4
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A COURIER
In October of 1998, a year into my stint as a delivery guy, I "met" the
woman who is now my wife. Our relationship began as an online
correspondence, the subjects of which were posts, such as the one below,
that I'd been uploading to the "Baba-talk" computer mailing list we both
belonged to.
After several months of correspondence, we visited in her home state
of California, and after a year of back-and-forth visits, I moved west. The
courier company I worked for, Consolidated Delivery and Logistics (which
had bought the "mom n' pop" company I'd started with) had an office in the
Bay Area, and so I continued in my line of work. This was all during the height
of the Silicon Valley economic boom, and the traffic on the freeways often
seemed an exponential increase from that of St. Louis—which had been bad
enough.
Eventually I made another entry to:
A Delivery Guy's Journal: September 17, 2000
God's Fool
A fool is driving his new car
60,000 miles a year
delivering small packages
and envelopes to businesses.
He isn't making that much money.
He's wearing out his car.
The numbers don't add up.
It doesn't make much sense.
But God loves his fool,
And does not judge
By the world's standard.
God loves his fool
And Blesses him
As he writes his poems,
As he prays and drives,
As he listens to
Great minds & hearts
On his tape player,
As he seeks
To forget,
And fly beyond,
To drive beyond
The sun and moon
And kiss God's Face,
And maybe even disappear—
The car and all—
Into His Mouth.
******
Ah, Children!
I had some serum to pick up the other day at a medical building
in Oakland. Entering the lobby, I came upon a young mother and her
two little girls, one of them about four, the other, nine or ten. They
were waiting for the elevator.
The little girl was crying, and as I often do for children, I pulled
out my harmonica, to try to cheer her up.
She kept crying. I put my instrument away, quietly rode up the same
elevator they were on, and picked up the serum to deliver.
On my way down, the same mom and girls were on the elevator when
it stopped. The little girl was still crying.
"The man doesn't want to hear you cry," said the mother to her
daughter.
"Oh, I don't care about that," I said. "I'm just sorry she feels
so sad."
"You know what she's cryin' about?" the mother asked me, with
emphasis and a little smile. "Her sister just got a shot, and she's crying
'cause nobody will give her one!"
*****
A Writer's Journal
Went to Kinko's last night to copy my manuscripts. Ha! Everybody
else thought their work was as important as mine--even that guy with
his family reunion album. But they'll see!
Ruined another $80,000 xerox machine trying to scratch the
white-out from my ms. off the glass. Patience, Max. That makes 3 this
year. But these will be trivial expenses, when I sell the movie rights.
Got nabbed taking extra packets of Equal at Barnes & Noble,
stuffing them in my pockets after sweetening my coffee. Now I'm
banned from every Barnes & Noble store in the world. They'll be
sorry. I'm going to ask for a written apology before I let them carry
my book.
Meanwhile, have to appear for Petty Theft, the 18th.
I can still go to Borders, so no big deal.
*****
Wheels of Inspiration
Flying in my chariot car
to You,
Suns and moons
for wheels,
Flying beyond Time and Space,
wings of inspiration,
wings of prayer,
wings of visionaries'
thoughts coming through
my tape deck.
Am I still on the highway?
Am I still on solid ground?
Earth, where are you?
"Ha!" Earth answers.
"I'm flying, too!
I'm flying
in the midst of endless Space,
flying in my circles
'round the Sun!"
"And I!" rings out the golden
Laughter of the Sun.
"I fly, ever outward in the Universe,
Travelling with my brood of planet-chicks."
I hear God's Voice,
beyond the Sun.
"You see? There is no 'solid ground'!"
"You must minister
to those who feel there is,
and must not take the ground of their belief
from under them.
But I am the only ground for you—
the Ground of Being, Itself."
*****
Mentioning His Name
I had a delivery the other morn,
from up near Santa Rosa, to the city,
San Francisco—to a
Video store in North Beach.
I parked my car, got out and strode
up a street full of colorful cafes,
just down from the big church
where Richard Brautigan, the writer, once
imagined Tom and Jerry, of cartoon fame,
chasing one another in and out its mousehole doors.
I found the right building on Stockton, and climbed stairs
to the video-production office on the 2nd floor.
The receptionist came and signed for the package.
I glanced at her name. "Pines", the last name read.
That was the last name of my Meher Baba connection.
I asked her if she is related to Ellis.
"He was from Dallas, originally," I said.
"What does he do?" she asked.
"He's in advertising now, I think.
He's a playwright, too," I added.
"I wish I did know him," she said with apparent interest.
I remembered that day in Ellis' office 30 years ago,
when Baba came to me.
The memory brought a flood of gratitude.
Right then, I made a conscious decision.
"Baba, You said it's our job to get Your Name to
people's ears, and Your job to get it, then,
From their ears to their heart."
I rarely mention Baba's name, these days, but touched by the
thought of my dear Baba contact, and in honor of that connection,
I said, "He was my connection to Meher Baba, who's been my
Spiritual Guide for thirty years."
That seemed to mean something to her. I don't know what.
More than likely, I'll never see her again.
She's heard His Name, though.
The rest—if there's to be more—is up to Him.
**********
One
I just finished listening to a book-on-tape, One, by Richard Bach and his
wife, Leslie Parrish-Bach. Based on the ideas that we're all really one, and
that we choose our lives, as lessons, the book is about their meeting various
"possible selves" of theirs in alternate universes. Some of these selves are
obviously them, and others not as obviously.
