useful. I believe in the power of talking about and facing the issues in your life that bring you down and make you sad. Sometimes something that may seem so insignificant to a stranger, is something that is literally eating us alive inside. Something mean or bad that we said; some minor lie we told; taking some object that wasn’t ours; using another persons’ body for sexual gratification; these are all things that tear us up inside with guilt. But if we think of our neighbor doing these acts or a friend or someone on television, they often seem rather meaningless and petty in the greater scheme of things.
I slipped into one of the long lines that were forming of parents and fifteen-year-old students in front of the confessional rooms.
Facing the priest brought naked fear to the surface. My heart was beating a mile a minute. I could feel the heat under my arms and the sweat dripping down my lower back. My turn came and I entered the dark booth and saw the priest’s shadow hunched behind the mesh window, a little prayer bench in front of it with a simple prayer printed on card stock. I wasn’t too sure of the routine.
“Um, yeah, I don’t really do this too much. I’m sorry.”
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
We both crossed ourselves.
There was a pause and I could sense his uneasiness at my uneasiness. “Do you have anything to confess?”
“Nothing that big.”
Another pause. I thought of all the carnal desires that burned in my skull along with little lies I might have spoken or getting angry or only thinking of myself but they all seemed too small and petty to mention. I almost felt bad I didn’t have anything really big and heavy to lay on him. But there was the one thing. It was the biggest question of all, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, there was no way he could answer it.
“Sometimes I struggle with certain desires. And this is really something that we’ve been dealing with for millions of years and even though I am aware of this constant struggle, still I find myself doing things I shouldn’t. Still I find myself being led into this darkness and ultimately reaching a point where I’m confounded by the utter pointlessness of it all. Like there is no meaning. Like once you have unraveled the deepest mystery at the bottom of all mysteries, it is just zero. Nothing. Emptiness. And I don’t want to think this way and thus yearn for annihilation, which is pretty much the death of the body but I can’t help reaching this point because I feel so overwhelmed and disheartened, and racked by such immense sorrow, the blackest, deepest sorrow, I don’t want to continue. I want to be free. So what is the meaning? Why the hell am I here?” I was about to scream: “what the fuck am I doing here?!” “Is there some point to this endless struggling to satisfy my needs and seek happiness or will that only really lead to greater sorrow? In the end don’t you know we’re all just mowed under like so many blades of grass? I mean, I long for God’s love, but it feels so distant, so remote, so cold, so condescending, so maddeningly incomprehensible that my only recourse and natural goal as a human being on the planet earth is to roll myself up in a ball and tremble. Is that the destiny of man? Is that our great epic goal? Tremble, for eternity? Is that my destiny? Please father, tell me something. Give me some encouragement. Drop me a bone. I am utterly confounded and clueless.”
There was a long pause and the priest sat up straight and I could make out his features a little better as the dim lamp in the corner hit him. He was pondering; maybe even troubled. His head was down. He was stumped. This was not a local priest. He was foreign, from India or the Middle East.
I thought I had really caught him off guard with this one. Today, after the endless train of masturbatory confessions, adulteress spouses, forged checks, throwing the old folks in the rest home, stealing the neighbor’s newspaper, where this priest had been spiritually lolled into a knee-jerk, quick-fix, magic bullet prayer response, now he finally had something to think about. You couldn’t just slide a prayer across a table and say, “here’s the answer”. There was no way he was going to wriggle out of this one. There was no “How to Answer the Question of the Meaning of Life”, in the Catechism Desk Reference For Priests. I almost felt smug and was about to stand up leave without another word spoken. That would have satisfied me; the only true answer to all questions: silence.
I looked down at the prayer on the little card in front of me. I took it in hand and scanned the text. I waited, almost mockingly, ready for him to tell me how many times to chant the obligatory prayer. Maybe throw in a few “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” for good measure. I had this guy up against the ropes. There was no way back from “Queer Street” now.
“Just love,” the priest finally muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“Just love. That’s it.”
“Just love?”
“Yes, just love. That’s really the only thing Jesus wants from us and that’s his primary teaching. First and foremost, just love.”
I was floored. My God, yes! It was so simple. Yet so perfect. Just love.
“There is really nothing that you must do or achieve. You just need to love more.”
The dark clouds of doubt burned instantly away, revealing only bright sunshine. It was as if I knew this all along, way in the back of my head somewhere, but couldn’t remember it. Like an old book in a library, in some back dusty store room. All it needed was a hand to point it out and a quick dust off. “Just love”. Wasn’t this what all the major religions were telling us from the beginning? Wasn’t this at the heart of all dogmas, creeds and divine law?
