ROAD BLOG AHEAD

Really.

After being sick for 10 days and sleeping in the living room, I decided to move back into the bedroom tonight until they come home from traveling. When they’re home, he has the bedroom and Lena and I sleep on the air mattress in the living room, but I felt like sleeping in my own room.

And it’s trashed. My mother would turn in her grave. YOUR mother would too probably.

Now, I’m not a neat-nik at all. I like things sort of vaguely tidy and put away, I appreciate clean, but I don’t prioritize housework over recreation and I’ll leave the bed unmade for a day without worrying about it if I’m busy with other things. I’d consider myself sort of midline as far as these things go.

But my guru, this dear, sweet, enlightened little imp of a monk with the twinkling eyes and the zap of a lightning bolt, this individual who has shown me the nature of my own mind and motivated me to do some pretty impossible things. He is NOT tidy, not neat. I knew this about him, but still, it was a shock coming in here tonight.

Every surface is covered with debris. Mostly paper - scraps of notes, envelopes, wrapping from things. Amidst all of that are many holy texts, wood block printed and wrapped in cloth in traditional fashion. Piles of these here and there. Statues and images. There is an intricate and amazingly beautiful antique long life vase I’ve never seen before sitting on one of the dressers. It belongs in a museum. No idea where it came from either, but there it is. There’s a bowl of moldy almonds, a couple of spoons, the plastic box that I know held a couple of croissants a few weeks ago.THe floor has a million rubber bands, little plastic baggies (Tibetans love those little plastic drug dealer baggies for relics) and some unidentifiable squares of bright blue foam rubber. There’s boxes of tsa tsas everywhere, many little paper-wrapped bundles that probably hold some kind of blessings, a zillion empty cassette tape boxes…

Where does all this stuff come from? He doesn’t own very much. It’s like living with Mary Poppins and her magic carpet bag, only it’s endless bits of paper and other odd trash that magically appear!

And so I will move it aside, carefully, so that I can equally carefully move it back where it was when I’m done. Some of it has value. I can’t tell what and I’d guess wrong I’m sure. So I leave it. When he leaves we’ll sift through the detritus of several months, finding the most astonishing treasures amidst the trash. It’s a little like a fairy tale - I’ve literally found jewels left in the bed… Of course I’ve also found empty cough drop boxes, cheap Indian kleenex packets, torn envelopes and coins worth less than a US penny (I forget how many Indian paisas to a cent, but it’s a few) It’s a part of the adventure.

One year he left behind a knitted yellow necktie. Now, given that Tibetans don’t wear neckties and, even if they did, he’s a monk and they don’t wear the kind of clothes you’d wear a necktie with if you wore a necktie. I have no idea where it came from. Probably neither did he. Somethat that appeared out of the depths of the magical Mary Poppins bag I guess.

Even writing here I am so behind. I’ve been posting to my other, more intimate blog these past few weeks and not copying things over here. I might at some point, but for now I’m just going to forge ahead.

I’ve been sick for almost 2 weeks. What should have been a head cold turned into pneumonia and I’ve been flat on my back. Or rather, propped up on pillows. I am now thoroughly bored with both being sick and writing about being sick so I’ll find something else to talk about.

I’m making tsampa. Maybe that’s worth writing about. Tsampa is pretty much the Tibetan national dish. If you can call it a “dish”. What it is is flour or meal made from roasted barley. There’s a lot of different ways to eat it and it keeps just about forever, provides lots of nutrition, is portable, storable, etc. It can be mixed with yogurt, with butter, with tea, with cheese. I like it mixed with butter and chura, the Tibetan equivalent of parmesan, only smellier. Lots of butter, lots of chura until it’s a kind of grainy lump. Then you eat it and it’s quite tasty and very very filling. A little goes a long way, but then it’s designed to keep you going for 9 month long, zero minus sixty degree winters in the Himalayas, so it sticks to your ribs and keeps you warm and energized. It’s not what you’d call ideal food for sunny California.

So anyway, being able to make tsampa is a very important skill when you’re playing den mother to Tibetans. Years and years ago, the first time Lama Wangdor came to visit after we were together, Lena showed me how to do tsampa using a wok and a kind of improvised beater to stir/roast the barley over an open flame. Of course then you are supposed to take your roasted barley in big sacks down to the local mills and have them grind it for you. Sure. I’ll just hop right down to the old mill stream… We’d experimented then and discovered that the only thing that really ground it to the right consistency (similar to a stone-ground whole wheat flour) was this ancient food processor I’d originally bought in 1980 to make babyfood out of table scraps when Roni was born. It made about a cup at a time, but it was pretty decent tsampa.

