zendo for sale

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Last night, my younger son asked me if I still had my army dog tags. He said he would like to wear them. My heart leapt at the notion of giving something to someone I loved ... something that would otherwise slip away like flotsam on the swell.

When I was sixteen, my father gave me a shirt of his. It was too big, but I treasured it for its assertion of connection and adulthood. I would be happy if my son were happy in a similar small gesture.

But then I had to tell my son the truth -- that he was more than welcome to the dog tags, but I honestly couldn't remember where they were or whether, in fact, I still had them at all. I found it hard to believe I would let such a momento get lost, but ... well, I had no clue as to where they might be. Perhaps, without looking, they had already slipped beneath the swell. I can't believe I didn't put them in a 'safe' place, but where that 'safe' place might be is an open and unanswered question.

I told my son I would look around, but I haven't got a lot of energy and the house is chock-a-block with accumulated stuff, so ... perhaps those metal tags I had once worn with the same regularity I brought and bring to wearing underpants had simply evaporated into an invisible and invisibly packed "lost" basket. I do wish I knew where they were, but I doubt I will be successful in finding them.

This morning, in the moments of returning to wakefulness -- the moments I think of as the wake-to-ache time -- it crossed my mind again ... how to get out from under -- or at least allow others to get out from under -- all the stuff I have accumulated in a lifetime. I really would prefer not to be a burden to others and freeing them from dealing with the things I have valued but on which they place no value ... wouldn't that be nice?

And within that framework, I thought about selling the zendo. No one else in the family cares much about it and perhaps someone would pay me the $40,000 that remains on a mortgage that nibbles and nags each month ... whittling away what little arrives in fixed income. How I would like to be out from under the mortgage payments.

The wispy wishfulness was tinged with the difficulties involved. Even assuming there were a buyer, I'm not sure how anyone would get this small building off the property. The building is tucked at the back of the backyard and, well ... it would require some maneuvering. Nevertheless, I allowed myself some pipedreaming and some recollection.

I built the zendo in a time of more intense caring about Zen Buddhism. I had a dream, so to speak, and this 12x16-foot building was a realization of that dream -- not perfect, not fancy, but solid and filled with intention. I was secretly pleased with the result, looking on the building as something akin to an old and trusted friend. A real estate dealer once told me that when the house was sold, at whatever time in the future, it would be the zendo that sold it.

Maybe so, but this morning I thought seriously about trying to sell it and pay off the mortgage, a matter of more immediate concern to the family. Since no one would care much after my death about its impact or meaning and since my own love affair was slipping slowly away, why not get some practical use out of it now ... instead of bequeathing an albatross to others?

Funny how what once had so much meaning and so much impact and so much implanted love or despair in one life simply fails to make the cut in anyone else's. Soldiers returning from war may be astounded or disheartened by the fact that no one "back in the world" knows the blood, sweat and tears they shed and perhaps continue to shed within. College students may spend many a sleepless night completing a thesis that will then be widely unknown or forgotten ... and yet, for them, remains. Marriages entered into with energy and smiles and hopes are relegated in the end to notations in a church's or clerk's log.

This isn't dismal or distressing, I don't think, but it is a fact. My heart-and-soul efforts are not yours, nor yours mine. But attending on that fact, a further recognition seeps in: My heart and soul efforts are not really mine or, if they are, they are not that important. Or, if they are important, they are not important enough to lay at someone else's doorstep like some random, step-around-it dog turd.

Where are those dog tags? I really don't know. I don't like imagining that I simply lost them ... but perhaps I did.

Where is that zendo? I can see it in the backyard, but the truth is, I really don't know. I don't like imagining I simply lost it ... but perhaps I did.

In the wake-to-ache early morning, I fall into a guy-thing (or is it just a human-thing) reverie: If there is a problem, there must be a solution and I am going to find it ... now. You'd think I might be old enough to know better than that. Solutions, like 'meanings,' are largely fiddle-faddle.

The mortgage, if you ask the bank, is not.
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