They get to observe their own shy first meeting, and try to persuade those
younger selves to get involved with each other immediately, rather than waiting
years, as the actual Richard and Leslie had done.
Some of the adventures Richard and Leslie have in the book keep me
absoutely riveted. In one, they meet Attila the Hun, and learn about their own
cruel sides. In another, they meet their "failed" selves, a Richard Bach who had
tried to become a writer and given up in the face of rejection. They find him
sitting at a table in a bar, holding a book by the Richard Bach, resenting him
terribly for his success.
In my favorite episode, they meet a prophet, Jean-Paul LeClerc, in 12th
century France. As they come upon him, a manuscript of pages written in gold
has just materialized in front of Le Clerc. It is a treatise on love. Richard reads
a few pages and feels, "This tells it as it really is. If humanity had these words,
it would finally be able to change its ways."
Richard tells Le Clerc of his intention to bring the "Pages" to humanity. Le
Clerc expresses his vision of what would happen—how the Pages would simply
arouse resistance in those not ready for them, and how there would be years of
war between the "Page-ists" and the "Anti-Page-ists"—how it would be just one
more cause of conflict, whereas the silent Truth is already available to those who
are ready for it.
In the end, LeClerc burns the pages and Richard has a revelation, that the
burning actually prevents decades, even centuries, of war on earth. Not
precisely how Meher Baba tells us the Avatar progessively, Advent after Advent,
brings Humanity along in little snail-advances that go on and on—Sensation to
Reason, Reason to Intuition—but nonetheless, interesting.
The theme that people violently resist Truth is certainly one Baba expressed.
*****
Anomalies
Ending on a light note:
1) Why on Wedding Invitations, do they give you only two choices :
___accept with pleasure ___decline with regret
What happened to
___decline with pleasure ___accept with regret?
2) Newspaper vending machines have this printed notation:
"Use any combination of coins. Do not use pennies".
But aren't pennies coins? Ha!
3) On the radio, they'll interview an expert—a criminologist, a seismologist,
or someone—about a terrible disaster that's just taken place. The person will
stand there and answer all kinds of grisly, gory questions, and provide gruesome
statistics about lost life, maimed bodies, ruined land.
Then, when the interview's over, the journalist says, "Well, thank you, Mr
or Ms. so-and-so".
The expert almost always replies, "It's been my pleasure!"
4) I may be repeating an old post,
but what's this about "women writers".
I thought there are writers and there are women.
I thought "women" was a noun.
When did it become an adjective?
*****
"3/4 of the World" Discussion—Again?
This past Wednesday seemed to be my day for hearing about environmental
calamity. First there was the report about the entertainment industry deliberately
marketing violent products to children—calamity in the mental environment.
Later in the day, I heard an NPR report about how the 500 million monarch
butterflies that blanket several acres of forest in the Mexican mountains every
year before beginning their northward migrations, are in danger of
habitat-destruction. This destruction will happen within the next 10 or 15 years
if the current logging in the forest continues.
That same hour, NPR had another report about the first primate to become
extinct since the mid-1700's. A journalist interviewed a zoologist who recently
conducted, without success, an extensive search for a single living monkey of this
variety in its habitat, the rainforests of the Ivory Coast and Zambia.
He said about 95% of the West African rainforests are completely gone. The
5% that remain, he continued, are in very good shape...except for the fact that
the people living in those regions are so poor they've hunted the forests bare of
practically all their animal life. The scientist said it is an eery feeling to be in these
forests, so beautiful and yet empty instead of teeming with animal life.
Later that night, I heard yet another interview, on some local station of
Northern California as I was returning home from a delivery to Crescent City,
near the Oregon border. This interview was with a Green Party activist. It was a
report on how Green Party people in that part of California have been chaining
themselves to old growth trees to prevent corporations from cutting them down.
Certain people have taken to living in trees, for years at a time, to protect them.
Julia Butterfly is the most famous of these folks, but by no means the only one.
I've not been a political activist since the '60s—but on this day of hearing so
much about the despoliation of our beloved Earth, I began to feel, "Chaining
oneself to trees may really be the only sane action in these times. That may be the
only way to really stand up for a liveable Earth. Mere sympathy with "green"
causes is never going to stop the march of greed." Such radical actions began to
at least make sense to me.
Still later, I heard a fascinating talk by author Paul Theroux, the travel writer who
joined the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa, in his early twenties, and recommends
leaving all one knows to find oneself in "unknown" geographical places and cultures.
Theroux has a self-sufficiency, an inner-directedness that moves me greatly. He's
travelled everywhere, it seems, and his main motive in doing so has had to do with
discovering who he really is. I've enjoyed his books.
After his talk, Theroux was asked his opinion of the environmental state of the
world. In reply, he said that every spot he's ever returned to after a long absence
has had more pollution and fewer trees. And since it is the trees that hold soil, the
world has been seeing more floods than it ever has before.
It was a day when I wondered if we really are going to be able to look at our
planet's situation realistically, and be willing to adjust lifestyles. Or if we are going
to go blindly and addictively forward to a collective catastrophe.
*****
Bumper Stickers Sighted
Just Say OM
(stuck on a toll booth with a
logo picture of a pine tree)
Dept. of Counterculture—
Planting Seeds
*****
Tricks of the Driver's Trade
to keep from going crazy and/or
to keep things a little interesting
1.) Try singing "Old Man River" out loud, in slow Rush Hour traffic.
2.) Dare yourself to shout things out of your car window as loud as you can,
driving through a city downtown at noon. Like "God Bless Elian Gonzalez!
*****
Tomorrow is anothe day!