Driving Minnie's Piano (16 page)

^{But he never went to the
Arctic himself and when the great leaders of Great Britain got fed
up with Dodd's foolishness and lies, they sent him off to become
governor of the American colony of North Carolina, just before
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson decided to light fire to a
revolution.}

^{As far as history goes, lies
seem to have been more effective than truth in motivating any given
population to: a) explore the unknown; b) kill the king; c) go off
to war; and d) start a revolution.}

^{Listen up. This will probably
be on the final exam.}

^{Locust Blossoms}

^{Athletes sometimes talk about
a semi-altered state of consciousness that occurs when they are “in
the zone.” Magical, amazing feats are achieved at this point when
you become un-self-conscious. In other words, you don't have to
think about what you are doing yet your body and mind are totally
integrated into the activity, and then zonk. You just
are.}

^{This happens
for me when I write. Sometimes. It also happens when I surf.
Sometimes. It requires practice and repetition and a unique state
of grace. Sometimes, ironically, you can arrive there by being
hyper-aware of who you are and being so self-conscious that you
break through some invisible barrier and the division between you
and your environment evaporates. You can just be part of whatever
is going on. I remember, long ago, reading Ray Bradbury's neat
little book called
Zen and the
Art of Writing
wherein he
suggests that the best way to write is this: don't
think.}

^{Tell that to your grade seven
English teacher. But Ray was correct about this, of course. Maybe
we can learn all kinds of stuff by stopping our thought process and
just doing it.}

^{A few years ago I was in
Beverly Hills visiting with the movie director Dan Petrie. He had
an office in a building where other creative types had offices and
Dan pointed out to me Ray Bradbury's office. The walls were all
cracked from a recent earthquake and I imagined all these creative
types - poets, science fiction writers, screenwriters and
independent directors - gathering in the hallway there while the
walls were cracking, having a grand old dramatic time of it as they
scrambled down to street level.}

^{I've only experienced two
small earthquakes. One little ripple that rattled some stones free
from the Hollywood Hills and another while I was asleep on a tatami
mat in a Tokyo apartment at five a.m. These were polite little
earthquakes that did no damage and I enjoyed both immensely. They
made me feel sensationally alive. As long as no one gets hurt, I
enjoy most of the primal activities of the planet - the elemental
things like big waves or heavy winds or thunderstorms, hurricanes,
and the like. As a civilization, our own self-consciousness often
prevents us from the basic contact we need with the earth. So we
need reminders on a regular basis.}

^{Tim
McCarver, the baseball player, suggested that “the mind's a great
thing as long as you don't have to use it.” I assume he was
referring to his own sport and how much thought can get in the way
of playing well. It's one of those great paradoxes and gentle
ironies of life. We suggest to our kids,
think before you act
and that makes perfect sense. But when we do
this to the extreme and let it rule our lives, we lose the joy of
the action in the self-consciousness of the
act.}

^{I'm reminded again of my
grandmother, Minnie, back in that cool mid-morning summer basement.
I can still hear the snapping sound of beans as she broke them in
half for cooking and then freezing. Exactly why she had to break a
string bean in half for cooking still eludes me but she took great
joy in it. I was just a little kid then, wearing a raccoon cap on
my head because I was a fan of Davy Crockett as portrayed by Walt
Disney. Minnie had made me the cap by cutting chunks out of a
full-length raccoon coat she had worn in the
1920s.}

^{I don't know why I was
elevated by the early morning bean snapping but I was and I think
Minnie was transformed too in her own way. She had moved into a
special zone then just as she had earlier while out in the dewy
morning fields harvesting the beans planted by my grandfather.
Moving into that zone, the transcendental one, happens in many
ways, but I think part of it may involve preparation, ritual and
repetition. This is why breathing becomes a big part of meditation.
You wouldn't think someone really needs to teach you to breathe.
But sometimes it helps.}

^{In surfing,
you paddle each stroke, you watch and you listen and you ultimately
feel the power of the wave under you. Once you are moving, things
happen quickly. There is no time to think or you get whacked in the
head here in Nova Scotia by a mightily cold North Atlantic fist of
sea. But in order to do it right, whatever
it
happens to be, you must love the act of doing it. And you
have to love the wave, love the words or love the beans. If there
ain't love in it, it's not gonna snap.}

^{In New Jersey this spring, the
black locust trees at my parents' house where I grew up were
splendid with white flowers, big clumps of them, and when the wind
rose, they showered down like fluffy popcorn. Three weeks earlier I
had been showered by cherry blossoms in Tokyo and I felt blessed by
all the flowers falling on my head that year. My parents were
growing great curtains of bamboo along the roads to try and shield
out the raucous noises of progress that surrounded them. “You can
watch the shoots grow inches by the hour,” my father told me and he
wasn't lying. I felt that link again with Japan where the bamboo
trees flourish and it seemed unlikely but significant that New
Jersey and the neighbourhoods of Tokyo had so much in common. No
bombs had ever fallen on this part of Jersey,
though.}

^{My old backyard is a beautiful
grove where the shade of the tall, crooked but somewhat elegant
black locust trees makes a haven in the midst of the near-urban
chaos. Every trip back here robs me of my adult identity and I am
twelve years old again, freezing my tongue to the icy iron of the
back step railing before tearing it off and screaming from the pain
of severed taste buds.}

^{That and many other mistakes
made up my youth, but it was mostly a happy one, punctuated by
bouts of self-doubt, loneliness and a kind of anxiety-driven terror
that dulled with time until I realized I was more or less just like
everyone else.}

