Category: Chapter One: The Cradle

I had a few friends in Bellingham, Massachusetts, where my family lived until I was five years old. There was Jenny, my best friend who lived across the street, who was two years older than I. I vaguely remember learning to skip with her in the woods, and I remember begrudgingly playing with her barbie dolls with her, although I also remember I would try to get her to play with my transformers with me. I would be very sad to leave Jenny when we would have to leave Bellingham, and I tried to track her down years later on occasion. I remember Jenny’s father being referred to as a “crazy inventor” by my father, and that he was always apparently losing the family’s fortune on his crazy revelries.

I had a friend named John as well, but I remember John always trying to get me into fights, which I didn’t like as I was a natural pacifist. I remember that one day John’s mother had come over to be my mom’s company (which was acceptable to John’s mother since she preferred to only have other Christians as company) and I was under the kitchen table crawling around, saying “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” over and over again. I had heard my dad say this word, but not often, so it interested me.

I remember seeing John’s mother seeing and hearing me and being totally aghast, just horrified. She became outraged and never visited us again and I remember how my parents discussed how she had forbade John from ever playing with me again since I had such a dirty mouth and since my mother had not been a good enough Christian to teach me better. My mom scolded dad for putting the word in my mind and after that he stopped swearing so much, just in case my mom found another Christian friend, I guess. I found John’s mother’s ethic about words quite ironic since John was always trying to engage me in physical fights. This may have been my first cognizant encounter with the absurd, teeming contradictions of Christian fundamentalism.

I vaguely remember my father going after his MBA degree during this time, mostly from home and in addition to his long work hours as human resources manager at a manufacturing plant (I can’t remember what the factory made, but it was something industrial and quite boring). I remember there was an unfinished room in that house in Bellingham and he would sit at this desk that was sort of like a drawing board and do math homework with what seemed then to be a very high tech calculator, with its little red LED lines-as-numbers. I would try to interrupt and he might entertain me as I desired, or he might tell me he didn’t have time to play since he was busy working. I got such a strong work ethic even from those very earliest imprinted memories of his putting in all those hours of perseverance to try to get ahead and stay ahead in the world, with education as guiding light.

My mother was a Suzuki violin teacher. My father was a human resources manager, a businessman. He was the breadwinner in the arrangement, but my mom won some bread also, teaching violin and playing gigs. It was a pretty typical American family in very many senses. Both my parents had conservative economic and political views, but weren’t entirely classic political conservatives, though they voted for Reagan (and later both Bushes, which I still can’t understand with how liberal they are as people).

My parents and I lived for the first five years of my life in Bellingham, Indiana, where we survived a few pretty serious hurricanes and many snowed-in winters with several feet of snow blocking entrances and windows. I remember my mother making us corn chowder and oysters and clams and other classic New England food while it was some inhuman version of deathly cold outside.

One winter, my mother walked outside in flip-flops on icy stairs while holding me, and fell down the stairs, inadvertently and with the kind of deep regret that only a mother can feel, causing me to break one leg (hairline fracture) when I was almost dropped. She felt so bad about her errant thinking already, and then even worse as the asshole doctor seemed to imply that maybe she was a child abuser when dad took us both to the hospital (even though she had hurt her back pretty badly when she slipped also, making it obvious that it was just a mindless mistake).

My mother was a Christian, although a pretty universalist-leaning and humanistic one. She taught me the Christian core spiritual values of love and forgiveness, redemption, atonement, the blessedness of the meek, and the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. She wasn’t a Bible thumper or a fundamentalist, and she didn’t hate gay people. She taught me to love all people, to try and turn the other cheek, and to try and see the good everywhere and in all people, regardless of their differences. She taught me to never judge people too quickly, and to always try to see things from their perspectives and try and stand in their shoes. She taught me to always treat other people with charity and kindness and dignity, and these were lessons I will never forget.

She had this board game that she would play with me. The game consisted of a square, rubber board with many holes for pegs in it. There were many pegs of many different colors (red, green, blue, orange, violet) that would fit in each peg. The game was meant as a kind of behavioral moral lesson to teach me the value of respecting each other despite perceived differences. The purple people would get mad at the green people but the green people would say “hey, I can’t help being green and you can’t help being purple! Why don’t we just all get along? Just because we’re different colors doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.”

