Thursday, January 08, 2009

dont say stage freeze, just do it

But pretty soon he roused his resources together and began cooking a supper and singing at the stove like a millionaire, stomping around in his boots on the resounding wood floor, arranging bouquets of flowers in the clay pots, boiling water for tea, plucking on his guitar, trying to cheer me up as i lay there staring sadly at the burlap ceiling. It was our last night, we both felt it.

"I wonder which one of us'll die first," i mused out loud. "Whoever it is, come on back, ghost, and give 'em the key."

"Ha!" He brought me my supper and we sat crosslegged and chomped away as on so many nights before: just the wind furying in the ocean of trees and our teeth going chomp chomp over good simple mournful bhikku food. "Just think, Ray, what it was like here on this hill where our shack stands thirty thousand years ago in the time of the Neanderthal man. And do you realize that they say in the sutras there was a Buddha of that time, Dipankara?"

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Chicago Bum

I had a dollar left and Gary was waiting for me at the shack. The whole trip had been as swift and enlightening as a dream, and I was back.