Fast forward about eight years and Rimpoche was coming back for another visit and Lena had taken up studying herbalism. My decrepit food processor had pretty much bit the dust when it was pressed into service attempting to grind smoked dong quai - akin to grinding hunks of petrified wood. The new models of food processors didn’t grind fine enough. We tried a coffee grinder and it was thoroughly inadequate to the task, not to mention waaaaay too small. Hmmm.

But wait. I remembered that there was an attachment for the Kitchen Aid line of stand mixers that just might do the trick. Actually there’s probably a Kitchen Aid attachment that will do just about anything and everything - I swear by Kitchen Aid!!! It was a grain mill - a heavy metal device powered by the strong motor on the mixer designed to grind grain into flour for cooking and baking. Not cheap - I think mine was close to $100 even back then, added to the hefty $300 price tag of the mixers themselves. But it worked! Not only that, but it let me adjust the coarseness of the grind depending on how I wanted my tsampa and what it was being used for.

Oh. Right. One of the most important uses for tsampa - next to feeding a hungry population above the snow line - is to make the ritual offering figures called tormas that are used in ceremonies. Tormas are, in a way, food for deities, spirits, demons, etc. They are also art forms - sometimes being truly elaborate and intricate sculptures made of dough that has been formed primarily of fine-ground tsampa and butter. They are decorated with butter - flowers of butter, curls of butter, horns and whorls and swirls of cold, hard butter. Remember - this is a form that developed in very very (did I say very) cold places. And often the sculptures are finished by being coated with a thick layer of… butter. Only the butter is first dyed bright red. But the making of the red butter is another story unto itself. Suffice it to say I can make red butter too.

We go through a lot of tsampa during a visit if there are ceremonies requiring tormas - which of course there always are. I tend to make it in five pound batches and usually make several batches while Rimpoche is visiting. It gets eaten for breakfast. It gets eaten for a midnight snack. It gets shared with guests in order to have the fun of sharing something new and unusual with people. Or to watch and giggle at the expression on their faces the first time they forget, inhale at the wrong moment and end up with a snoot full of tsampa. There’s an art, not only to making the stuff, but to eating it safely. Tibetan children learn that art before they can walk. Westerners learn the hard way

One thing we discovered is that a sack of tsampa makes a really fine gift when Rimpoche goes visiting other Tibetans who have emigrated to the States. It’s a taste of home. People import the stuff. We’ve been offered small bags of tsampa that was made in Lhasa and smuggled out of Tibet. Ten years ago especially, it just wasn’t made here. Nobody had figured out how. Or something. Except me. By trial and error I’d also improved on the roasting process, speeding it up immensely without sacrificing flavor by doing it in batches in a low oven on heavy commercial baking sheets. It was a trick I’d learned when brewing our own beer and roasting barley for that. I thought “hmmm, might this work for making tsampa?” And indeed it did. The trick isn’t just in putting it in a shallow layer on a heavy pan in the right temp oven - it also requires pre-moistening the barley to the right degree - not wet or even really damp, just rehydrating it a bit over the dried out dessicated condition it arrives in commercially. I just use ordinary cheap pearl barley from Safeway. It comes in pound bags at about a buck a pound. People have tried using fancy unhulled, organic barley. They’ve used seed barley. They’ve used fancy brewing barley. Uh uh. Safeway. The cheap stuff. Yeah it’s been sitting awhile. That’s why you rehydrate it. I pour about five pounds of it into a huge mixing bowl and then wet my hands and run it through the barley. Keep wetting my hands and sifting barley until it’s just slightly moistened so that the grains cling to my fingers a bit. Then I leave it sit for 4-8 hours or overnight to absorb the bit of moisture. It’s not wet. You might not even know there’s any added water to look at it. But it makes all the difference. Then, when it’s roasted, it doesn’t turn into little hard pebbles. It gets tender. I roast it maybe 20 minutes in a 325 F oven or until it’s just the least bit pale browned. Cool and put it through the grain mill. Voila! Tsampa like Ama used to make!

I’m writing this because I got a call today from Chicago where Lena and Lama have been teaching the past few days. There’s a small Tibetan community there. A family is hosting Rimpoche and Lena and, when the local Tibetans got a look at my tsampa, apparently there was a mob scene and now they all want to know exactly how I do it - how I have managed to make quantities of the “real” stuff, authentic, using modern appliances and methods?!! Yeah my streamlining the roasting is good, but they could live with the old-fashioned wok roasting. It’s the grinding that has stymied everyone, the finding of a machine that will do it right - like the old stone mills back home!

I don’t suppose there’s quite enough demand that I could go into business making the stuff in bulk and selling it by mail order? Nah. Didn’t think so. So I’m happy to share my “secrets” with anyone who wants them. It’s kind of funny really, that this is one of those cultural things that got passed on to someone outside the culture who figured out how to do it with her modern “labor saving” equipment and now can pass that information back to people out of the original culture who no longer have their traditional methods available. One wonders just how many different skills and tricks have evolved and adapted to change that way over the many thousands of years of human history and migration? We sure are an adaptive species.

