Two Short Essays on Vacations

Posted on August 6, 2003 in Childhood Writing Exercises Writing in Orange

I wrote these tonight at the Wednesday Cafe Writers group that I facilitate and I offer them both as my piece for yesterday’s Living in Orange topic which is write about vacations. The first is a bit more “out of the past” than I think is appropriate and the second is, perhaps more appropriately, pure fantasy:

Vacations, I told my father, weren’t for work. You were supposed to go out to a lake, to the sea, to a place where you could just rest and poke along the shore for treasures washed up during the previous night’s thunderstorms. You went to green places, I told him. This is a green place, he’d say, as he began hacking at some dusky shrub in the back yard. The dust would rise and he’d take off his shirt. “Take off your shirt,” he’d say. “Get some sun.”

I was offended by my own nudity and by the mud forming on his milky back. We’d spend his vacation doing the jobs that our perversely diverse garden requred. Where our neighbors had swimming pools, concrete, and the tiniest border of flowers, we had lawn, fruit trees, exotic flowers, and patches of dirt that demanded that we pick up rotten fruit, pull weeds out of the prickly junipers, mowing the lawn, hacking the shoots from the poisonous Brazillian pepper tree, washing windows splashed with our sweat and sap from the bushes we martyred.

At day’s end, I’d crawl into my room, too hot and too weary. He’d mock me for reading a book. Why, he’d drawl mockingly, you’re just an ammunition dump. He liked to borrow images from his work with the Defense Department. I found out later that he’d been in Junior ROTC and that he’d been one of three survivors of a company sent in a charge against an entrenched German position in Italy. Frozen feet denied him the chance to rise in the ranks; he came home 21 days before Anzio, alive and uninjured. Nevertheless, he sought to rear his sons based on a military model. He set me on forced marches around his garden on the hottest summer days with reveille at 7 am, our sleep broken by the thunder of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. There was no sleeping when there was work to be done.

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Ajanta.

The truth is hidden in those caves which are carved out of the living rock. I’ve surveyed the route in guidebooks and decided that it will be an arduous journey from Bombay on buses, possibly overcrowded, filled with emaciated men who will offer to sell me the shade of their hands for a few rupees. The seats may be hard, falling through. Despite the toll they will take on my hips and on my sense of territoriality, I want to ride them over those switchbacks leading up to the caves of Ajanta, where bodhissatvas painted on the walls offer to lead us away from the realm of the senses by exciting the senses.

Inside the caves of Ajanta, I know that I will find temples — caves within caves — and stones rounded into stupas, the obelisk-topped domes that pilgrims circle for a count. Perform the ritual and your soul will be purified for the next redemption, for nirvana, what we mistranslate as annihilation, the end of selfishness and obsession with our separateness.

I’m not going to Ajanta to be saved: I’m going to see the human genius in the wall paintings and in the statuary carved out of the rocks by hands that have long since been cremated, scattered over the Ganges, and carried out to sea where their nutrients fed the seaweed which fed the crustaceans which fed the fish that were hooked and slaughtered by a fresh pair of hands; then eaten, incorporated into a new being of cells, reincarnation in which the mind that receives the sacrifice of the ash is completely oblivious to the lost thoughts of that which now builds and holds its cells together.