by Mark Salzman
Even worse than my failure to become more popular at school, however, was the growing realization that instead of making me different from my father by producing total inner fulfillment, my struggle was in fact making me more and more like my father: perpetually disappointed. But I felt stuck. As I saw it, if I dropped the whole matter I would piss most of my life away like Scrooge, never questioning or understanding what I did or why I did it, chasing illusions like money and power only to realize just before the end of my life that they all had slipped through my fingers. On the other hand, if I kept pining after the experience of feeling no need to pine after anything, what if I never got it right and wasted my whole life making myself purposely uncomfortable? Or what if I woke up twenty or thirty years down the road and realized that my father had been right to be skeptical of my attempt to become like a block of wood? What if Zen itself was an illusion created by unhappy people who had invested too much of themselves in their “spiritual path” to consider that enlightenment might be a hallucination?
I couldn’t admit the most serious of these doubts to my father because that would have seemed like a defeat, and I wasn’t yet defeated. I did mention to him on one of our weekend trips to the town dump, however, that I was disappointed with my progress with kung fu. We were watching a bunch of crows maneuver around a bulldozer as it pushed some fresh garbage, and I said I didn’t understand why, if crows could eat garbage and not seem particularly unhappy with their lot, it bothered me so much to be such a coward compared with, say, Sensei O’Keefe. I told him about Sensei’s example of dying well by facing one’s enemies bravely even under impossible circumstances and fighting without being hampered by indecision or fear.
“Mark,” he said, wincing as if all of a sudden he had noticed that the dump smelled bad, “that is ridiculous.”
I was shocked; he was usually more careful in his choice of words when offering criticism. “What do you mean, ridiculous? Why is it ridiculous?”
“Because it’s a fantasy. It’s fine to enjoy as a fantasy, but it’s silly to get it mixed up with real life. I don’t care how long you study karate, Mark—you want to know what would really happen if you found yourself in an alley cornered by a dozen men with weapons who were about to kill you?”
“What?”
He looked right at me. “You’d shit your pants. And so would I. So would any normal human being. Trying to make yourself immune to things like fear is dumb, because there are perfectly good reasons to be afraid of dangerous situations. All living things with brains have evolved to feel fear—it’s for self-protection, it has nothing to do with your being a weakling. Just be yourself, Mark. You’ll do just fine as you are.”
Be yourself! What a can of worms he opened there. Of course I was trying to be myself! That was the whole point of the kung fu; to become the me I thought I ought to become, instead of some half-assed loser. Anyway, who was to say who I really was? I didn’t even know that—that was half my problem right there. All I knew was that when you’re a really little kid, your parents praise you when you do something they like. If you do something they don’t like, they say, “You’re not the sort of person who does that! Don’t try to be somebody you’re not! Be yourself!” So maybe, I reasoned, being yourself means being the person your parents or teachers want you to be. Do we have anything to do with who we are at all? As we get older, we think of ourselves as having unique personalities, and we take credit for these personalities when we do something good, as if we created these personalities ourselves. But maybe we didn’t! Maybe our personalities were shaped by how people around us responded to us. So who are we? As I said, this was a can of worms I didn’t care to dip into—at least not that day.
I stuck to a more immediate issue: no matter how hard I tried, I could not picture Sensei O’Keefe or Bruce Lee shitting their pants in the face of danger, and so I was not yet willing to picture myself doing it either. I asked my father how he could be so sure that a two-thousand-year-old tradition that had produced generations of enlightened masters was wrong.
“I’m not saying it’s wrong, Mark. I’m just saying that because you’re not a guy living in medieval China I don’t think you should kick yourself for not being exactly like those people. I think it’s good that you think so much about these things, but don’t be crushed if they don’t turn out the way you want them to. Lots of things don’t work out the way you want them to, regardless of how good your intentions are. It’s disappointing, but you do learn to live with it.”
Well, I already knew that my father was able to live with disappointment. He proved every day that it was possible to survive in an uncaring, purposeless universe without becoming evil or alcoholic, and I respected that; it was just that I hoped to do better. Instead of just surviving, I aspired to go through life feeling as if every moment and every experience were precious. There had to be a way of looking at things so that even if they didn’t turn out the way one expected them to, they still appeared to be turning out great. My dad gave in to resignation too easily, I thought.