Sometimes you have to dig a little bit to find it, but love is always there somewhere, no matter how cleverly hidden among the brambles.

The Healer

“The Healer”

I want to do the right thing. I want to help people. I want to volunteer my time to maybe pass on some of the wisdom I have learned, along with instilling compassion and loving kindness in those who may really need it. I want to be a healer. I want to heal troubled souls.
I show up at Hospice House in Calabasas, California for my volunteer training with Gladys, the supervisor, and two other volunteer trainees. Gladys is a kindly, happy-go-lucky Christian who herself had started as a Hospice volunteer and rose to a paid staff position. She always has a big smile on her face and never really takes anything too seriously. Gladys is a trooper because she works day in and day out with human beings at the end of their lives, which isn’t always a sun-shiny, knee-slapping good time.
When you are admitted to Hospice House, you have basically six months to live. That is the physical stipulation that is confirmed by a doctor in order to receive the Medicare coverage.
Gladys has us introduce ourselves and explain what cosmic forces compelled us to want to lend a helping hand.
“My name is Jay. I really feel like I am on some kind of spiritual mission where I want to impart some of the great wisdom that I have learned over the years to other people who might really need it.” I am feeling a little smug here, maybe even over confident. Gladys is beaming, her eyes actually glinting with tears. “Sometimes just a simple quote from The Bible can save a life or really bring peace to a person who is really feeling down.”
As I finish I gaze humbly around the room at each volunteer. They are moved. They believe. They want to be my Christian foot soldiers on the march to our great cause of saving souls.
Our first order of business is feeding of the Hospice patients. We are to observe how this is implemented and gain a general introduction to the care center. I find this odd because why would we need to be there when they are being fed? I picture some sort of waiter role, trucking trays of food back and forth from the kitchen or maybe fetching drinks, taking orders, being on hand to help scoop ice cream at desert time. This was definitely not the case.
I am stunned when I enter the cafeteria. Most of the patients can neither move nor speak and a few appear already in the death spasms. They need to be fed, because, as I am told, if they weren’t, they would never eat and the food would simply be thrown away promptly at the six o’ clock bell. I never anticipated the final days being this vegetative, almost as if each patient has returned to the postnatal phase where they are virtually helpless as a babe. I hang back uneasily to observe Gladys go around to each individual, many in wheel chairs, many unresponsive, many babbling incoherently, many just staring at me like I am the incarnation of the devil. Gladys quickly tries to scoop a few spoonfuls into unresponsive mouths then moves on to the next person. I do my best to paste on a grin but the room is so miserable, so depressing, so dim and utterly without hope and there is such a ubiquitous cloud of unwieldy death shrouding all, my smile hurts. It physically hurts.
In absolute wonder, I watch Gladys as she dances from one patient the next, ever-smiling and ever-offering words of love and encouragement, never wavering for a second. My God she is a trooper. My God.
“This is Mr. Klein. We thought we lost him two weeks ago but he’s still here,” Gladys says, patting the back of an elderly man in a reclining wheel chair with a brace that supports his neck. Everything about him is gray, almost as if he is only half on the material plane. First, he looks like he is about 120 years old. His hands are bony, claw-like, crippled with palsy. She makes a few faint attempts to offer him the pureed paste from his tray, but he doesn’t respond, his lips slightly trembling at the cold of the spoon.
“Some of the patients have to get their food in soft form otherwise they can’t swallow or digest it,” she explains.
Mr. Klein’s plate consists of three little piles of mashed food product: one gray, one darker gray, and one an orangish brown. I don’t have the faintest clue what kind of foods these represent but assume it is of the generic baby food variety.
“Are you working?” A stern-faced woman in glasses asks me with a German accent.
“Uh, I’m learning. I’m a volunteer.”
“Come with me.” She takes my hand and leads me to the corner where a large-eared, old man sits upright staring straight ahead into oblivion. “This is Klaus. He needs to eat dinner. Please.” She bids me to sit across from Klaus.
“I’m not sure if I…”
“It’s very easy,” she says. “You take a little like this and offer it to him.”
She takes a small amount of rice and pushes it into Klaus’s mouth. He chews, his eyes still peering off into space. She hands me the fork. “Go ahead.”