^{The land on which my parents
house sits is a triangle, a place where two roads converge. Once
they were rural cart paths, then gravel roads, then county
connector roads; now they are highways. The locusts and the bamboo
continue to offer some wilderness protection from traffic but it is
never enough. In the mornings now when I wake up there, the house
shakes and windows rattle just like my first morning in Tokyo, only
it is traffic, not the quaking of the earth that makes the house
tremble. Trucks slamming into manhole covers at 5:30 a.m. instead
of tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth. Amazingly, the
feeling is much the same.}

^{Back in Nova Scotia, the wind
and the sea rule the day, although I've known days where the
combined efforts of both create a sound precisely like that of
highway traffic in the distance. If I am in bed and not yet fully
awake, I am fooled into believing I am still twelve years old,
still living in New Jersey. Before my current self can overtake the
boy I once was, I have at least a brief shuddering theory flick
through my brain that Nova Scotia and all the rest, the surfing
included, is something I conjured up, dreamed into being. But by
the time I've planted my two good feet on the floor, I've wrestled
myself back into the present and my identity is confirmed by the
fact that my clothes seem to fit my current body.}

^Alive

^{Summer arrives grudgingly slow
here in Nova Scotia. April and May breed hostilities against the
sluggishness. Rebellions break out and we want to know why we live
in such a climate. Then the sky cracks into blue, the winds abate
and I discover again this can be a quiet, beautiful land. I walk
the shoreline of the Atlantic and rediscover the serenity and power
of this deep sea at our doorstep.}

^{It has been a productive,
successful and even adventurous year for me and also one that has
stirred the deeper, darker fears. I am not without clues but I am
probably not much closer to finding the great
truths.}

^{Satisfied that the great
truths are yet far off, I occupy myself with trying to formulate a
few good questions. Some are old and stale. Why am I here? What am
I doing? Am I making the best use of my time? How can I be happier?
How can I be of more value to the world? Or simply, what should I
do next?}

^{Why is it that the
satisfaction I get from earning money, writing books, receiving
awards and congratulatory handshakes for all my professional deeds
is not nearly as fulfilling as simply walking along the sand at the
very edge of the sea on a calm, even cloudy morning? The simple
answer is that so much involving accomplishments pulls me away from
anything that is essential. Follow your intuition and settle for
simple things, seems to be the clue, but not the
answer.}

^{The road back to Nova Scotia
and sanity, for me, often begins with the trip away to somewhere
else. Banff, Paris or Tokyo and then New Jersey. After my father's
radiation treatment for prostate cancer, I flew down there to check
up on how he was doing. Any return visit to the house where I grew
up is fraught with emotional peril but also blessed with sweet
visions from my past. Somewhere in my thirties, I think I finally
outgrew my nostalgia for my youth but I expect it will creep back
into my consciousness within a decade or so.}

^{On the two-hour hop from
Halifax to Newark, I sat beside a New Jersey State Trooper. A
six-foot-two, 280-pound Black man with an infectious laugh, Kenny
Wilkins confessed that he travelled to meet women, lots of them,
and that he found himself attracted to women who were not American.
“American women want too much,” he said. “They're too demanding.”
So he had a girlfriend in Vancouver, one in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,
one in Norway, one in Morocco and he was hoping to enlist one in
Spain. He was flying home to his Turnpike job, however, from
Newfoundland, where he had struck out. Or as he put it, “I wasn't
there long enough to get my bearings.”}

^{Truth is, Kenny was not a
sexist creep. In fact, he was a very nice guy, reluctant to the
extreme to admit that he was a Jersey trooper. Most kids growing up
in New Jersey had a distinct hatred for state troopers who would
bust you for everything from hitchhiking to smoking pot to going
five miles over the speed limit. So here I was sitting next to what
should have been a loathsome individual and I found myself liking
him immensely.}

^{I told him I was a writer and
nearly begged for Turnpike stories, for surely this guy who had
logged over a hundred thousand miles of driving on the Pike had
stories to tell. “I seen it all,” was the best I could get out of
him. No colourful details. And then we talked about growing up in
New Jersey, about high school even and about parents. Kenny was
very proud of the fact that he had just bought a “small” house. “It
only has four bedrooms.” It was small and old (twenty years) by the
standard of his friends, he said, who were all buying new and
monstrous houses with extensive mortgages that no one ever expected
to actually pay off.}

^{For some reason, I told Kenny
about my ancient history days of hitchhiking and doing other
illegal things on the Jersey Turnpike. Now that I was older and
respectable (well, sort of) and even ten years older than this guy,
I felt like I could flaunt it in his face. Which is really pretty
dumb of me but there it is.}

^{“Anything bad ever happen to
you?”}

^{“Not on the Turnpike,” I
admitted. Suddenly I realized nothing bad ever did happen to me all
those times thumbing up and down the Pike from Exit 4 to Exit 8 as
I attended Livingston College. No trooper ever hassled me because I
only caught rides outside the tollbooth. I was a rebel but I wasn't
stupid. I also told him about the Marine with the case of
Budweiser, just back from the horrors of Vietnam, who gave me a
very scary ride; the other drunk on a highway in North Carolina;
and the time I was stuck at an Interstate in Alabama - a northerner
with hair down to my armpits in a sea of rednecks. I gave it up
when Kenny's eyes began to glaze over.}

^{Kenny asked me about writing.
He asked if I had any of my books with me. I didn't. At that point,
I don't think he believed that I actually wrote books. Not that
it's a big deal. It's just that unless you can show the goods,
sometimes people think you're just trying to impress them by being
a writer. All I had was other people's writing: a Kevin Major
novel, a manuscript about riding a bicycle around Cameroon by Neil
Peart (the drummer from Rush), a book by Leo Buscagila (wonderfully
corny and profound) that I'd been meaning to read and a magazine
put out by the Buddhists called the Shambhala Sun. On the cover of
this issue was the provocative question: “What Happens After You
Die?”}