…
Although his resignation did not make my father a glamorous role model for a teenage boy, it made him an excellent amateur astronomer. You must possess a high tolerance for disappointment to maintain an interest in objects and events so dramatically beyond your control, not to mention so dramatically beyond your reach. For example, every August on the night of the Perseid meteor shower, when the earth passes through a band of the solar system unusually crowded with bits of rock and dust, my father set up a cot in the front yard and hoped for good weather. If the skies were clear he brewed a pot of coffee, lay out on the cot and stayed up all night to watch the falling stars, hoping to witness one of those extremely rare peaks of activity called a meteor storm. This occurs when the earth hits a particularly “dusty” section of space and runs into as many as several tens of thousands of meteors in an hour, each one making a bright streak across the sky as it burns up in our atmosphere. Astronomers estimated that during the most famous meteor storm of all, the Leonid Storm of November 1833, some 260,000 meteors fell into the atmosphere over a period of twenty-four hours. At times they counted as many as twenty falling each second. One Native American chief out in the Midwestern plains saw it and depicted the event in a painting on the outside of his teepee, which was preserved and can still be seen today in the Smithsonian Museum. Witnesses of these storms say that it is like driving through a blizzard at night, and that it is the only time a person can actually sense the earth’s movement as it hurtles through space at nearly seventy thousand miles per hour. Despite his perseverance over the years, my father has never seen a meteor storm. One did occur in the early 1960s, but that year the skies over Connecticut were overcast.
All sorts of things can frustrate an astronomer’s attempts to observe a rare event or a particularly distant object. Even one’s own personality can get in the way. In 1970 my dad drove Erich and me down the coast to Norfolk, Virginia, to see the most spectacular of all astronomical events visible with the naked eye: a total eclipse of the sun. He had planned the trip several years in advance, the last three months of which he spent poring over maps of the eastern United States, even though Interstate 95 took us the whole way. He had three cameras ready, two handheld and the other fixed on a tripod, and led Erich and me through several practice sessions where we choreographed what stages of the eclipse to watch out for, who would be in charge of what camera, and what to do in case one of them jammed.
At last the time came. Dad woke us up at 1:00 A.M., tucked us into the back of the Volkswagen bus, and we drove all night. Erich and I tried to prove how big we were by staying awake, but by the time we reached Rye, New York, we were both snoring. I do remember waking up at about 4:00 A.M. when Dad stopped for gas and got his thermos filled with coffee. The smell of coffee in the middle of the night in a car on a highway, somewhere in a part of the country I’d never been to before, made me feel like one of the astronauts on his way to the moon.
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sp; We drove and drove; we saw the sun come up in Maryland, and arrived at Cape Charles beach at around ten-thirty. We had a few hours to kill, so Erich and I paced up and down the beach, collecting crab claws for Rachel and poking at a huge dead seagull with sticks. We waited and waited for so long that I lost track of what exactly it was we were waiting for. Dad had us look through strips of exposed film at the sun, and we could see that its image was now in the shape of a crescent. The moon really was there, and at least it was on track. Still, as soon as you took away the strip of film, the sunlight seemed just as bright as always, and the world didn’t look changed at all. Erich and I were getting impatient; so far this was not worth the drive.
But then it seemed that at a certain point the world got dusky. It was as if a soft, brownish dye had been added to the atmosphere. My father began to get focused and told us to get ready. Ten long minutes passed; then he pointed out over the ocean and said, “Here it comes.”
During a total eclipse the moon blocks out the sun entirely, casting a perfectly round shadow on the earth. Since the earth spins on its axis toward the east, the shadow always moves west; because we were standing on the Atlantic coast, the shadow raced over the water directly toward us, allowing us to see it from quite a distance. It was a distinct wall of darkness that spanned the horizon, and it was moving fast. When it reached us, everything changed without a sound.
The whole sky went ultramarine, the color that appears in every child’s paint set, and which every child uses to depict the sky. No sky is ever really that blue, however, until you see an eclipse, and then it really is that blue. The color was so rich and deep that the stars shone through it, while the horizon glowed a luminous red. The air had been full of noisy seagulls, but when the shadow hit they went silent and dropped like stones into the water. I looked upward and saw, right in the middle of the sky, an indescribably lovely soft white glow. Right in the center of it was a perfect coal-black disk, the image of the moon in front of the sun. It was one of those rare occasions when reality becomes so absurdly unreal that you feel as if you are watching a movie, and worry that you aren’t truly grasping the experience while it is happening.
It was the moment of a lifetime. I snapped a few pictures and turned to make sure my father was taking pictures with the big camera, only to see him frantically trying to communicate something to a group of European tourists standing a few yards away from us. After all his planning and staring at Rand McNally maps he wasn’t looking at the eclipse; he was trying to get someone else to look at it. At the instant of totality, they had all turned around to face the wrong way! Somebody had obviously told them that if you look at an eclipse it will hurt your eyes, which is only true of partial eclipses; during a total eclipse the harmful rays of the sun are blocked, and you’re treated to one of the greatest spectacles on earth. Dad was pleading with them to turn around, trying to explain why it was safe, but they didn’t understand English and looked as if they thought he was some kind of maniac. Eventually they got angry, clopped off in their strange-looking sandals, got into their rental car and drove off without ever looking up.