My father was more of a secular humanist, although he certainly wasn’t ever able to conform to what he regarded as political correctness, and this got misconstrued when I was young as outright homophobism and racism, as he would sometimes mock the sound of a gay lisp as a caricature or spoke in jive, like the characters in the movie “Airplane.” He would also make up a verbal affectation of the mentally handicapped, which although totally politically incorrect was so funny that most mentally handicapped people definitely would have laughed at it–he also did a great Donald Duck impression that would make me laugh forever, which I would often try and fail at imitating.

He was very smart about the ways of the world, almost too much so for his own good, as he was constantly losing jobs throughout my upbringing for being a corporate whistleblower. He was a shrewdly ethical man, and he didn’t like to confuse his ethics with religion, although I do think he could always see where my mother was coming from with her more religious frame of reference. In a parallel universe, he was George Carlin maybe. He would have been much happier with his life as some kind of artist, for certain.

My mother’s spiritual perspective, along with my father’s almost academic and somewhat cynical-yet-humanistic business-keen perspective, helped me develop in a way which has always allowed me to go outside many boxes–to expand always and to take things to the very edge of possibilities, giving me something from the way I was raised that’s very grounded in pragmatism, yet truly transcendent at the same time. On the other hand, there were many things wrong with my upbringing (such as my parents’ Republican politics), but there is something wrong for everyone I suppose.

I could not have asked for two finer parents in the basic acceptance department, really. I tested them greatly throughout the coming chapters of this book, and time and time again they saw me as their beloved child, forever dear and lovable to them, no matter how much pain I brought them. They are true angels in that sense.

As is my sister, who was an interruption of my parent’s love for me (their firstborn). I was immediately very angry at her when she was born for taking all that attention away from me. And she was not a calm and peaceful infant, as I was. She was a SCREAMER. She would scream these manically piercing screams which would go straight through your skull and leave you wishing for the void. We later theorized that it was because she was having untreated minor Urinary Tract Infections which were causing blinding pain.

My sister loved and adored me so much, and even though I loved her, I despised her so much and so wrongly for taking my parent’s attention away. And I did this much like a prideful Leo would, without guilt or remorse, as if she was absolutely wrong for coming and stealing mommy and daddy’s attention away. She was very creative, and very sweet and adorable, and always so much kinder and gentler than I. And she was always better at not judging people. I have so much to learn from her natural presence as a person even to this day. She doesn’t seem to have to meditate or lower her ego much at all to be kind and humble, and that’s exactly how she came into the world (save the screaming of course).

On July 28, 1981 at 8:05 pm, in a hospital in Milford, Massachusetts, I was born. I came onto the stage five minutes late–fashionably late, classical musician-style. I came to play a solo concerto with a full symphony orchestra of the highest caliber behind me. I came with the pride of a Leo, my mane glistening in the young night’s moonlight.

I believe I remember my birth, or maybe I’m just making that up to make sense of things. But, I believe I remember pouring out of my mother’s womb into an operating room and into the immense loving pride and adoration of my mother and father, wet and gooshy with doctors and nurses in bluish-green frock coats in attendance. I remember the intense pain of being alive–of being alive “again,” and then again of the immense love and pride and reassurance of my parents.

I think I remember that I had gone very close to the Light awhile before that birth and had almost dissolved all my karma in it–that is, I think I remember being a soul between the last life and this one, as in the way the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes reincarnation or as the Hindus do–about passing through the “bardo” states between the last life and this one.

They describe it as the buddhi, or essence, leaving the body through the crown (there’s a good Alex Grey portrait that depicts this cataclysmic process), and the ego leaves straight towards the Light of Eternity, the Ocean of Pure Love-Light, only to realize before it dissolves completely in that Oneness that it still has karma and must therefore return to find a new body to inhabit, forced to play out the drama and ego of all its karma until it has been consumed into that God-light.

I think I got pretty close last time. I certainly came back in a little singed, or perhaps even a little scorched. Something tells me I did. Or then again, maybe I’ve been getting pretty close many times. The meaning of those memories would make a great deal more sense to me when almost 20 years later I would take bodhisattva vows in a zen training center in New York; “I vow to liberate all beings, returning always to liberate.” When I made these vows, I felt that I remembered taking them, many, many times before. I know I must keep coming back, so may I remain humble.