“Hey, what’s up, bro?” I ask Klaus, trying to scoop rice onto the fork, not wanting to get too much in and choke the poor bastard. Klaus just stares beyond me vacuously.
“He doesn’t speak much English. Please.”
I raise the fork to his paper-thin lips with a little rice on board. As the fork touches his lips, they part and I dump the rice in. He chews slowly and impassively, like a cow. “Good. See, it’s easy,” She says then she leaves. I have no clue where she goes and don’t see her after that. She just disappears.
“So, how are we doing there, Klaus?” He just stares past me. “Do you like rice?” As a response, he gives a long oozing fart with liquid sounds which I know must be a bad thing. I turn around and there is a heavy-set Hispanic lady in a wheel chair, two inches from my nose, staring at me with piercing black eyes.
“How’s it going?” I say uneasily.
“Feed me,” she says in loud monotone.
“Um, I’m kinda with this dude.”
“Feed me.”
Gladys comes by and takes the fork.
“This is Kiki. Why don’t you help her and I’ll assist Mr. Voller.”
I wheel Kiki back to her table and begin shoveling chicken chow mein into her mouth. At the first spoonful, she makes a disgusted face.
“You don’t like it?”
“Cold.”
“Oh.” I offer her more and she eats, still each bite eliciting the same reaction as if I am feeding her Comet.
“Juice,” she snaps.
I offer her a drink from her glass. Despite being confined to a wheel chair, Kiki seems more vigorous and lively than the others. Gladys tells me that Kiki is not on Hospice but has other “special needs”. The center doubles as a nursing home but the active elderly who don’t have one foot in the grave are kept in another part of the ward. It is sad they have Kiki bunched in with the soon-to-be-departed.
“Biscuit.”
I take the dinner roll on her plate and hold it to her lips. The dinner role appears more agreeable than the chow mein.
“Juice.” I offer her more juice.
“Biscuit.” I offer another bite of the bread.
I offer her more chow mein and she only makes the disgusted face.
“Take me to my room,” Kiki says abruptly.
“Uh, not sure if I’m supposed to do that.”
“Take me to my room.”
I look for Gladys.
“She wants me to take her to her room.”
“No. She needs to eat. She just wants attention,” Gladys explains.
I feed her a while longer until she no longer seems interested, only staring at me like I just sprouted horns. I keep smiling through the pain.
“This is Mr. O’Leary,” Gladys says, leading me to a hearty-looking fellow who resembles a retired general with a buzz cut and a tall, solid frame. Strong Irish boxer’s features. A wave of relief passes over me as I feel that at last, here is someone I can talk to who is coherent and we might have a nice warm discussion over dinner. “Hi, Mr. O’Leary. How are you today, handsome?” Gladys says, hugging him then kissing the top of his head. Gladys takes his fork and offers him food and things go down hill from there. He bites down on the fork and won’t let go, finally dropping it into his lap, then on the floor. He clenches great fistfuls of chow mein and rice and smears it across his face and over his pink polo shirt.
“Oh dear…” says Gladys, her smile going crooked, backing off as Mr. O’Leary crushes the food in his enormous hands and plasters it over his entire body, wolfing it down like a wildman. Gladys looks at me and I see a trace of the real Gladys, hidden in there somewhere. She is doing her best to maintain and be a good Christian, but damn it is hard.
“Mr. Moser…” she introduces me to an affable man with gray hair who doesn’t look that old and appears normal enough until he opens his mouth...
“Be-bop the de-dop, the car said, the man said, he go, she go, which go,” he stammers, in a stream of consciousness rant.
“Yes, yes, I know Mr. Moser,” Gladys says, hugging him.
“Which way, this way, the car way, the car, the bus, brick bus, bit bus…”
“Yes! Yes! The bus! Mr. Moser, the bus,” replies Gladys.
“Frontiers, frontier, the frontier, the guesswork, the car work, the car, the cars, haddle-haddle-haddle…”
“I love you, Mr. Moser! “
“Bing-bong the ding-dong, the ring, the thing, the car, the car thing…” As he speaks he always stares straight ahead, never directing his words at anyone in particular, unblinking.
“Yes, I know!”
I turn around and Kiki is inches away from me again with that unnerving, penetrating look. “Take me to my room.”
“Why don’t you take her and we’ll meet you there? We’re going to the conference room from here. It’s on the way,” Gladys says.
“Oh, uh...”
“Don’t put her in bed though. She just wants attention.”
