The Great Spring, Page 9

  I have been having terrible trouble this summer with my house out on the mesa. First it was the mice. Every day I caught three in my Havahart mousetrap. This went on for a month. At the end of August, teaching a two-week writing workshop at the Mabel Dodge Lujan House in Taos, I came into class and explained why I was late:

  “As I was leaving the house, I heard the trap snap closed again. I thought, That poor mouse will have to be in it all day. I better take her out now. So I put down my car keys and my books, walked her down the long drive, crossed the road, aimed her at Michael’s house, and let her go.”

  Each morning the class wanted to know how many were caught. I told them I was getting the funny feeling I was catching the same ones over and over. Kate Green, who was teaching with me, said, “Well, you put out a meal for them each night. Why wouldn’t they return?” It was true—the night before I couldn’t find anything else in my refrigerator, so I set out gourmet almond butter for them.

  One morning, before I left to teach, the phone rang. “Eddie, I could swear the same mice are in the traps every morning.”

  “Nat, didn’t you ever hear Mary’s story? She was married to a man who had a cabin on an island in Rainy Lake, in northern Minnesota. He’d catch mice and take them in his canoe and let them off on another island. He’d say to Mary, ‘I could swear they’re coming back.’ So he started to paint their toes with different colors of nail polish. Sure enough, when he caught mice again, they had polish on.”

  I drove across the mesa to class that morning thinking D-Con, the poison that mice munch and then run from the house in search of water. Last night, I saw four mice whiz across my living room as I read a book. It seemed to me they were almost frolicking, content from being well fed. I grew increasingly paranoid—I thought every shadow was another one. I read little that night. D-Con, I thought, and cackled as I turned my car toward Taos at the blinking light. I was tired of being the bodhisattva of mice.

  On the way home from class, I stopped at Smith’s and bought new and improved d-Con—two packages. I placed a box under the kitchen sink and another in the bathroom, where the mice had been feasting. I lay awake, thinking I heard them crunching on the poison, imagining I saw their small white ghosts arising right outside my bedroom window. I felt terrible and guilty. I finally dozed off at 3:00 A.M.

  I woke up at four to a long animal screech. I was certain it was the mice dying. Then I was sure it was a cat who caught a poisoned mouse and he too was dying. I’d moved up the animal chain. I was ruining the entire neighborhood.

  That morning when I woke up, there were no mouse turds. I looked gingerly around the house. No mice had dived into the toilet bowl, desperate for water. Okay, I had one sleepless night, I thought. I’d be okay.

  Two days later, I took a bath—finally, my new well was working, though the water was still a bit muddy. I thought I smelled something burning. Kate was over; she was reading me some of her new poems as I lounged in the brown water.

  “Go check the barbecue. Maybe it’s something out there.”

  She came back. “Nope, everything’s fine.”

  “I still smell it. Check the kitchen.”

  “Oh, my God,” she shrieked. “Nat, the house is on fire. The water heater—it’s in flames.”

  By the time I slid, wet, across the tiles, Kate had thrown water and put out the fire.

  I stood there in a towel, looking at the smoldering remains of my Aquavac on-demand water heater.

  On Tuesday the plumber came to replace it. I went over everything with him. When he left, I sighed. “Now I have everything. The heater’s replaced. My well runs, and the mice are gone.”

  Twenty minutes later, as I spoke on the phone to a friend in Santa Fe, my telephone line went dead.

  I knew I was going crazy as I drove across the mesa to teach my afternoon class. I passed my plumber, who had gotten a tire blowout after he left my house. I waved, asked him if there was anything I could do, and then kept going.

  I parked at the post office. I thought I’d walk slowly across Kit Carson Park to the class. I needed to gather my wits. Nat, I kept saying to myself, breathe. These things happen.

  I walked into the classroom. I told the students about the phone going dead. Then I told them about the old monk who became fully enlightened when a stone hit some bamboo.