The eclipse was spectacular, but I don’t think I would remember it so clearly if it hadn’t been for that hapless group. The fact that they had made the trip to the beach to see the eclipse and then didn’t dare look at it made the sight of that velvet-black disk seem especially rare and beautiful. It also provided me with a memorable image of my father. Totality during that eclipse lasted just over two minutes, and he spent fully half of that time trying to get a bunch of strangers to enjoy it. I suppose it revealed something about my own odd sense of priorities that I felt obliged to spend that whole minute watching him miss the damn thing.
No sooner did we make it back to Connecticut than my father began preparing for our next trip. This time the whole family would go. The next total eclipse visible in North America was predicted to occur two years later, in July 1972; after that, the eclipses for the next century would all occur in places like Africa, the Indian Ocean or the Arctic Circle—out of range for us and our Volkswagen—so a sense of finality hung over this adventure from the start.
Dad calculated that the best place to see the eclipse would be Cap Chat, a town, once again on the water, on the Gaspé Peninsula in northeastern Canada. Our route this time was more complicated, involved several highways and even some local roads, so Dad began examining his maps over a year in advance.
We put a tent on top of the Volkswagen and camped our way north, finally reaching Cap Chat late one morning and having to ask a chain-smoking, French-speaking twelve-year-old to direct us to a spot where we could pitch our tent. We settled on a site in a large, barren field on the outskirts of town. By the next morning we were surrounded by hundreds of tents, each one with a fabulous camera, telescope or other type of instrument perched in front of it. This was a scene entirely different from the one in Virginia. There were no hapless tourists anywhere, but instead hundreds of professional and serious amateur astronomers from all over the world. I had never seen such a variety of technology or heard such a variety of languages.
The third day was the day of the eclipse. At six that morning we woke up to blue skies. There was only one small cloud on the horizon, so small and distant that most people ignored it, but not my dad. He squinted at it for a long time. Finally he shook his head and said quietly, “It’s going to kill us.” He crawled back into the tent looking defeated, which seemed awfully premature.
By noon that cloud was a lot closer to the sun, it looked bigger, and it was no longer alone. People around us were beginning to get nervous, but by no means did the situation seem hopeless.
At three o’clock the clouds joined and covered the whole sky, and from 4:32 to 4:34 all we knew was that it got dark out. It looked like the end of any ordinary cloudy day. Several of the astronomers around us were so frustrated they cried; one tore at his hair, kicked the wheels of his car and shouted things I had heard only once before, when I was ten years old, had my brother and sister on my lap in the car and tried to scare them by opening the passenger door while Dad was driving.
My father, on the other hand, was entirely under control. He had already dealt with the loss by lying quietly in the tent by himself before the disaster actually occurred, so while many of the other astronomers were just beginning to realize what had happened and were only now writhing in agony, my father was already figuring out our route back to the main highway. He emerged from the tent and began pulling up its stakes so that we could be on the road before dinner. It occurred to me then, with so many heartbroken grown men around me to compare him with, that he was unusual in the way he dealt with disappointment. I thought, What an effort it must take for him to spare us the sight of him rolling around on the ground and pounding the earth with his fists, as one astrophotographer camped next to us was doing. I realized that this was the first opportunity of my life to reverse our roles—to act like a man and console him the way he had always done for me when I was disappointed. I prepared as much of a speech as any twelve-year-old can compose in his head in a hurry and approached him.
Just before I reached him, however, Dad stood up stiffly and started touching his mouth with one of his hands. He turned toward me and I saw a puzzled expression in his eyes. When he moved his hand away, I saw that both his lips were bright purple and swollen to comic-book proportions. We both stood there, too confused to say anything, when a woman, whose lips were also swollen, walked over and said, “Don’t worry—it’s a kind of spider that lives around here. My husband got bit this morning, too. The swelling goes down in about an hour.”
I’m sure it was Erich who started giggling first. He was always the one who started things. Rachel and even my mother got into it, and before I knew it I was laughing harder than any of them. The puzzlement faded out of Dad’s expression and turned to annoyance, and he finished pulling up the tent stakes without a word. That doomed eclipse was the only time nature gave me a textbook opportunity, plump with symbo
lic as well as concrete value, to become a man right before my father’s eyes. Unfortunately, what nature giveth, nature also taketh away: the spider got to my father before I did.
So when Dad told me at the town dump that I had to get used to things not working out in my favor, I was prepared to agree with him, but how does one get used to disappointment? I’d already tried, without success, to get used to physical pain by making myself feel it a lot; setting myself up for disappointment on purpose as a means of building up a tolerance for it probably wouldn’t work either. I imagined that a Zen master would say that the root of all disappointment is expectation, and that all expectations are illusions. If one could accept the present moment as it was and let go of the need to control the future, disappointment wouldn’t have anything to hang on to. Like all of my Zen insights, however, the idea of letting go of the need to control the future sounded great but I had no idea how to put it into practice. Accept the present moment—immaturity, unpopularity, anxiety, celibacy—and let go of the desire to become an adult, have good friends, discover a way of life I could enjoy and find out, at last, why the French call an orgasm “the small death”? Not bloody likely.