Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles

by Rivvy Neshama

  But the next time we met, Ellie said the retreat was great, just what they needed, individually and as a couple. And it had strengthened her will to maintain a daily practice, now that she saw how good that made her feel.

  That said, we lit a candle and sat down for meditation. Ellie set a timer for twenty minutes, and our session began.

  My thoughts were scattered—a little this, a little that. Watch your breath, I told myself: in, out.

  After more distractions, I tried a mantra: “Hum sa. I am that.” Hum (inhale). Sa (exhale). Hum (in). Sa (out).

  Then I began planning what I’d make for dinner. Sarah and Paul were coming. Copper River salmon. Yes! And Sarah likes black olives. Lots of black olives.

  Don’t think about dinner. You’re supposed to be meditating.

  But the dinner’s for Sarah, who’s having brain surgery. I felt good doing something nice for Sarah. Then I felt good about being good. Aargh! Spiritual pride!

  Hum. Sa. Hum. Sa. HumSaHumSaHumSa.

  We’ll have spinach with the salmon, fresh spinach simply steamed. And goat cheese and crackers for starters. With drinks. I think I’ll have tequila. Yeah, I really want tequila, with lime and salt and that nice floaty feeling. Ahhh.

  Rivvy, cut the tequila and watch your breath: in, out, in, out—

  And that’s when the timer went off. Ellie hit the chime and our meditation was over.

  “Oh amiga,” Ellie said, “I feel so glad. Not just for our friendship and the good times we have, but that we’re spiritual buddies too.”

  “Well,” I responded, thinking of my dinner meditation (and some unkind words I had said the day before), “I’m glad I can also tell you when I’m feeling unspiritual!”

  “Right,” she said. “That’s part of it.” Then she told me about the last day of her retreat. She was sitting with her group for their morning discussion and they were sharing how they felt about going home. Ellie told them she was scared that she wouldn’t be able to stay on a spiritual path but would fall off it and essentially fail.

  “And right after I said that, I thought, How arrogant,” Ellie said laughing. “I mean, every saint and yogi falls, so of course I will too. But you know what? I think it’s the times I fall that I learn and grow the most. They’re a big part of the spiritual path.”

  “They are?” I asked, kind of surprised.

  “Yeah,” Ellie said. “Maybe that’s how you know you’re on a spiritual path—when you fall off it!”

  I took her hand and held it tight. She’s my buddy.

  ON THE “A” TRAIN

  The silver-haired man who smiled at me on the subway was very old and poorly dressed, but wore his age and shabby blazer with elegance. It was a day so steamy hot and humid that people looked at each other more than usual, too wilted to bother looking away. Most of them just stared and sighed, without the energy to even nod.

  The old man and I looked at each other in that enervated way, and then we looked again and started to smile. I got a slight sense of shining from all the gold in his teeth. I also got an instant jolt of connection.

  “That’s half the battle,” he said. “It’s half won when you get one person to smile at you during the day.”

  “What’s the other half?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, laughing. “I’m not old enough yet.”

  Sometimes your joy

  is the source of your smile,

  but sometimes your smile

  can be the source of your joy.

  —THICH NHAT HANH

  WHAT IS WANTED?

  WHAT IS NEEDED?

  My mother told me this story about her eighty-something partner, Len.

  One night, Mom and Len were at a very nice restaurant enjoying a good dinner. At a table nearby, however, a young couple sat, holding their baby who wouldn’t stop crying. So Len finished his dinner and then went over to the crying-baby table.

  “Did he reprimand them for bringing a baby to a fancy restaurant and ruining your meal?” I asked, which is something I might have wanted to do but would not have had the nerve.

  “No,” Mom said. “He offered to hold their baby so they could enjoy their dinner.”

  Wow, I thought. And then I thought of est . . .