This afternoon I took a nap and woke after awhile thinking I was having an asthma attack. My chest felt heavy, constricted. It was hard to breathe. There was this strange vibration… I came to consciousness then and realized that there was about eight kilos of purring feline curled up on my sternum. The cat we call Itty Bitty Kitty (for the same reason that bald guys get called “Curly”) never used to do that - sit on me. That was Velcro’s spot. But Velcro died 2 months ago and now that I’m sick and Lena’s away, the cat has taken to parking on me whenever I’ll hold still.

She’s a funny cat, this one - a calico with beautiful markings and green eyes. Quite the curmudgeon in personality and also very smart - she’s taken over as the chief cat in our household since Pearl became senile. And now she’s sitting on me constantly. But not affectionately. Oh no, do not ever think that. One might mistake this attentiveness and purring for a kind of affection. One might confuse her vigilance at my sick bed for caring and nurturing. But Itty Bitty Kitty (aka Serendipity, aka Sara, aka Lardass) will not tolerate such foolish sentimentality. I made the mistake the other night, while I was petting her (until she drooled mind you) and scratching her chin, of telling her how much I appreciated her company, of praising her and telling her that she was a fine cat and very lovely. When I came to the point of mentioning her thoughtfulness in keeping me company while I was sick, I must have crossed over some line because she gave me such a look out of those green eyes! Then she bit my hand just hard enough to make me jump and left the room abrubtly. I guess I broke some unspoken feline rule about never letting them know that you know. Ooops.

I’ve been positively maudlin today. It’s probably an artifact of all the bacteria and virii dying off in my bloodstream, but I have spent a good part of my day weeping and feeling just too too sorry for myself. It probably means that I’m feeling better than I was. I know I haven’t wanted to spend the entire afternoon asleep as I did the last few days. On the other hand, my focus isn’t back to normal. So I’ve been restless and disgruntled, but not getting much accomplished. Oh, I managed to wash a load of clothes, but only cuz I was out of clean pajamas. I did actually put on a bra and socks today though and washed my hair. This suggests that, either I’m improving - or I’m easily amused.

I really miss Lena a lot. She called today from Chicago where there was decent cell phone reception. I cried at her, much to my disgust and her tolerant amusement. I hate it when I cry at her! But I was feeling so crummy and missing her so much that, at the sound of her voice, I just broke down and wept. At least I didn’t cry when, a little later, Lama Wangdor called to see how I was feeling. That would have been even more embarassing! Fortunately, it’s hard to have a meltdown while trying to remember verb tenses in a tonal language.

They had a bout of the same initial crud, but seem to have gotten over it faster than I have. Doc Ellen thinks I got a dose of a second bug just as I had overcome the first one - she thinks they’re two different things going on at once which is why I ended up with the pneumonia. Aren’t I lucky? I got Lama’s Asian flu AND my grandson’s bacterial infection. Wheeeee.

Oh. Okay. I guess it’s now time to pet a cat. She’s insisting. And you know how cats can be about things like that. She’s going to shed on my keyboard until I do her bidding…

I think it’s time for my bedtime cocktail of nasty but necessary chemicals that permit me to sleep and breathe simultaneously

I am getting bored with this sick thing. Doc Ellen just left and guess what boyz and grrls? I’ve got fucking pneumonia! Just when you thought I was out of the woods, here comes another whammy!

Woke up this a.m. still running a fever, lightheaded and my chest just plain hurts. I suspected a problem when I realized how much it hurt every time I coughed. So I left a message for my precious doctor saying “help!” and she did. What a sweetie - she ran over with her kit, plus a course of a different antibiotic than I’ve been taking, one which should hopefully knock this thing out - PLUS another vat of soup. Listened to my lungs and said oh oh! And put me to bed with the whole “lots of hot liquids, steam, sleep, antibiotics and anti fever stuff and call me if it gets worse or doesn’t get better by morning.”
I’ll tell you - this beats the hell out of a trip to the emergency room. Which is where I’d be if she weren’t around.

So I’m trying to figure out how to get as much as I can done while lying in bed. I don’t really have the wind for long phone calls. I can do some computer stuff, but not the things that require stacks of papers and references. I’m returning lots of non-critical e-mails, which is good and hopefully getting my database fixes done.

Maybe I’ll break down and watch a video. I rarely ever watch anything, but this might be a good time for mindless entertainment. Wondering if I can talk Nyondo into letting me get my hands on the “Kill Bill” I & II dvds I bought her for her birthday? She’s kinda touchy about things like that. I don’t have cable so I’m pretty much limited to what’s in the house. And, since we’re not TV watchers, the selection is pretty slim.

