"They Say That In This Life Every Meeting Is a Reunion"

The title to this post is a quote from the movie "The Grandmaster." When the two martial artists in the above photo meet, the sparks are blinding--and not from the punches and kicks they deliver.

When I was first dating Dan, he seemed so familiar to me that I would sometimes wrack my brain over it. Who was it that he reminded me of? It was like a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn't quite utter. At the same time, all I could think of was how different we were, and why could he possibly be interested in me when we were really into very different things. And of course there was my wreck of a life that I was dragging behind me. All we really have is right now, this moment, he would tell me. Just be right here.

I don't really watch a lot of martial arts movies, but if "The Grandmaster" is any example, there are a lot of shots of feet. Our feet let us know where we are right now. And of course, they're very important in the martial arts.

Tonight I went to a T'ai Chi Chih (not a martial art, but a moving meditation) practice in a location that is not my usual one. We had just begun when a homeless guy walked in. He was staggering and looked a bit out of it, but he joined the circle, waving his arms around, not really following our moves. "Yoga," he said. Then "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo." (A Buddhist chant)

"You're welcome to join us," the teacher said. "Or sit and watch. But we're going to do our practice." So we did. The guy stood in the circle with us, but mostly did his own thing. Not too disruptively.  I put my attention in the soles of my feet. About half-way through, he left the room and later reappeared in the lobby. I had the perfect vantage point from which to see him perusing the various pieces of literature. (We were in a church.) Pretty soon he walked out the door and staggered across the parking lot as he made the sign of the cross.

Reunion? Perhaps. We never know for sure, I guess. Every encounter holds something way more mysterious than the fortunes I keep on my kitchen windowsill.

The Living Present

"I marked a passage from Nisargadatta," the man who loves me said this morning on his way out the door.

Questioner: Are you ever glad or sad? Do you know joy and sorrow?
Maharaj: Call them as you please. To me they are states of mind only, and I am not the mind.
Q: Is love a state of mind?
M: Again, it depends what you mean by love. Desire is, of course, a state of mind. But the realization of unity is beyond the mind. To me, nothing exists by itself. All is the Self, all is myself. To see myself in everybody and everybody in myself most certainly is love.


I am not in the habit of reading spiritual teachings--eastern or western, but the man who loves me gave me my very own copy of "I Am That--talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj." It's a modern spiritual classic, the cover proclaims, and for days now--or maybe weeks, I've read the first eight pages over and over again.
After I read the passage above, I went back to where I'd left off and reread the section titled, "The Living Present."

Q: Between the body and the self lies a cloud of thoughts and feelings which neither serve the body or the self. These thoughts and feelings are flimsy, transient and meaningless, mere mental dust that blinds and chokes, yet they are there obscuring and destroying.
M: Surely the memory of an event cannot pass for the event itself. Nor can the anticipation. There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event which the previous or the coming do not have. There is a livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illumined. There is the 'stamp of reality' on the actual that the past and the future do not have.

I didn't set out to drive through my past this afternoon. But for some reason I elected to get to the Craft and Folk Art Museum by driving down Wilshire Boulevard instead of taking The 10, and there I was going by all three of the offices buildings where  I used to work. Then afterwards I drove north on Western Avenue, the view of the hills so familiar it made me feel unstuck in time--as if I might look out my car  window and see myself pushing C. in her stroller waiting for the steady whoosh of the afternoon traffic to soothe her. Or I might have seen an even younger self in a discount furniture store buying a brand new couch and chair for the Low! Low! price of $89.99! because my mother-in-law was coming for a visit, and the bare living room seemed all wrong. And it might have been me wheeling a cart into the Vons, but it's not a Vons anymore--and come to think of it didn't the Korean market sign go up even before we moved? All that time travel gave me such an appetite I nearly stopped at the coffee shop where I had at least a couple hundred meals with the guy who could never understand the Mexican accents of the waitresses, and so I ordered for him. He'll take the baked potato--butter and sour cream, French dressing on the salad, please. But no, don't stop there, my younger self told my old self. Or maybe it was the other way around. So I went to the deli at the supermarket in the neighborhood I lived in after that. I wanted that carrot salad, but had to settle for broccoli salad, which was unfortunate because my present self forgot to mention to my past self that I'm a vegetarian now, and we had a little quarrel about picking out the bacon.

I had planned to go to a movie after the museum--to see the new version of Brighton Rock--based on the Graham Greene novel because it has the most villainous villain ever and I was in the mood for a villain, but when I got to the ticket window, I said, "Midnight in Paris, please." I try not to read about movies until I've seen them, and voila,  it was a surprise to me that the movie was about sorrow and joy and the past and the present and the infernal wanting, wanting, wanting that we humans do. "The past is never dead. It's not even past," the protagonist tells his soon-to-be-ex-fianceé, quoting Faulkner.

It was twilight when I walked out of the movie theater, the sky a murky lavender, the streetlights already on, adding to the glow. I thought about Paris, and how I had lived there once, and my heart asked my brain, please, how I could manage to go back and live there again? But the city streets that I was driving on right then--the streets of my city had their own light in the coming dark, standing out as if illumined, and for once it seemed to me that the past was stone cold dead.

Love, Money, and Mink

I recently took my mother back to the apartment where she used to live with her sister until health problems forced them both to move a couple of years ago. Because the place is in the basement of my cousin's house a lot of their things are still there, time-capsuled as if they might someday return and resume where they left off.

"Do you suppose this gin is still good?" my aunt might ask as she leans down from her wheelchair and peers into the cabinet.

"Of course it's good," my mother would respond, opening the fridge. "But I don't know about these olives." They'd discuss the pros and cons of a martini without olives then, but they'd make the drinks anyway and sit at their table, a cumulous cloud of smoke forming under the low ceiling. They'd sip. And talk about how good it was to be back. 

Could happen. But probably not. My aunt lives in a nursing home now, both legs lost and her memory chasing after them.

What did happen was that my mother opened every drawer and each of her  little wooden boxes (many of which most likely came from thrift store or trash picking treasure hunts.) She looked through her closet and her jewelry box and stood in front of her bookshelves . "Take this," she'd say when I exclaimed over something. "It needs fixing, but..." We found earrings that have been in her jewelry box ever since I can remember. She still had the little golden expandable chignon-style hair clasps that I used to set on top of my head as crowns when I played dress up, her father's watch chain, and the crystal rosary in the pouch personalized with her name in gold across the white leather that her mother presented to her as a wedding gift.

I thought I was familiar with each and every one of my mother's treasures, but there was a surprise. "Is that mink?" I asked. The fur was soft as a kitten's, not marred at all by time, although the satin rose was maybe a bit faded with a hint of fray.

"Your father gave that to me for Christmas the year I asked for a mink coat," she said.  

My parents never had any money. The way I remember it, the only thing they ever fought about was money, and that was because there wasn't  any. I was touched by the story because my father heard what his young, poor-all-her-life wife wanted, and with, I imagine, a rather stylish sense of humor, he delivered mink.

And now the mink and satin rose is with my mother at my brother's house where she lives with him and his girlfriend.  My father has been dead for almost thirty years, and my mother looks back almost as much as she looks forward. Tucked-away treasures bring the past and the present together. I like that.