Fried Day

Yesterday was July 19. Five years to the day that dad died. On that day every year, my mother, my brother and I recite a sutra (dont' know what it's called in English). Neither Ben nor I got into Buddhism when mom did, so for us it's almost completely a familial ritual instead of a religious one. Either way, I went out on the fire escape at 11PM, and, not really having anything to look towards (such as a portrait of dad, etc.), I just read the words out into the Baltimore night air. The second part of the sutra we read isn't even in Chinese or any other language I understand, but after 5 years, it's complete muscle memory.

I'll never understand what the difference was between my mother and I that caused her to respond to dad's illness and death by embracing Buddhism and belief in karma, and I by subscribing to postmodernism and existentialism (or something of the like), especially since her rationality makes my current aloofness look like the most syrupy sentimentalism in comparison, and hell, she probably read Nietzsche and Sartre at a younger age than I did. Whatever the reason, it's probably the same reason that makes her believe that good things still come to good people, and unable to understand why good people sometimes do bad things--whereas I had to explain to her that people were people, first of all, with all attendant virtues and vices, "good" or not, and that is why my Lutheran pastor uncle had an affair with a member of his congregation and later quit the clergy.

Same reason fine kids get kicked out of boarding school for their drug habits while assholes go on to the Ivy League. Same reason good doctors get cancer and die. Which is to say, of course, no good reason at all.

I remember the morning of 2002 July 19. I remember the clothes I was wearing, even. And other details. Which I shall not go into. I remember feeling the crush of responsibility of having to play father-figure to Ben (which never really happened in the end, due to my extended absences) at age 16 and wondering why it all had to happen to me. Same reason of course. We deserve our fates as much as we deserve anyone else's fates, as much as anyone else deserves our own; which is to say, of course, not at all. We deserve nothing, and thus may choose anything. Anything that is within the bounds of possibility, of course. Bounds which we may not choose. Contradiction is a spiral.

Chinese folk tradition is ancestral worship; the belief is that deceased predecessors are guardian spirits. I remember once, very soon after dad died, mom told Ben and I to pray to dad. Familial rituals, once again. I remember what I asked: "to be helped to always do the right thing." And so it's been, doing the right thing, sometimes to the extent of a total lack of sympathy, whether for myself or for others. And sometimes forsaking the good things for the right things.

I asked something else last night: to be kept on the path of right things, but be rid of the attendant solitude. I don't know if that's like asking a carriage to drive itself without a horse. Perhaps. But I hope not.