It looks like it’s gonna rain soon. Which has me chuckling. Psycho landlord did his sanding this morning and then primed the wall for painting. I would just love to watch it rain. I’m not normally vindictive, but I do have some appreciation for Mother Nature’s little practical jokes and, if she decides to listen to my occasional prayers, more power to her.

Oh, one of the odd things (so when aren’t there odd things around here?) - The psycho has a dead truck parked in the driveway. Actually, I think it runs but he’s collected so many tickets and let his registration lapse so he doesn’t dare take it off private property. This came about right about the time when he started going off the deep end, late summer. Prior to that he was eccentric but mostly pretty functional. Anyway, in the past 48 hours some time, a large wooden sign appeared on top of the truck. It appears to be from a carnival midway. Brightly colored shapes adorn it and, in huge letters, the words “Drench The Dunce!” No clue why it’s there or where it came from. Every time I see it, I have the impulse to say, “Oh,okay, I will” and turn the hose on the psycho.

Dealing with this bozo, I keep thinking about Ladee who streamlined life and is living simply in a nice little RV down in Southern California. Lena and I have talked about doing just that and it is sounding more and more appealing all the time! I think the trick will be finding the size RV that pleases both of us. She wants teeny tiny. I have to remind her that I’m six feet tall. I’m thinking mediumish - something that one can park and run into Safeway, but where I could actually stand up without giving myself a concussion. No more psycho to contend with would be a fair tradeoff for a certain amount of space I’m thinking.

Well, it’s all speculation. I’m certainly stuck where I’m at through the summer at least. And, the way life tends to pop up with surprises, just about anything could happen by then.

Later…
It rained. And I look out my office window and there’s the psycho, standing out in the pouring rain painting the side of the garage. His movements were frantic and jerky and he’s shaking, but he kept painting and painting. And the faster it rained, the faster he was trying to paint, as though he believes that, if he moves fast enough, he can beat Mother Nature. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. And, of course, the paint washed off in streaks and now the wall looks like absolute hell. I guess he was determined that, if he’d sanded and primed the wall, he was, by gods, gonna paint it like he intended. I wonder when he last slept?

7 a.m. this morning I am awakened by the sound of power tools going non-stop. It’s EasterSunday, the entire neighborhood is asleep. I look out the back window and he is up on a ladder powersanding the back building not ten feet away! I stick my head out and say, “Um, it’s seven a.m. on a fucking Sunday morning. What are you doing?”

And he looks at me with utterly cold, expressionless, too-hugely dilated eyes and says, “Around here we start at 7 o’clock.” Then looks back at me, just as cold and says in a condescending voice, “I can wait a while if you like.”

I just sort of stared at him blearily. Yeah, I know *legally* around here construction can start at 7. But there’s a huge difference between *can* and *will* and this just wasn’t sane - he woke up everyone in a block radius and that’s not going to win him any friends. The neighbors already think he’s a nutcase (they’re right.) There’s a lot of things I *can* do and get away with, but I don’t because I’m aware of the impact on people around me. This guy appears to have lost that awareness.

So, after a minute of peering, I asked, a little carefully but genuinely wanting to know, “Are you doing this on purpose?” And he twitches, his gaze slides sideways and he replies,
“I’m sanding this on purpose. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.” Pause. “I can wait awhile if you want.”

And I just said, “No. I’m already awake.” And shut the window. So, of course, he stopped.

Now, when he began the construction project that he started (building an enormous planter box outside the garage) he started it at night and continued to bang and saw until after 3 a.m. I saw he was on a roll and didn’t complain about that, even though that was way outside local noise ordinances! I figured it wasn’t doing anyone any harm and I was still up and he wasn’t sawing and banging consistently so what harm? I guess he feels he can do whatever whenever.

Am I nuts to object? To think that there is something wrong with this scenario? One of the neighbors asked us if he’d gone “off” again. (Again? wish we’d known that before moving in.) Another just looked pointedly in his direction and whispered, “All I want to know is: crack or crystal?” Which is our question too. Mad scurrying all night long. Paranoia. He’s accused people of saying and doing things that are not either reasonable OR in keeping with their personality.

He told me I phoned him and said he’d killed my cat. Now, my cat died a couple of months ago and we were really sad, but it had absolutely nothing to do with him, nor did I ever think it did. I wasn’t even the one who told him that the cat had died. The only phone call I made to him during that period was when the cat was not only alive but we expected her to recover. I phoned him once asking for a repair on the house. When we tried to point this out to him however, he insisted that he had “kept the tape and listened to it over and over to be sure (of my accusation of him murdering the cat.)” But, of course, when asked if we could hear the tape ourselves since he’d kept it, we were told that he no longer had it.