  Back in the early 1970s, when some people were trying out all sorts of things, I was one of those people and I tried out “est,” the lowercased acronym for Erhard Seminars Training. Founded by Werner Erhard, guru of the human potential movement, “est ” was supposed to help you find “it”—which was never defined and once found was soon lost. I never knew if I really found “it” and worried that I was the only one who didn’t. But then, maybe others were worried too.

  The training became infamous for being led by ex-marines who wouldn’t let you leave for the bathroom until the breaks. Well, there were some strange things going on, but some good things too, and a few lessons I never forgot. One was Werner’s advice on how to relate to this world we live in. Simple advice, like a recipe: Look around and ask yourself, What is wanted? What is needed?

  I think of that sometimes when I’m in a meeting, or with my children, or feeling restless or self-absorbed. What is wanted? What is needed? Then I go pitch in.

  And just in case I’m feeling too proud of my deeds, I’m always humbled when I hear of people who go way beyond what I envision. People like Len, holding that baby.

  CONFESSIONS OF A LISTAHOLIC

  I’m addicted to making lists. I make lists of What to Do, Who to See, What to Research, and Who to Call. And when my lists get too long, I make lists from my lists: What to Do Today, What to Do Soon, What to Do in the Future. I write long lists in yellow tablets and short lists on index cards. I look over the relevant lists almost daily and use a highlighter to set priorities.

  Yes, I know, over the top. But now and then, the value of lists becomes clear. You see, before listomania hit me, I’d often hear that a neighbor was sick, or a colleague lost a parent, or a friend was getting divorced, and I’d think, I should send a card, or drop off a meal, or call and make a date. But then my life would get too busy and I’d forget.

  So now I write down my intentions as soon as I have them—send get-well card to Rita, give thank-you gift to Charlie, visit Katherine—and they’re there on a list to remind me until I do the deed and cross them off. (And for list makers, few things are more gratifying than crossing things off!)

  Some things stay on my list far too long. Others I thankfully do just in time. Here’s one:

  Our neighbor Jack had been very ill for months. I put his name on one of my lists to remember to pray for him and call now and then to see if I could help. One day, the list prompted me to take him something that might cheer him up, and I had just the thing: a CD called Facing Future, by a Hawaiian singer named Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. It’s so lyrical and uplifting that I bought a few of them to give to friends.

  So I took one over for Jack and left it by the door. Later, his wife, KC, called to say that Jack had gone into the hospital a week before to have a stem cell transplant. The chemotherapy was making it hard for him to talk or read, she said, but the one thing that made him feel better was listening to music.

  Thank you, list. Much obliged.

  A ONE-MINUTE RECIPE

  FROM MEXICO

  We were on vacation in a small Mexican village. Gwen, a friend we first met there, was staying in another small village nearby. So we arranged for her to spend her last night with us.

  She arrived in a white taxi and stepped out holding her bag. John and I ran to greet her. Then the taxi driver got out and walked toward us, offering his hand. “Juan,” he said with a big warm smile. We all shook hands. I thought he would say more or give us his card, but that was it, and he drove away.

  That’s when Gwen told us she had kept the driver waiting twenty minutes when he picked her up.

  “I apologized to him several times,” she said. “He was nervous because he had another pickup to do right after me.”<
br />
  She paused and then added, “What a nice man. He was worried and rushed, yet he still took time to meet you, a minute to connect.”

  YOUNG BABES AND OLD BROADS

  Most of us spend time with people our age. Here’s what can happen when you don’t.

  YOUNG BABES

  It was Christmas week, which explained it: John and I were stuck for hours in an endless line at customs in Gatwick Airport, London. We were lost in a mass of families, most of them Muslim. The women were wearing black or white hijabs, scarves that covered their hair and neck, and holding onto their children, who looked tired and cranky.

  I was feeling the same—and also nervous, since this was the year of the shoe bomber and other plots by Islamic extremists. In fact, I was about to succumb to a very dark mood when I spotted in front of us a little Pakistani boy propped on his mother’s back and crying. He looked about two years old and was surrounded by family members; but none were paying him attention as they, too, looked ready to cry.