I find myself pushing Kiki down the interminable corridors that seem to stretch on forever. Patients watch in wide-eyed horror as we pass. Some stand in corners like zombies, others truck by aimlessly on walkers or wheelchairs. I picture this as some anesthetized plane of lower hell where the sane mix with the insane, in a slow, simmering decline of the senses, not quite dead but dead enough; a kind of atrophy of the soul where one is trapped in a spoon-fed nightmare, the delicious freedom of death only spoken in the fractured chittering of the demented.
“Uh, which way do we go?” I ask realizing that if I didn’t, we could have circled the facility until one of us actually expired in the process.
“Straight.”
“Left here?”
“No.”
“Right here?”
“No.”
“Are we getting close?”
“No.”
“Which way now?”
“Right.”
“What’s your room number?”
“Left.”
“Are we close to your room?”
“No.”
“Which way now?”
“Left.”
“Are we close?”
“No.”
If by some miracle, we finally find her room after what seems like an endless trip around the ward. Her room is a tiny space with two single beds, a nightstand with a few books and stuffed animals and a single closet. A white specter of a woman lies in the second bed nearby asleep.
“This is it, huh? Here we are. Okay.”
There is a silence as she just stares at me and I nod uncomfortably and try to smile. I go out into the hallway to see if Gladys is on her way. Nothing. I go back in and stand near Kiki, glancing at the woman in the second bed.
“What’s her name?”
“She’s sleeping!” Kiki yells.
I scan her books, a weird assortment of horror novels and thrillers by Peter Straub and Stephen King.
“Did you read these? They look like good books,” I say.
“Those are my husband’s books.”
“Oh, where is he?”
“He died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“He died in a plane crash.”
“Wow, that’s sad.”
“He was a writer and a movie director.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“He never sold anything. No luck.”
A long silence. I sneak out to the hallway even though she is spearing me through the whole time with her piercing black eyes. No Gladys.
“I want to go to bed.”
“Well, uh...”
“Put me in bed. I want to sleep.”
“Not sure if I’m supposed to.”
“I want to sleep.”
“Yeah, I know but...”
“Put me in bed.”
“Can you do it yourself?”
“No.”
“Alright.”
I position the wheelchair close to the bed and move around behind Kiki to place my hands under her arms. I lift with all my strength. She offers no assistance whatsoever just sitting there like a stubborn elephant. She feels like she weighs a thousand pounds. I strain and manage to get her up and wedge her into her sheets. Her legs dangle awkwardly over the bed. I put my shoulder to her shins and heave. Finally, I’m able to pull the sheets over her body.
“Alright, there we go. You’re all set.” She just stares at me with those wide black eyes. “So, uh, I better, uh, you know, head out.”
“Do you like books?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Those are my husband’s books.”
I flip through her books and find “A Farewell To Arms” by Ernest Hemingway.
“Wow, you have Hemingway? He’s great.”
“I don’t know.”
I sit there for about twenty seconds trying to look happy and content while she just glares at me. Twenty seconds feel like twenty minutes.
“Are you from Los Angeles originally?”
“No.”
Another twenty seconds. I pretend to read, to smile, to nod. I glance back at the hallway like a drug freak.
“Do you have a big family?”
“No.”
Another twenty seconds.
“Is that your daughter in that picture?”
“No.”
“What’s your relationship with God?”
“You ask too many questions!”
I sit in silence, looking at her, then down at Hemingway, then back to her smiling self-consciously, nodding, then down at the Hemingway again. I am about to throw out another question but I hold it in. I feel the back of my neck creak and the hair stand up on end. For a second I feel like my skull will rip apart and my brain will spill onto the carpet, sizzling like a raw egg. I look at Kiki and for a brief instant, I notice a twinge of warmth in her eyes mixed with pity.
“What are you doing?!” A scolding voice comes from the hall. I turn and see Gladys framed in the doorway with an angry look. I want to say, “I’m diddling my nutsack, what does it look like?” But what I actually say is, “Uh, she wanted to go to bed.”
“We don’t move patients. Only nurses move patients.”
“Oh, I was just talking to her.”
Gladys is really pissed like she caught me urinating on the floor or something. “Come on. We’re going now.”
I move to the door, glance back at Kiki and give her a wave. “See you later, Kiki.” She makes no response and for a moment my heart leaps as I think she might have died, right there, her face is frozen in that wide-eyed look of wonder. She finally blinks and I sigh, hugely relieved.
“Don’t move patients. She just wants attention anyways and will be back in her wheel chair and down the hall in five minutes or so,” Gladys explains.
