8
For the next two days we wove a desultory groundwork, mentioning almost random bits and pieces of our lives until we formed some kind of familiarity with each other. No special bond appeared, nothing ‘deep’ happened between us. It was more like two friendly strangers meeting daily on a park bench, trading personal facts back and forth until they knew a substantial but colorless framework of each other’s lives.
I pitched in to be of whatever help I could over those two days. I vacuumed the house and raked the mostly-dirt yard and organized the toys and things into some neatness. He had a very specific diet, so I shopped for a list of foods he’d given me that were gentle on his digestion—the mechanical hum I’d heard my first afternoon was a dialysis machine, which a nurse arrives to help with daily. Once I made him a small salad of tender butter lettuce, fresh sliced starfruit and a little honey dripped over these. A simple and succulent salad, which he loved. He’d never eaten starfruit before.
Small pleasures, of taste and sight and sound experienced only through a head, and touch experienced only through that head and a right hand. This, now, instead of wild rides and adventures with friends and girls and to faraway lands. For the rest of his life.
9
On the second afternoon I was asked to carry him outside—I was the biggest and strongest person present—to a reclining deck chair in the front yard, so he could sit in the fresh air and join our picnic around the oak. It’s true what they say about a limp body: to lift his utterly slack form, frail and probably less than eighty pounds, took me much more effort than to lift a body even fifty pounds heavier but with working nerves and limbs.
This was an intimate act for me, being trusted to lift this lifeless but living body up from a bed, carry him through his house and out into the sun, place him on his chair and arrange his limbs and hat and drink according to how he directed me. The neighbor’s teen daughter and preteen son helped by holding his blanket in place along the way, wrapped around him for dignity and privacy. There were a dozen people chatting and preparing the picnic table and barbecue, and they all treated the happening as entirely normal, most not even bothering to look as I carried him out.
They all knew what to do and they looked out for him, but this time I appointed myself. I didn’t need to hover, I just darted an occasional eye in his direction in case he needed something, like the adjustment of a limb or which direction the straw leaned in his glass, or how the sun was angling under his hat’s visor. He visited with whoever sat next to him, friendly and familiar, neither mobbed nor ignored, no one treating him unusually other than looking out for his small needs. Sometimes he sat alone. During a couple quiet lulls he looked at me and smiled.
After less than an hour, he nodded at my checking-in eye so I tripped over to him.
“I’m a little tired now, man. Can you take me in? Or do you want someone else to take me in? They all know how. They can double up.”
“No, it’s my pleasure,” I said.
Though I tried not to grunt as I strained, and was panting and sweating by the time I’d set him down on his bed, it truly was my pleasure to carry him inside and arrange him and the details around him into the shape he wanted for his nap.
10
“Anything?” I asked out loud.
I was taking an evening stroll through the neighborhood after dinner. No parks or ocean view, no mountains or forest or river, just more old houses and cracked sidewalks and swaying palms, block after block. But I wanted to be out and moving. Thinking. Asking. What can I do to help this person? Is there anything?
The Helper in me of course wants to help out, solve things, fix things… but what can I do when there is no such thing as solving or fixing? There is no solution, for him. His broken spine and limp body isn’t something that can be magically healed or ‘gotten over’.
Gone, for now, is any thought of my next teachers. I just wanted to do something for the better, for him, here, now. But there’s no point in any ‘heart-to-heart’ talk, that’s already been done, a lot and enough, between him and the people close to him. It’s not my role here. His abnormal life has, in its own way, become a new normalcy to him and to them. They’ve all settled into the difficulty and it’s become familiar, known, coped with graciously.
So, what? What am I here to do? Do I just be friendly for a while, help out around the house for a few days like I would as a guest at any other home… and then leave tomorrow? Is that it? That’s all? That’s my only role here? Is there nothing better, nothing more profound for me to do?
I looked up at the palms but they didn’t answer. No answer from the sky either.
I stopped walking and sat down on the curb, closer to the smaller things around me.
A caterpillar inched its way across the grate of a storm drain beside my foot, almost slipping and falling into the sewer. I held a dead, dry palm frond blade in front of it and, after testing it, the caterpillar climbed right on. I lifted them and placed the caterpillar safely on a bush behind me.
An immediate thought arose:
Why did you do that?
I looked down at the grate; just an inconsequential iron grate beside the curb to me, but a huge possible death trap to the caterpillar. I looked behind me again, at the caterpillar on the bush.
Why did I save you?
What did I feel, what feeling urged me to do that?
I felt you falling through that grate into darkness and a river of sewage, being churned under and sinking, suffocating, drowning, disappearing forever from the light of life above.
Ending. You, an almost invisible, almost inconsequential little green caterpillar… and I felt some tiny little feeling of your life and your suffering and your death. And that tiny little feeling mattered enough to me that I activated my great big body—as big as a skyscraper, from your perspective—and I did what I could to save tiny you from slipping into a predicament you could not foresee.
I felt you. I felt a sameness with you, for a moment. And it mattered. It mattered that I could feel what you feel, in some limited way. It mattered enough that I made an effort to remove you from possible mortal danger.
I looked up again at the palms and the sky above, then around at the streets and homes and people and dogs. At the sidewalks, the dust, the grass, feeling the breeze, listening to the sounds.
Within all those different things… Sameness.
