My teacher told my mom that I was crazy in second grade.
During the 40 minutes of daily “free write,” I tried to pen a story about leprechauns, swimming pools, and David Koresh. It was 1993, and my teacher didn’t think it was too appropriate for a seven-year-old boy to be glorifying the leader of the Brand Davidian religious sect. He was a polygamous self-proclaimed prophet, and I was a chubby kid with a bad haircut that was not writing pretend Power Rangers episodes in his black and white composition notebook.
The menacing phone tag that shortly followed between Mrs. Ford, my mother, and the school principal continued long enough for me to figure something was up. It wasn’t like I was exploring my options and contemplating a trip to Waco to join Koresh’s cult, but I guess I just watched TV and was kind of curious as to what the hell was going on outside of the parish in South Buffalo that my family aligned ourselves with.
I was raised Catholic in a very loose sense. Church, at least in my household, was only an Easter and Christmas thing, not including the occasional funeral and wedding. I knew the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and I knew that you weren’t supposed to do something bad unless you wanted to tell the priest inside of a tiny box. Coincidently, Father Jim was also chubby and had a bad haircut, but that is neither here nor there. Regardless, conversion to anything outside the realm of Catholicism seemed utterly ridiculous.
Somewhere in junior high, between the Jim Morrison biography book report and the class presentation given in character as Holden Caulfield (I used this as an excuse to say “damn” a lot), I took a liking to Jack Kerouac. My interest in the Beat Generation was a healthy change from my obsession with The Doors and dressing in an ironic Boy Scout uniform, and though I never made the jump so snorting amphetamines, exclusively listening to jazz, hitchhiking across the U.S., and writing all my English essays on extended teletype paper like my new hero Kerouac, I was pretty into the shit. I never took it quite as far as I did when I tried to find sweet leather pants and copied D.H. Lawrence excerpts into my journal a la Morrison, but hey, whatever will keep the kids in school, right?
Somewhere after my second or third or tenth read of the iconic On the Road, I picked up a copy of Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, a semi-fictional memoir of the author’s adventures out west in the years following the trips documented in his earlier book. Though some critics chastised Kerouac for his loose interpretation of Buddhism, something in his story really clicked with me. My public school education taught me enough about eastern religion to get through the first round of Jeopardy teen tournament, but the tales of Kerouac and his pals scaling mountains in California, drinking wine, learning about life, and trying to enlighten themselves made me yearn for something that my Sundays spent playing video games could not fulfill. And it ended just about there.
What can I say? Unfortunately, it takes a lot to motivate us to do nothing. Turn to page five this week and read Generation-writer Jonathan Camhi’s firsthand account of Zen meditation in Western New York. While getting in touch with one’s self sounds beautifully ideal, enlightenment by way of Zazen isn’t something that has taken the country by storm. Yet. Between 1991 and 2001, Buddhism grew an outstanding 170 percent in America. And while I may have given up my dreams of tossing my possessions and climbing mountains with monks in Washington with the ghosts of Kerouac and company, there is still something captivating about what Buffalo Zen Dharma Community founder Ray Ball describes as a subtracting process of “lettings things go” underneath a veil of conditioning that has masked our true selves on the inside.
Once high school started, I never quite made it back to St. Agatha’s unless there was a death or marriage, and though The Dharma Bums got me through quite a few study halls in ninth grade, here I am, still not too sure what I believe about myself or, well, anything. While I’m not about to sit on a cushion, cross my legs, chant, and get intimate with myself for half an hour, as Camhi puts it, it’s refreshing to know that others in WNY are celebrating the ideas that stirred something inside of me with each consecutive read.
I never did get those leather pants, by the way.
