The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [49]
It was a working-class world and fights occurred, not often, but memorably. I had an aversion to them, stemming from laziness, cowardice, or intelligence, it wasn’t really clear. I could usually, not always, think my way past fights that were casually offered. The difficulty with my father belonged with me, though, and couldn’t be dodged. Our generations were set against each other by the times; to him, Vietnam looked like World War II. Ideas were separating people everywhere you looked.
One time we faced each other in the living room as if we were in a western. The living room was a small space in which Danish modern furniture with skinny wooden arms and green cushions had recently and proudly replaced the walnut nineteenth-century chaise lounge and sideboards.
A street fighter hits you just before you have convinced yourself to fight, but something more complicated was going on with us. We were listening and guessing. He was more skilled, but I was an athlete, fitter and quicker, and it wasn’t clear to me who would win or if it would be good to win. In the middle of that waiting, time began to spread out and we relaxed. This might have been a bad sign, meaning that the posturing was over. But then the space around things got larger still. No time was taken up by this expansion, but during the interval it came to me that fighting was not a good idea. An explanation of this would be that if I lost, I lost, and if I won, I lost—we would walk through a one-way door—but it wasn’t a reasoned decision. The clarity was an absence of reasons. We didn’t like each other any better, and there was no satisfactory resolution, but the seriousness and tension drained away, and this became a moment of seeing through things, the emptiness of plans—the emptiness of what we each thought was crucial. Zen happened to us.
In the story of the Buddha’s early life, there is a moment when, as a child, Siddhartha sees things just as they are, without wanting anything to be different. Later, his awakening builds on this simple discovery. This moment with Max seemed like such an opening in time. Not a mystic revelation, but not delusion either—simply a piece of clear-mindedness, a gift. If consciousness is always making up its best story, these are moments when it doesn’t—when it is not really committed to the way it thinks things are.
Now, this is not such a big deal, really, but the important moves in consciousness are the small moves that bring about larger shifts. It’s not that my dad and I were wise; we just stopped holding our prejudices, and it became obvious what to do, which was mainly what not to do. The opposite of hell was not heaven but an unself-conscious simplicity.
Back in the hospice we moved him to a room with a slant of precious sunlight and a potted palm outside the French door. It seemed a blessed tree.
“So how are you, Dad?”
“I’ve been thinking. I’ve changed a lot since I was young.”
“You have?”
“Yes, I have.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’m a lot more easygoing than I used to be.”
I took this dialogue as an acknowledgment of past difficulties.
“I’ve changed a lot, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I have.”
“How is that?”
“I’m a lot more easygoing than I was.”
He smiled a quiet, private smile, and that was it for working through our past.
I had made my first visit home to Tasmania in 1984, after over a decade, returning on the plane across Bass Strait as something incomprehensible—a Zen teacher, exploring the deep passages of the mind.
I wrote a poem about the cottage in which I grew up, where he and my mother still lived. They were kind enough to take the poem as an offering. It begins like this:
The Source
No memory warned me
how particular and true
the doll’s house where I grew would be,
the kitchen smell of rosemary, my father’s
cough, the