The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [91]
When I think of my father on that trip—his reckless lust for life as he charged up a mountain or down a dirt road—I remember what an old boyfriend of mine used to call me: a “hyper-appreciator.”
“You love the world too much,” he said.
“Sometimes,” I answered.
After a while Dad lowered the volume on the rental-car CD player. “I forgot to ask if you had a pipe. We’ll have to buy one. I brought a little bud of grass for us.” I didn’t say anything. This was not the first time he had smuggled marijuana on an international flight.
“I know your mom and sister would think this was so irresponsible—coming to see you when you’re depressed and bringing drugs,” he said. “But I think my role should partly be to distract you. Sometimes you just need to get away from yourself.”
I agreed, perhaps too energetically. I had decided long before that I would be the only person in my father’s life who refused to see his unconventional choices as mistakes.
My dad put on a new CD of antiwar songs by a Vietnam vet from Texas. He told me to listen to the words; he thought I would appreciate their anger. I looked out the window and tried to listen. After three songs he stopped the CD.
“It sounds to me like maybe what you’re going through is a loss of self,” he said quietly. “Maybe from all your meditating in India. Like a loss of the ego. So you have nothing to hold on to.”
Normally I dismissed my father’s abstract Buddhist explanations for what seemed to me a very specific pain. But now I found myself reaching for my journal and reading aloud for Dad a few sentences I had written that morning after jerking awake at 5 A.M. from a wine-drunk sleep fully clothed, contacts dried to my eyes, the desk light glaring in my face. “That was the worst feeling I can ever remember having,” I had scrawled in tiny letters. “As if I had disappeared. No more me.” What my father had said seemed to fit so well with what I’d written that it woke me up a bit: the possibility of connection, someone responding to my state of mind with an idea that resembled one of my own.
My father was encouraged. He told me I could not be truly depressed if I still wrote in a journal. He thought I was doing great. I closed my eyes and felt the flicker in my chest die out. “Let’s put on some Tom Petty,” I said.
Only once in my life has my father asked me to turn down my music: Four friends were spending the night at my house to welcome summer’s arrival. This was during the years when my mother had lost her job and was suing my father and his wealthy new wife. My sister had moved out of our mom’s house, vowing to live with our dad until the lawsuit had ended, while I continued to travel back and forth between my parents’ houses. I was thirteen and concerned exclusively with my friends. My dad did not like my music during those years: “Anger without beauty,” he called it. But he listened to it with me anyway, chauffeuring me from one social gathering to another.
At the sleepover my friends and I listened to the band Live on my boom box as loud as it would go and took turns doing impressions of girls we didn’t like. One friend had brought some NoDoz pills she’d stolen from the supermarket. We were going to stay up all night, no matter what.
When my dad came into my room at three in the morning, I started yelling before he did. We weren’t doing anything wrong, I said. He told me to turn down the music; he and Pat couldn’t sleep. I said I could do whatever I wanted, and he said I had better turn down the fucking music. I told him to stop acting like an asshole. He put his hands around my neck and tightened his fingers briefly, then let go. As he stormed away, I told him to fuck off and yelled