I am a little huffy that she left me alone for such a long period of time.
“Where did you go? It felt like you were gone forever.”
“I went to check my email.”
Great, she’s checking her email while I engage in elderly abuse.
“That’s sad her husband died in a plane crash,” I say.
“Oh, he didn’t die in a plane crash. He comes every other day to visit her.”
I join Gladys and the other two volunteers in the conference room for the remainder of the orientation. Our meals are brought to us and we eat while Gladys goes over the rules and protocol of Hospice House. We are fed the exact Chinese chicken chow mein and rice meal the patients received. After feeding so many Hospice patients the same thing, I am feeling a little queasy. While Gladys shows us the volunteer handbook, Mr. O’Leary barges in like a rampaging zombie and throws our handbooks around the table.
“Grab your plates!” Gladys screams.
We all try to be cool and gather up our plates and silverware. We try to appear happy and casual while Mr. O’Leary thrashes about in the room but everyone looks wildly disturbed, even Gladys.
“Grab your pens!”
Mr. O’Leary has armed himself with a pen and is wielding it like a dagger, flailing his arms about and bumping into the table. He bumps into me and I try to look calm expecting any second to feel the pen driven into my carotid artery.
“Hi, Mr. O’Leary. Do you want to join our meeting?” Gladys says in a loud, measured tone, the color drained from her face.
Mr. O’Leary continues to thrash about like a gut-shot zombie. He tries to rip the employee handbook out of my hands and suddenly I am in a minor tug-of-war match with a man who has less than six months to live.
“C’mon! If we pretend to leave, maybe he’ll go away,” Gladys says to us, not even trying to be discreet at this point. “Mr. O’Leary, we’re leaving. You can come if you want.”
We all file out the door and Mr. O’Leary shambles after us, the room in complete disarray, papers scattered everywhere, food and dishes spilled on the floor, glasses of water overturned and dripping on the carpet. We roam down the hall and Mr. O’Leary follows us. No one speaks. Everyone looks like we just witnessed Bambi executed by Dick Cheney.
“In here!” Gladys yells and motions us into a patient residence room where two frail old men sleep peacefully in their beds. Mr. O’Leary staggers in, bouncing off the wall. I fear for the tenuous lives of the old men. Mr. O’Leary still grasps the pen upside down in one hand.
“Quick! Run!” Gladys commands and we all bolt down the hallway. I want to stay and stand guard over the two sleeping men but this is not an option. We sprint down the hallway.
Gladys takes us on a hasty tour of the facilities, clearly still shaken by Mr. O’Leary’s rampage. We meet a few warm old people along the way that, thankfully, are fully lucid and energetic. Gladys greets them with hugs and words of love and support. My mind is still on the zombie island massacre that could be happening down the hall but I try to blot it out of my mind as I will try to do with much of the memories of the evening.
Our tour brings us to the “rec center” which is really only a large room with a long conference table, many rough, very uncomfortable looking sofas and a blurry big screen TV. A large group of patients sit around watching Samuel Jackson and Collin Ferrel machine gun terrorists. There are explosions, bloodletting, bodies flying everywhere. Somebody takes a head shot and their face blows apart. I see Samuel Jackson throw a knife that sticks in a guy’s eye. I look around the room and see who is handling the remote--an angry-looking, middle-aged Hispanic orderly, leaning against the wall, so enraptured by the carnage he doesn’t even know we are there. I realize there is nothing that exists on earth that will pry the remote from the orderly’s fingers. Half the people in the room, I am certain, have already passed away. They look like they have been lying there for days, some in contorted positions on sofas, some spread at the conference table, some half on the floor. A few stare glassy-eyed and stunned at the screen. Some lie with their heads thrown back, mouths wide open.
“This is Mr. Garza. He’s an orderly here.”
Mr. Garza doesn’t even turn to say “hi”. His arms are crossed at his chest and he grips the remote like a lifeline.
By this point in my visit to Hospice House, I am feeling that my soul has gained about twenty-six pounds. I feel heavy, tired, burnt out, like I could sleep for days. I feel sick and drained like a vampire might after supplementing his diet of blood with sugar water and Twinkies. I want to go home. There were no spiritual lessons here. There were no healings. There were no great life-affirming talks of wisdom and transcendence. There was no robust inspiration of light that myself and the other volunteers might have shone on the darkness here. No one was saved.