  So I stepped into my best routine: hiding. I ducked behind John’s back and then popped my head above his right shoulder with a big smile and a “boo!” Then I hid again, this time appearing above John’s left shoulder. Well, I got the baby’s attention, and before long he stopped crying. In fact, he started to smile and soon was chortling. Cool, I thought, we’re playing peek-a-boo in Pakistani!

  Then his young mother turned around, and she smiled too. She spoke to others who were with her, and they nodded at me as I nodded back.

  In that moment, in that interminable line at that crowded airport, I felt happy: connected to a whole group of people I had stopped seeing as “family” and to this sweet baby boy who helped make me see.

  HUM

  One winter, John went to Africa, to a rural village in Mali. A European company was celebrating its centennial there by helping the villagers plant trees—one million trees—and John was invited to cover the story.

  To launch the project, there was an outdoor ceremony near the pond, and every tribal chief and elder was present. After listening to four chiefs speak, and spotting five others lined up to follow, John drifted away to view a mud-built, castle-like mosque near the arc of huts where most people lived.

  Soon after he started walking, John felt something warm and gentle in his hand. Looking down, he saw a young, barefoot boy, who held tightly onto his hand and smiled. John pointed to himself and said “John.” Then he pointed to the little boy, who said “Hum.”

  And for the next two hours, wherever John went, Hum went, never letting go of his hand. They wandered through the village, into the school, and even planted a tree together and named it “Hum John.”

  “He had such trust,” John later told me. “I think it’s because of the village. It felt so open and safe, as if all the adults were there for all the children.” I remembered the African saying “It takes a village to raise a child.”

  John was moved by the warmth of the Mali people, by their music and their easy smiles. But what he’ll never forget is Hum, the little boy who took his hand.

  TWENTY-SOMETHING

  Another good thing about mixing the ages is it keeps you in tune with the changing times and expressions. I had a twenty-something guitar teacher named Dylan, who would always say to me, “No worries.”

  Whenever I changed our appointment, whenever I forgot what he taught me, whenever I did anything wrong, that’s what he said: “No worries.”

  It’s a kind phrase, I think, and reassuring. It makes me feel good about this new generation.

  “But Dylan,” I told him one day, “I’m Jewish, I worry!”

  He smiled at me and said, “No worries.” And now I’m saying it too.

  VISITING OUR ELDERS

  Visiting our elders is a mitzvah (see “Mitzvah” recipe). It’s one of those things I feel I’m meant to do, and it’s what I hope others will feel they’re meant to do when I’m older. It’s also, almost always, a source of joy: There’s the joy you give them, and the joy you feel seeing their joy, and the joy they give you with their stories and inspiration.

  Now, some elders are more fun than others. So it goes. Katherine, a ninety-something neighbor, wasn’t a great talker, which meant it was sometimes a strain to keep the conversation going. If I asked her what was happening, she usually told me about her back pain.

  Not a great topic. But we all need someone to complain to, right? So I would take off my sweater and listen.

  The reason I took off my sweater was because Katherine, like many older people, kept the thermostat at about eighty-five degrees, winter and summer, which made her house as warm as Miami and also made me sleepy. But she was my next-door neighbor, so I tried to visit once a week. I mean, imagine what it’s like to live alone when you’re old and don’t get out much or have many friends still alive, so you just sit there most of the time, watching television. You’d welcome some company, no?

  Whenever I’d visit, Katherine would give a surprised “Oh, hi” and a smile. Then she’d sit back down in a gray reclining chair, and I’d sit in a brown leather chair facing her. Slowly, our relationship evolved. We even found things to talk about—things we liked doing as kids, politics, and Oprah.