Our friend W who’s a working clinic psychologist has heard our tales, knows the guy a bit, ran into him and talked to him last week and is shaking her head and saying that, yup, he’s flipped and, given that the neighbors are asking if he’s done it “again,” it’s probably something cyclic and unlikely to change and our best bet is going to be to move.

Unfortunately, this is NOT a good time for us to consider moving. Not only do we dislike the whole process. Not only is it expensive to move. But we’ve got so much going on, plus business stuff, etc. This is just a really lousy situation. And yet I really DO want to get out of this - the stress is awful. And it’s worse on Lena who is attempting to share office space with this nutcase. He is so very passive agressive, trashes the office but won’t cooperate in her using it during her scheduled hours. Partly he appears to be pissed because, as a doctor, she has treated a couple of people that he doesn’t personally like.

I’ve rented from “friends” before. I’ve shared property with the landlord before. I’ve NEVER had this kind of problem before. We’ve always been considered model tenants by every landlord. I’ve had the occasional difficult neighbor, but who hasn’t? But landlords? Always made it work, no matter what. A, OTOH, has been in litigation with pretty much every tenant and roommate he’s ever had. He’s had restraining orders out on several people who, apparently, threatened to kill him (which I do understand now - how someone could be pushed to make such a threat.) I wish we’d known that before we moved in - I wouldn’t have moved in! This is the sort of thing we only found out about after the fact. A landlord who sues all his tenants is in the same category as someone who has no ex-lovers who are speaking to them. There’s probably a reason! And it’s probably not the tenants or the exes. Sigh.

So I think we’ll be looking. Later this summer though - with Rimpoche here, it just wouldn’t be possible to contemplate moving. What a mess that would be! It’s too bad, since we like the house, even if it’s a tad small for us. We’ve nested here, made it “ours” for the moment. The prospect of starting that over again is horrifying. I keep hoping that, if A’s psychosis is cyclic, that it’s a longish cycle and he’ll get sane again for awhile… If it’s drug-related (we had a roommate for a few months 2 years ago who acted like this when using speed triggered her previously under-control schizophrenia) it won’t stop on its own. Big sighs!

That was nice. Ellen came bearing Hot & Sour soup, a favorite of mine and what she could find fresh at 9:30 at night in Oakland. It did the trick and opened my sinuses to boot. Plus she brought some organic thyme and made me steam myself with boiling water steeped with thyme to open the passages. Then she gave me an acupuncture treatment and I feel a lot less ach-ey and cranky.

Ellen is amazing. She started out as a pediatrician, became an allergy specialist and then went into 5 Element style acupuncture, one of the few MD acupuncturists around. The woman is brilliant and not afraid to change tracks and take risks, yet she looks like somebody’s sweet grandmother. She’s also a Tibetan Buddhist and does for her teacher some of the kinds of stuff I do for mine - organize and trouble-shoot. Not on the same scale, but locally. She’s a saint and we keep proposing marriage to her. One of these days she’ll accept

Anyway, she made me feel much better and we got trading stories and laughing like idiots and the laughter does me just as much good as any medicine. Heart friends really are so important, people you love and feel absolutely open and at home iwith. I am so blessed to have some of these in my life!

I hope Lena is getting enough rest that her cold improves. They’re in Kansas City right now. She tried calling me yesterday but cell phone reception in the house where they’re staying wasn’t good and it was pouring rain outside so she didn’t want to go out walking. I didn’t hear from her today. Hoping that means she got to sleep in since they weren’t teaching until tonight. I miss them a lot already, even if I’m sick enough that, if they were here, I wouldn’t be that much good to either of them.

It seems weird to just be talking in English in the house. I didn’t realize how much I was thinking in Tibetan until I didn’t hear it around me and it seemed wrong. Languages are funny that way - there are always words and concepts that just don’t translate very well - concepts that are best thought of in their “native” terms. Tibetan has a bunch of stuff like that - terms for states of mind, meditation experiences, etc. that just don’t really exist in English. You have to talk “about” them instead of having a single word that says what you want. So there’s a bunch of Tibetan words that we use all the time at home, just because they are the best words for the job. Any bi-lingual family will tend to have these terms. Actually, because Lena and Lama lived in India so long, there are a handful of terms for everyday household things that we use the Hindi words for which makes three languages. Sometimes people who are over won’t understand what we’re saying when it seems perfectly normal to us to say something like, “We’re having poma so, when you set the table, put that katak in my jolla so it doesn’t get haldi all over it and set the roti there instead.”