Do I have the ability to feel what a rock feels, what a swaying palm tree feels, what a drowning caterpillar might feel, what the sky feels, what death feels, what enlightenment feels? What thirty-five years of prison feels, what sudden freedom feels, what a quadriplegic young man feels?
Somehow… yes.
If nothing else, this is what I have in me.
This sameness of feeling.
This compassion.
I have it in me to consciously feel what another feels, to understand a single other human being, to understand everything, every insect and every rock and grate and leaf.
Pulling my ever-present mini-notepad and pen from my rear shorts pocket, I wrote for a while, sitting there on the cracked sidewalk beside a storm drain, with a caterpillar for company and sky and palms to witness.
11
Then I stood, watching and feeling my muscles flex, moving as they were born to move in my wonderful, working legs. A motorcycle cruised loudly past and I turned to follow it back down the road toward the house, toward the young man. As I walked, another latent thought leapt suddenly from its hiding place and into my forethought:
On his mountaintop the old man didn’t say that each teacher would send me to the next teacher; he said ‘After each teacher, you will be sent to the next’.
‘Be sent’.
By anything, even a leaf or a caterpillar or a sewer. By anyone, even a lady at a picnic, a wounded young man, by anyone I stumble across.
By me. I’d been assuming the ‘teachers’ were all part of some list of people he’d met, some pre-structured path he was sending me down.
But it isn’t like that.
Each next step of my path is free.
Even if I never again search for another person who has met the old man… I have been set into a very particular motion. Simply because my first step was taken, each next step will fall into perfect natural order, each teacher will be the right teacher for the next step.
12
He was still awake, bedside lamp on. No visitors, not reading or watching TV, not anything. Just lying there, moving along at the same speed as the walls and furniture moving along with him.
“Hi,” I greeted. “Took a long walk. It’s beautiful out.”
But my voice was different. A further inch of warmth, caring, humanity. Not an overhaul, just degrees of more. More sameness between us, more compassion. Maybe that is all I have to give, here. And I’m realizing… that’s not a small thing.
He glanced tiredly over to me.
“Hey, man. Yeah, looks real nice out there. Hey, I heard you’re leaving tomorrow. Sorry we never really talked, man. I just took my meds, too, so I’ll be drifting off pretty soon. Sorry about that.”
I placed the chair in the visitor spot, at the foot of his bed. Entering felt familiar and accepted now, I didn’t have to ask. I sat and leaned forward a little.
I felt the equality between us, rather than the working and not-working, whole and not-whole, healthy and injured. Still me, the high school dweeb, thinking what an amazing guy this is, full of acceptance and courage and a lot of fortitude. The same dude loved by the dweebs and jocks and girls in his school, still in there somewhere, right in front of me.
“Maybe there was no need for us to go deep into all that,” I said. “You have great people here. I expect you’ve already said it all a thousand times, with everyone.”
Still my natural voice, but how much warmer and closer I was feeling toward him. It changed my voice and my movements a little, without me doing it consciously.
He noticed the change, somehow. He didn’t smile, just kind calmness in his face, looking at me.
“I guess. Yeah, we pretty much covered it all. It was pretty hard, for a while there.” Now a small smile. And for the first time, I liked the way somebody said ‘I guess’ around here.
“So where are you heading tomorrow, man?” he asked.
“You know, I don’t know,” I said. “Not a clue. I’ll just walk out your front yard and keep walking whichever way my feet turn.”
I didn’t see any wistful sparkle in his tropical blues—that adventurer is gone—but I saw an appreciation. A small pleasure. I saw him feeling a little of what I was looking forward to feeling, tomorrow when I was ‘walking anywhere’. I saw his own sameness toward me, his own compassion.
“That’s really cool, man.” A small apologetic smile from him, and a sigh. I don’t think he can yawn. “Well, I’m flaking out already. Pretty tired.” He turned his head slowly to the window.
“Can I give you a hug?” I asked. “I may not see you in the morning.”
He turned back, tired blues looking kindly and directly at me, with some mixed expression I couldn’t name but which I felt good receiving.
“Sure, man. Yeah.”
I bent over him and hugged him, gently but surely. I knew he had a little feeling and movement in his right hand so I held it, and felt a small pressure in return from two fingers. And he pressed his head against mine, ever so slightly as his neck would allow.
“Good night,” I said. “You need anything else, first?”
“No, man. Yeah, good night, hey?” he said, tiredly. Using his chin he pressed a button beside his head and the lamp clicked off. I closed his door and went to bed early myself. There were others still in the living room watching TV, but the volume was low and I put my earplugs in for a purer silence.
13
Very early the next morning I gathered my travel gear, the house silent and shrouded in hesitant dawn. I quietly let myself out the front door, after stepping wraithlike through the living room, past a girl curled up on the loveseat and a young man stretched out on the sofa, both asleep under blankets.
Under the oak tree I hefted my backpack on and, standing on the sidewalk outside his yard, I looked back and could vaguely see the shadow of his head through his wispy curtains. I couldn’t tell if he was awake or looking at me, but I held up a goodbye hand and looked for a moment to where his eyes would be.
Then my feet turned toward their own choice of direction and I walked.
And what did I write in my mini-notepad the previous evening, beside the caterpillar?
(That writing coming soon)
For a deeper understanding of this part of your journey, read the SAMENESS COMMENTARIES here (coming soon)
Journey continues into Chapter 4: DIFFERENTNESS