  Then I paused for a brief moment. I held up my hands. “What a fool I’ve been. That phone going dead! There was my chance! I could have turned everything around—that was it—in the face of distress, I could have become totally enlightened. Oh, my God, what a jerk I am!”

  A student raised her hand. “Why don’t you become enlightened now?”

  “No, that was my moment! You can’t do it later. I missed my moment.”

  But I think I did become enlightened for a while, once. I was quick enough, alert—no, that wasn’t it. I was big; I wasn’t myself. My cells had been tossed up inside my skull and fell down in another pattern. I saw things from a different angle, outside myself, my needs, my desires.

  I was in southern France with Thich Nhat Hanh for three weeks in June, two years after my first retreat with him. I was forty-four years old. Each morning, Thay (Vietnamese for “teacher”) lectured for three hours. I came early to the zendo and sat right in front of him. I was ready to have the teachings poured into me. He talked about the Diamond, Lotus, and Avatamsaka Sutras. Halfway into each morning, he switched the subject and told us another episode of when he fell in love as a young twenty-four-year-old monk with a twenty-year-old nun. He said it was an accident—he was a monk; she was a nun. It was not supposed to happen. “Falling in love is an accident,” he said. “Think about it: the expression falling; you trip into it.” Because he did not act upon it in a romantic way, as we normally do, he examined these strong feelings with mindfulness, and forty years later, he shared the benefit of that with us. He was teaching the nature of love, of how to love well.

  I flip through my notebook now and see the notes I took then. They seem to glimmer off the page: “Your first love has no beginning or end. Your first love is not your first love, and it is not your last. It is just love. It is one with everything.”

  “The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.”

  “When we practice mindfulness, we emit light. We create more time and space.”

  “The miracle is to walk on the earth.”

  “No coming. No going. Everything is pretending to be born and to die. That is a lie.”

  “This self has no self.”

  “A king once asked, ‘Is there anything, any attachment, that will not cause suffering, anxiety, grief?’ ‘No, Lord,’ said the Buddha.”

  “It is okay to suffer in the process of love.”

  I heard these things during those three weeks, and they poured into me. I received them, knew them to be true. I didn’t try to understand them, figure them out with my logical mind. I walked differently on the earth because of them, and it continued after I left the retreat. Out in ordinary life, I felt a tenderness toward sidewalks; loved the tall sycamores lining Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, where I went after the retreat; ate slices of pizza I bought in the streets as if they were part of the Last Supper.

  Then, on July 8, two weeks out of Plum Village, I was bitten in the back of my right leg, above the ankle, by a trained guard dog who had been hiding when I walked up to a private house, thinking it was a café. My friends and I had wandered off from each other—we were in Saint-Rémy, near the monastery where Van Gogh had committed himself for a year. No little teeth indenting my skin—there was a chunk, a big one, hanging out of my leg. I didn’t know this until I was halfway over the hill, moving fast through the woods, toward the monastery, the place I was meeting my friends. I stopped, turned my head, lifted the pale-green cotton pant leg. Oh, my God! It can’t be as awful as that or I couldn’t be walking. I dropped my pant leg and got to the monastery office, banged on the door, yelling. There was
a rush of women inside; the door opened.

  “Un chien!” I yelled, and made the motion with my hands together, opening and closing, like a crocodile’s jaw (I didn’t know the French word for bite). “Ma jambe.” I pointed to my pant leg. I didn’t lift it though. I didn’t want these nurses and nuns to collapse in a dead faint.

  “Un grand chien?” they asked.

  “Non, une grande bouche.” I was in a panic. “Aidez-moi!”

  They called an ambulance.

  Now the remarkable thing: Not for a moment did I feel hatred for the dog. At the moment of our confrontation, I felt compassion for him. Thay had lectured us about “looking deeply.” The dog had been trained to do what he was doing. This was no act of personal violence. This was the result of the lineage of private property, of ownership, of fear of loss of possessions. I do not mean to sound high-handed here, or even political—I just saw into the depth of the act, where and how it came about. The dog bit once—deftly, swiftly—and retreated. I fell on my left knee. He growled fiercely, as though to warn me, “Get out of my space.” I crawled out of the range of his chain.