At the main entrance, Gladys punches a code in the security lock. For the moment, she has forgotten the code and we are trapped. I am scared. I am horrified. I want to jump out a window. I want to break the door down to get out. The little Asian volunteer feverishly pushes on the bar, trying to swing the door open, taking panicked breaths.
“No! Don’t do that! It won’t open without the code!” Gladys shouts. The Asian man continues pushing on the bar. He doesn’t care. He’s had enough too. I feel short of breath. I look around like a trapped animal. What if I am to be stuck in here all night? There must be another way out. There has to be another way out.
I notice a sad-faced lesbian nurse pushing Kiki around in her wheelchair. Kiki sees me and flashes a faint grin of recognition. That faint grin offers me worlds of hope. I feel tremendous relief. I wave to her and she waves back. I can suddenly breathe again as Gladys punches in the code and the cold night air hits me as I wander out into the parking lot, the half moon and glittering stars never looking so good.

You Must Haveth Thy Sense of Humor

“You Must Haveth Thy Sense of Humor”

I cherish my Sunday mornings because that is my soccer time. I can run like a maniac, breathe fresh air, compete, laugh, meditate, get-away and sweat, with very basic, simple intentions before me. I find soccer gives me a better workout than any other activity or exercise because I am forced to work my entire body and am constantly forced to run.
When I got back into playing soccer after college, I fell in with a group of Persians who had been playing together for years. At first it was a little hard to acclimate into their group because I was the lone American so I didn’t receive the same treatment as the other players did. I was fouled more often and yelled at constantly. I really had to prove myself as a player, much more so than the other new Persian players.
One of the interesting cultural factors of Persian athletes I have observed over the years, which is in sharp contrast to athletes from other countries, is the intensity and argumentative nature of the competition. When Persians compete, even if it is a kick-around at a local park among so-called friends, they treat it like the finals of the World Cup. There are constant arguments, battles, fisticuffs, intentional injuries, revenge, temper tantrums, screaming, crying, and so forth. When I have played with Americans, British, Germans, Asians, South Americans, Italians, Spanish, Mexicans, basically any other nationality, you have guys who want to win and play hard and sometimes fight and get angry, but not to the extent the Persians do. Persians love to win. Persians have to win. Even if there is nothing really at stake except pride. Americans want to win too, but there will be a point when an American will finally throw up his hands and proclaim, “You know what? It’s just a game and we ain’t getting paid so what the heck?”
A friendly kick-around at a park for Persians is all out war. Even the dude who is the nicest, friendliest chap before kick off, the person who seems like the most compassionate lover of humanity the modern world has ever known, with patience like a saint and monk-like restraint, will morph into the Demon King of Destruction on the field. And someone is always bound to get hurt. I have seen broken jaws, broken legs, broken ribs (I’ve done some of the breaking and had it done to me), broken arms, broken ankles and feet (I’ve had my foot broken too), broken noses (sorry, did this to someone too), heads cracked open, black eyes, fat lips, bloody noses, torn muscles, many, many destroyed knees, and numerous other injuries.
When a fight breaks out, as it always does, (I have been playing with this group for eleven years now and maybe have had three Sundays without at least one fight) I have to step back and laugh because the way I look at it is: I’m here for the fun of it. I’m here to get a little exercise. Laugh a little, sweat a little, connect with the land, my neighbors and fellow athletes and test my skills. Winning for me is great, but in the spirit of play, not in the spirit of harming someone else or making someone else feel bad. Granted, I have injured quite a number of persons in the course of different games but I am never compelled by malicious or vengeful motives. Not that I am more highly evolved or more intelligent or have greater sensibilities than anyone else, I am just happy to be outside, running around and appreciate every second of it. To get angry and fight really defeats the purpose.
I try to apply this to all areas of my life. It is very hard for me to become angry. Ever since my near-death experience, anger doesn’t seem to make much sense anymore. Anger and frustration are born out of thwarted desires. Not that I have beat desire completely, but it has cooled a bit, and I no longer need to have everything, be with everyone, smash things and be loud.
Often we take ourselves too seriously. To me, when someone is too serious about everything in their life, this is a sign of immaturity or ignorance. This is especially true when someone is older. I always feel sad for the older person, who has lived so many years only to reach a point where they are letting anger eat up their bodies and minds. It is anger that issues from stress and leads to more stress and more anger. We are angry because we are not getting what we want. We are angry that we lost a loved one or that someone cheated us or that God is challenging us. Smile and realize that it is all part of God’s perfect plan.