I grew up in a house where Polish and, occasionally Yiddish, words were sprinkled into daily use English in this way. I still think of expressing maternal love (as opposed to romantic love) by saying Ja che koham. (I may be spelling it wrong - I never learned to write Polish) And a little hole in something will always be a juda to me. Polish was the language the adults used to talk behind the children’s backs so, of course, us kids learned enough of it to figure out what they were saying! It’s been years since I’ve been around any Polish or Russian speakers on a regular basis though. I can still recognize them when I hear them - usually - but I only remember a small handful of phrases myself after so long.

I’m rambling a bit. Not for any reason, just got off on a tangent. Probably should get to bed. Again. Seems like I sleep more than anything right now. It’s probably good for me, but it’s kinda boring to be so sleepy.

Sometimes I know I’m a lucky girl. How I know is by the quality of the people around me. One of my best friends is E. She’s an MD, but she’s also a super person all around, just one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever know. I tease her that she’s too nice and she argues that she’s really not - but I know better.

She, Lena and I bonded tightly a couple of years ago when she ended up in an abusive relationship. She was horribly embarassed by getting herself into this mess, as people who do tend to feel. And we were the only people she felt safe to talk to about it, but we were the ones she asked to help get her out of it. So we went over there and physically threw the abusive boyfriend out of her house, got the police to take him home, changed the locks and then sat with her for the next few weeks until he went back to his own country. We got both that it was an abusive situation but that she didn’t want it or get into it on purpose - it’s not her pattern. She IS nice, but not an abusee by habit. So that solidified a tight friendship and we all take care of each other at need.

She called tonight to check in on me and, when I whined at her about how I feel just crappy at this stage, she decided that what I really need is some company and a bowl of chicken soup. So she’s on her way over to fix that. How sweet is that? She knows that sometimes penicillin is good, but sometimes the best prescription is TLC. She’s excellent at both.

I’m still playing “juggle that schedule” with Lama’s stuff. Now Florida cancelled. I don’t know what is with the weekend of April 23&24 - this is the 3rd group that was all gung ho to schedule something that weekend and had to cancel at the very last second. I’ve NEVER, in the 18 years I’ve been doing this scheduling, had three consecutive cancellations for a time slot. Very bizarre. I’m wondering if maybe we’re just supposed to go to Mexico and hang out for an extra couple of days? Maybe. Hey, I wouldn’t mind a bit!

I’m going to whine about my cold. It’s pretty awful - the worst one I’ve had in several years. There are just so many more things I’d rather be doing than blowing my nose and coughing. Many more things I NEED to be doing than spending the day in bed. My to-do list is 4 pages long and doesn’t include things like housework, shopping or personal care. Oh, or earning a living! I’d thought to make a nice dent in it over the next few days but my head is so full of snot that I’ve got the IQ of a doorknob and no problem-solving skills beyond making myself a cup of tea. Taking a much-needed shower this morning was very nearly beyond my capacity!

I get a bit nervous when I get sick under these circumstances. Twice before when Rimpoche has been here and we’ve been going full-tilt, I’ve ended up so ill that, not only was I hospitalized, but both times the emergency room docs warned the next of kin with me that I might not make it through the night. One time it was with a serious blood clot. The next time it was with a kind of pneumonia that took 5 different antibiotics to clear up and left me disabled for 2 months. This was right before the SARS epidemic and, while nobody called it that, all the symptoms were the same.

Rimpoche says that it is some sort of karmic purification that I’m going through, getting sick like this each time I start doing intense work and practice with him. That’s the short explanation - burning up karmic formations. Apparently it happens to a lot of yogis when their meditation gets intense. I suppose I should feel like it’s a good sign, but it really freaks out my family - not to mention is extremely unpleasant. The first time, Lena and Rimpoche were teaching in Italy and Lena ended up rushing back from Tuscany, sure that I was dying and would be gone before she got to SF. That was an intense time!

I really think this is just a cold though, even if it is probably compounded with some kind of Indian bacteria. The other times I was already really run down and not in great physical shape to begin with. This year I’m a lot healthier all around. Besides, this is running the same course that everyone else’s cold has. I’m not having asthma with it, which is actually pretty cool, having had asthma for years and only getting it under control the past few years. Since that bout of pseudo-SARS as a matter of fact!

So that’s the whine. I really do wish I were getting packed to go to Vancouver in the morning. I’ve been looking forward to doing that for a couple of months now. One constant aspect of any long distance relationship is anticipation. The flip side of which is, of course, patience.

A certain amount of anticipation can be fun. Getting one’sself worked up, knowing you’ll see that special person soon sort of sweetens the deal. But there are limits - I don’t always think anticipation is fun. I’m into gratification too. And patience has never been my strongest virtue. So, yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this visit with a certain amount of eagerness and I am really bummed that we’re having to put it off for another time, even though I recognize that it’s by far the most sensible thing to do. Right now I’m feeling congested, not companionable and the only thing I have the focus to truly submit to appears to be a herd of nasty bacteria. Sadistic little bacteria.