  In the ambulance—it was an old car carrying me to the hospital in Avignon—I sat in the back, my leg up along the length of the seat. “Depechez-vous,” I called to the driver. She lit a cigarette. We passed groves of bamboo and fruit trees. I had left a note at the monastery for my friends: Meet me at the hospital.

  In the back of the car, I thought, If Buddhism’s gonna work, it’s gonna work now. Breathing in—I inhaled—I know I am breathing in. Breathing out—I exhaled—I know I am breathing out. I am always breathing in and out, but it is rare that I am aware of it. Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Actually, I was delighted to be aware of my breath. It gave me something to do besides freak out about what had just happened to my leg.

  We turned the corner into the hospital parking lot. I was put on a gurney and wheeled into a small room.

  Two nurses lifted up my pant leg. “Oh, mon dieu.” Their eyes wide, their hands thrown across their open mouths. They ran and got other nurses, orderlies. Everyone was emotional.

  “Un grand chien?” was the only medical question that I was asked.

  Breathing in—I was scared. Breathing out—I was afraid. High school French failed me. “Un docteur?” I moaned.

  A man came in wearing a white T-shirt. He looked; he said, “It all right. It okay.” He put his hand on my leg.

  “Oui?”

  “It okay.” It was the only English anyone spoke in the whole hospital. He made the motion with his hand that he was going to have to sew.

  I nodded yes, I understood.

  He left.

  I lay there, waiting.

  I looked away as the doctor worked. A second felt like a year. He hummed a little. We were alone in the room. Okay, Nat, what are you going to do now? Breathing in and knowing it wasn’t quite enough.

  I was facing the wall. I began to sing a song I’d learned at the retreat. I sang it loud. The lines, “I’m as solid as a mountain, as firm as the earth,” comforted me the most. I repeated them over and over and skipped the rest of the song. Was this possible? I was filled with joy. I felt such gratitude to be alive. The air shimmered. I wanted to turn to the doctor and touch him, thank him.

  He was done. I turned. “Combien?” I asked. “How many?”

  He made a face. “Beaucoup.”

  I held up ten fingers. “Non.” He shook his head. He flashed twenty fingers. “Vingt soutures.”

  I nodded.

  The nurse came in. She had given me a tetanus shot earlier. She showed me a card. I had to get another shot in a month. Another in a year.

  My friends Rita and Phyllis came to the door. “I can leave,” I said. We were so happy to see each other.

  I sat in the backseat of our rented car.

  “Let’s sing,” I said. All three of us had been to Plum Village. We drove through the countryside. “And I know there is space deep inside of me . . . I am free, I am free.”

  Rita was driving. “We should go back to the hotel. You’re in shock.”

  “No, I want to go to these medieval towns I’ve been reading about,” I insisted. I looked at the map. I wanted to live every moment now.

  We drove down winding, narrow country dirt roads. “Pull over,” I said.

  We got out of the car and looked around. Fruit trees—three of them—in tall grass near vineyards. I walked over and looked up. Cherries, all ripe, many fallen to the ground. No farmer was going to gather this crop. I grabbed fistfuls, hobbled with my bandaged leg from clump to clump, my hands dripping red.

  “Aren’t you afraid a guard dog is going to come?” Rita called, standing by the car, snapping a picture of me.

  “Nah, no dog wants to harm me. That was a Mu dog, a Zen dog, that bit me. He said, ‘Wake up!’” I laughed. “Rita, these are bing cherries. Bing. Do you understand? They are my father’s favorites. I always imagined they grew on vines, not trees.” Phyllis stood under the tree too, grazing alongside me.

  I filled a big bag full of them. Then we drove in the dusk past a faded chocolat sign overlooking a beautiful valley.

  We were stopped in Cavaillon by truckers drinking wine out of bottles, their massive semis parked in the road—a blockade. They were demanding more lenient license laws. They let us pass. We drove on and on, the car carrying us back to Aix.