  One day Katherine told me how she was raised: by elderly adoptive parents in the Midwest who believed that children were meant to be silent and just listen. Well, no wonder she wasn’t much of a talker! Shortly after that, I stopped worrying about keeping the conversation going. In fact, one day, when I was tired and her house was even warmer than usual, I sat in that brown leather chair, closed my eyes, and fell asleep. I must have slept for ten minutes, and when I woke up, Katherine was still sitting facing me, and it was all okay. How nice it felt to be with someone and it was fine to just be there, to even fall asleep. When I left, she said, as always, “Thanks for coming. It means a lot to me.” Joy.

  AND THEN THERE WAS RITA

  And then there was Rita. Irish Rita from the Bronx. White hair in a bob, impish green eyes, a tough little woman with a big spirit. She was my friend Paul V.’s mother and the most fun elder I ever met, bar none.

  Rita was earthy. She told bawdy jokes and was a great storyteller, imitating the voices of everyone she described. And whenever John was coming back from a business trip, she’d urge me to “make whoopee! Make lots of whoopee! Do it for me!”

  A devout if irreverent Catholic, Rita sprinkled our conversations with casual references to the Blessed Mother, the Mother of the Whole World, whom I came to envision as a female version of the Great Spirit. “Rivvy,” Rita kindly assured me, “she’s the Mother of All. That means Catholics and Jews and everyone.”

  Rita prayed a lot, for anyone in need, and she strongly believed that her prayers would be heard. “She’s got a direct line to heaven,” our friend Helen confirmed. So whenever I was sick or scared or someone in my family had a problem, I asked Rita to pray for us. Later, she’d tell me how she wrote out the names I gave her and put them by the small statue of the Blessed Mother she kept on her bedroom bureau. Once I knew that, I felt better.

  When Rita reached her nineties, her health faded. Small strokes and a few falls left her needing a walker and mostly stuck in her apartment. So John and I would visit her there and take Chinese food, her favorite. “Chicken with nuts,” she’d order, “and brown rice, not white.”

  She would always have lots of cake, chocolates, and tea waiting for us, and while we ate, she’d tell her stories and we’d all laugh. She especially loved telling us that she was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, home of the infamous accused murderer Lizzie Borden. Rita would get this devilish look on her face as she recited with glee, “Lizzie Borden had an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one!”

  One day, Jeanne V. called to say Rita’s health had worsened. They were moving her to assisted living. “She can’t live alone anymore,” Jeanne explained. “Yesterday, she lost the feeling in her legs and couldn’t get up from
the bathtub. So she lay there for hours before using her beeper to call anyone. I think she’s lost her judgment. She’s better off where she’s going.”

  John and I made plans to go see her, but we were a little scared—afraid she’d be depressed about leaving her home and not sure how she’d seem without her “judgment.”

  “It’s a big change,” Rita told me on the phone, “a big change.”

  When we arrived at her new place, she looked smaller than before, even though she was now in a much smaller space: one room, in which Paul and Jeanne had neatly placed her bed and bureau, one chair, the statue of the Blessed Mother, and pictures on the wall.

  “Sit in the chair,” Rita insisted, as she sat down next to John on the bed. Then she asked him to open the bottom drawer of her bureau—and damn if she didn’t have a cache of chocolates there too, which the three of us began to munch. Soon, Rita was chatting it up like old times, imitating the physical therapist who would bark at her “Knees! Toes! Knees!” and telling us about the nurse she liked best, Rosie Vasquez, who had a bad neck, so Rita gave her a massage.

  We asked how her legs were doing, and she told us the story of being stuck in the tub. “But why did you wait so long to use your beeper?” I asked.

  “Because I didn’t want some firemen breaking in and seeing me naked,” Rita explained.

  “Stupid me,” she said, laughing. “Being modest! Wouldn’t you know, the day I got here they had this big, burly man give me a shower. He was really big (Rita put her hands out to show just how big he was), and he washed me all over. Then he dried me down with a towel and puffs of air. Poof, poof.”

  Rita laughed and laughed. “Oh God! Let me tell you! Poof here. Poof there. Well, I figured, I’m this bag of bones and he’s probably seen everything, so why not? And there I was worried about some firemen seeing me naked!”