Giving myself enough time to recover does seem like a sane plan. There are many fun things hopefully to come. If all goes smoothly (not that I assume it will) I’ll be going to Mexico at the end of April, to Portland (and possibly Seattle) late May and definitely to Hawaii at the end of June. As it turns out, we’ll get to stay in Hawaii for several days after the teaching schedule ends. A friend has offered us the use of her house there and, since the plane tickets are being picked up by the center sponsoring the teachings, all we need to come up with is local transportation and food and we get to have the first real holiday that Lena and I have had together in…. probably years. The last vacation we managed together was a camping trip in 97. Since then we’ve been too busy or too broke to both get away at the same time, other than for a few days when our daughter had her baby last summer. So a week in hawaii sounds like heaven!

Mexico is intended to be a holiday of sorts also. Someone that Lena and Lama have known for more than 30 years (he used to visit them when they lived in the caves in the Himalayas) recently bought an estate in a place called San Miguel de Allende which appears to be smack in the middle of the country, a sort of spa/resort town with perfect weather. If we can get Lama a visa, Tom is flying us all down there for a week at the end of April. It’s contingent on the visa though and we won’t know about that until mid-April when they’re in DC and go to the embassy there. I’ve got most of the necessary paperwork together, so I’m hoping it will fly! Tom’s a really decent sweetheart of a guy and has the means to make this happen. It’s a trip, when we’re just getting by, to get a letter of financial sponsorship for the visa with the blythe assurance that someone’s assets are in excess of ten million bucks. He’s one of our living proofs however that money doesn’t buy happiness. If it did, he’d be happier.

Anyway, he wants us to come down and see this hacienda that he’s bought and rennovated. We kinda have a standing invitation, but with lama here, he’s sponsoring the whole trip, so that makes it a lot more do-able for us. And it would be mostly relaxation and holiday. There’s hot springs there and mellow weather and… gasp… servants! I could do with someone else making the beds and doing the cooking for a week!

So there are perks for working this hard - if it all comes through. It also looks like there’ll be a chance to go up to Portland and visit my daughter and grandson. Ostensibly, I’d be renting a car and going to pick them (Lama and Lena) up from one of his friend’s house in Portland where they’re teaching and driving them to Mt. Shasta, CA where they’re scheduled to teach and, from there, back home to the Bay Area. It’s cheaper than flying. And a great excuse. I’m just trying to figure a good way to justify including Seattle first, with maybe a run up to Vancouver. Juggling the time is tricky, but I do love to travel and the idea of doing it in a nice shiny rental car rather than my 20 year old pickup is a big plus.

All of this is somewhere more than fantasy - it’s in the planning stages, but less than certainty. It depends on so many factors and really requires a lot of time juggling. The thing is that I can do so much of my work on the road. Everything I need really fits in my rolling office bag: laptop computer, cameras, portable printer/scanner, cell phone, miniature tape recorders. I love traditional stuff, but I absolutely adore technology as well. In that way, I really relate to the Tibetans - they’re a very traditional culture, particularly the Khampa nomads. But they’re practical people, very practical and have adapted to modern technology with surprising ease. these are the people, after all, who invented the prayer wheel, a machine which is designed to speed up the process of saying hundreds of thousands of mantras.Rimpoche adores his cell phone. I’m glad I got him one with voice dialing. It’s just sort of culture shock for Lena to see him holler “Bumchung!” at his phone and know that, at the other end, it’s ringing a phone in the cave of an elderly Buddhist nun in Himachal Pradesh who still makes stuffed dumplings by hand and steams them over a wood fire in an old biscuit tin!

Old and new. I can take my laptop to the interior of Mexico where the electricity and phone reception apparently are very uncertain and can go out for days at a time, but where a new satellite assures excellent internet reception!

The world becomes a small place at times. I routinely talk to people thousands of miles away and think nothing of it. I recruit sponsors for people who can live on twenty bucks a month in a shack with a tin roof and a blanket for a door, while being flown to an island paradise by wealthy people who want to learn to meditate but lack the day to day common sense of a housefly. I used to think it was hypocritical of me to enjoy these “extras” that happen across my path in this way while working with people who are desperately poor. After a few years though, it became apparent to me that, even if I *didn’t* accept the perks, those people - who would think nothing of spending $600 to fly me to Kona - would not then turn around and give that money that had been saved to be used for feeding the kids or building a storage shed for the nuns. They’d just buy something else or fly some other teacher’s assistant to the island. So I go when asked; I accept the moments of fun, luxury, adventure, etc. Because it’s somehow part of the whole dance, the whole play of human experience and the creations of the mind. It’s what life IS. All of it. Sometimes I myself am so poor I can hardly pay the rent. Other times I live like a millionaire for a few days. My life has always been like this. I don’t really prefer one over the other - both ways of living have their merit. And I sometimes think I can see/appreciate those merits more by moving between the polarities from time to time.