  I loved the Hotel Splendide. I loved my room, with the window opening onto the orange tile roofs of the city. Just that morning I had lain there looking out, carefree, the swallows scissoring the morning sky. Both legs intact. Now the local anesthetic was wearing off. A dog had bitten my leg.

  The next day I stayed in bed. Rita brought me quiche and purple flowers. Phyllis drew my portrait. I read The Great Gatsby in its entirety. I’d bought it two days earlier at an English-language bookstore. The cover photo was black-and-white, a sleek boulevard with a man and woman leaning against a thirties sedan. In a foreign country, I discovered the American classics again. I looked toward that continent where I was born and wondered, Who am I, anyway? And what is the American dream?

  I finished the book and looked down at my leg, then at the water lily wall painting the owner of the hotel had done, and I knew I was in my own dream.

  The next day Rita and I went to the emergency room of the Aix hospital. I needed to get my wound dressed, and no one at the other hospital spoke enough English to tell me what to do. We found a doctor there who spoke some English.

  “It may become infected. Maybe okay. Maybe you need operation. They take skin from your hip”—he pointed to my hip—“and put on leg.” He pointed to the dog bite.

  Rita and I looked at each other. It wasn’t going to heal in ten days, in time for me to fly to London? I was going to have to leave and return to the States.

  A reality map spread out in front of me. Suddenly Rita and I were bewildered young girls together in a foreign country. She told me about her father’s funeral in New York. “You know it’s going to happen someday, but there you are picking out a coffin. Whose life is this, you think?”

  I made reservations to get a flight the next day from Nice to Minneapolis—my close friend there is a doctor.

  My plan to fly to London to meet my friend Henry and travel around Scotland was just an idea—even though I had made travel arrangements. It was a concept, a future moment. It did not exist, except in my head. In a moment your whole life can change. “It is not because of impermanence that we suffer but because of our ideas about permanence,” Thich Nhat Hanh had told us.

  I called Henry and told him I couldn’t come, but I was not suffering. I miraculously was not holding on to any plans, and I did not know it was miraculous. I was living my life. I was in it in a way I’d never been in it before. It was burning pure white.

  The plane had engine trouble near London, and we had to come down. I was taken in a wheelchair—my leg had become swollen—to a bus that drove us from Heathrow to Gatwick. I looked out at
the green grass of England, at the sturdy homes. I had to board another plane, and we landed in New York too late to catch a plane to Minneapolis. There were long lines as Delta figured out hotel and plane reservations for all of us at Kennedy. I sat in another wheelchair. The porter went ahead of the line and got me new reservations. Then he told me I had to wait with the rest of the group for a bus to go to the Holiday Inn.

  “Will the bus be outside?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” he answered.

  “Well, could you wheel this outside? I’ll wait there. I need real air. I’ve been in planes and airports for nineteen hours.”

  He brought me to the front door and left me outside. The air was humid, the sky hazy. And past the hustle of taxis and sweaty people of every color and language, wearing shorts and thongs and baseball hats, greeting each other, grabbing arms and hands, was the full moon, like an ancient call, big and fat, out there in the dark.

  The porter came back ten minutes later. “Wanna come back in? It’s hot out here.” He put his hand to his neck. “Air cool in there.” He nodded toward the door.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’d like to sit here with the moon.” He laughed, looked up at it, wiped his brow, and left.

  I remained in my wheelchair, my right leg stretched out, my blue nylon suitcase hanging from one arm of the chair and my red nylon purse hanging from the other, until the bus came twenty minutes later.

  In Minneapolis, my leg was a waiting game. Would the flap that they sewed back in France survive? I could walk or lie down, be straight, vertical or horizontal; but sitting cut off vital blood flow. I lay on my side in Carol’s living room.

  I’d met Carol ten years earlier in a Hebrew class when I still lived in the Twin Cities. After I left, we became traveling partners. Every two years or so, we would meet for a month in Czechoslovakia, Amsterdam, Portugal, Israel. Now I was back in Minneapolis with her.