We’ll see where the next leg of the adventure leads. Right now it has led me to my (solitary) bed with a bottle of cough syrup and a box of kleenex. And a couple of cats. Why do cats always sit on sick people, even the cats who don’t normally sit on one? And why are they always heavier at such times?

I caught the baby’s cold.

By Tuesday morning it was apparent that I was sick: sore throat, coughing, itchy ears and cranky. Just like my grandson - and then my daughter. Bleh.

It’s a bummer all around. I was supposed to leave for Vancouver on Friday, after seeing my two precious ones off to the Midwest to teach for the next 10 days or so - they’ll be in Kansas City, Chicago and Milwaukee. And I got to go have fun. Except that, between Silva and I, we’re neither of us in shape to have much fun and traveling with a bad cold is something I try to avoid doing - it’s not only unpleasant, but unfair to the other 200 people sharing the same canned air on the airplane. So we’re postponing our visit for another time when the circumstances are more auspicious.

It was also a bummer cuz I’ve missed two days of teachings I particularly wanted to attend. Usually I stay home - I get the same stuff around the dinner table. But I’d been trying to set up a teaching at Spirit Rock, the big American Buddhist retreat center in Marin County for the past 5 years and it was happening Tuesday. And, again, it wasn’t fair to share my germs in close quarters with all the others. So I had to miss it and just hear the stories. Today’s ceremony wasn’t such a big deal to miss. I’m not a big ceremonial type anyway and the actual energy of the empowerment I already got when we ran through the ritual around the table last night.

I just hate not feeling at all cuddly when my sweetie is leaving in the morning and won’t be home for a week and a half. I’d like a farewell fuck, but I’m in no shape to do more than wheeze and try not to cough on her. So romantic! I just hope that she doesn’t come down with this while on the road - it’s hard enough talking non-stop and making nice with the natives without being on sudafed to do it

Sometimes life is just really sweet and it’s the simple stuff that makes it so.

My adult daughter arrived last evening with her guy and the three kids - theirs and his two from a previous marriage. My grandson is eight months old today. The other kids are a 7 year old boy and a 5 year old girl - both really bright and terrific kids who greet me with hugs and shouts of delight.

With our lama friend here, this makes for quite a full house. Last night, Lena Nyondo and I all shared Nyondo’s bed which, while comfy was also a somewhat snug fit. I had the outside and, when Lena, who was in the middle, did one of her agressive sprawls in her sleep, I found myself clinging precariously to the very edge of the mattress, trying not to roll off. It’s hard to sleep soundly while playing limpet. Nyondo, who had the wall side, didn’t have this problem and snored on happily! With Rimpoche in our room, this gave my daughter and her partner our air bed with the baby and the two older children shared the couch with room to spare. Still, with all their stuff (including a playpen)there’s not a lot of room to move around in this house right now.

My daughter has grown up with a Tibetan lama as a kind of frequently visiting “uncle” in her life. The first time he came and stayed with us for six months, Roni was 7 years old. That was 17 years ago and he’s been back eight times since, staying anywhere from three to six months at a time. So she was very eager to come and see him and show him the new baby. He loves kids and has always adored Roni. Some thirty odd years ago, when he was a young monk living in the cave in the Himalayas, he ended up adopting and raising a small boy whose refugee parents had both died. So he knows children.

Anyway, knowing Roni and the kids were coming, he insisted on splurging on steaks for dinner. I cooked and our good friend Ellen joined us. So it was a significant crowd around the table - and an oddly diverse one. The leather dyke mommy wizards, the kids and grandkids, the celibate lama, the Jewish-turned-Buddhist doctor. Oh and four cats of course, who all circled the table awaiting their share of meat. This is what family looks like to me and what my kid grew up knowing as family. It was wonderful to see her and wonderful to hear her say how good it felt to be “home” with the moms and uncle lama and to be able to share that with her own children.

I think she has an appreciation of our alternative lifestyle that she is enjoying sharing with her partner. She likes having an “interesting” family, one in which things actually happen, where people change and travel and have lives. Her dad came to supper today. He and his current boyfriend just got back from the Yucatan last night and are heading off to Thailand in a few weeks. It was good to see him too while he’s around. Kellan, my… um… step grandson (I guess you’d call him) is mesmerized by Lama - grilling him about Tibet, the people, the country, the language. He actually made an effort to learn a few words: hello, thank you, please and retained them. He’ll have stories to tell for the rest of his life about the guy in the funny clothes who spoke almost no English but who gave him an amulet and taught him a mantra for protection and shared a bag of dried fruit brought from a place on the other side of the world.