The Shed Story

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. - T. S. Eliot in the Zen Calendar (September 17 2002).


A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes. - Mark Twain in the Zen Calendar (September 21, 2006).

Day 365.  Last Blog.  Tomorrow I turn 50.  What a moment to give birth to!!

My mom loves to remind me I was born in a blizzard.   She of all people chuckles at the irony that I (of all people) entered the world in the dead of winter.  She chuckles because I loathe the cold.  She chuckles because in my 20's I had a bathing suit fetish and bought upwards of ten bikinis each summer.  She chuckles because I adore the beach above all other geographic locale.  She chuckles because, pre-cycling, I spent every second of my free time in or around or on water.  Preferably warm water.  Optimally, very warm water.

Last night I was reflecting upon my previous decade changes.  The night before I turned 10, I was convinced I would die (I was such a strange little being).  I wasn't particularly upset about it, and distinctly remember my reasoning was based on some bizarre obsessive concern with entering an age containing two digits. Needless to say, I awoke the next morning very much alive.  I don't remember much about my 20th birthday, most likely because I was planning ahead for the big Two-One.  I lived in Washington state when I turned 30.  I probably spent the day gazing at my gorgeous three month old baby.  It was cold and snowy.  When I turned 40, I was teaching on the Air Force Base at Keflavik, Iceland.   A blizzard blew in during the night, and I awoke around 11:00 a.m. (when the weak, wintry sun finally crested the horizon) to the deepest accumulation of snow I had ever witnessed.  Looks like when I turn 50 I will, again, wake to cold and snow.  An occupational hazard when you are conceived on Mother's Day (I get a kick out of that little detail regarding my creation).

In the early months of the Blog Adventure, I occasionally fantasized about the content of my last blog.  Imagined I would be heralding the news of my book contract and accompanying movie deal.  Wondered about just how Enlightened I would be by the end of a solid year of daily zazen.  Novice!  As recently as the past month,  I wondered if Enlightenment would ethereally float in at the last moment, wafting in azure shades of turquoise and lavender like the Aurora Borealis - and then - POOF!  Body and mind fall away in a dramatic exposition of Truth Attainment.  As tempting as it is to weave a description of such a finale and end the blog on a grand scale (not to mention increase the likelihood Hollywood will buy the script), I shall remain steadfast  to being impeccable in my word.  No wondrous dramatization of Enlightenment.

Instead I will tell a story.  We all love stories.  It's a Jungian thing.  I call this one The Shed Story.  It begins in early summer when I was 11 or 12 years old.  My dad decided to build a shed in the back yard behind the garage.  He drew up plans, purchased materials, built a 10 by 12 foundation.  We laid a floor with 2 x 6's and framed the walls with 2 x 4's.  I couldn't tell you where my brothers were that summer.  Certainly not in the back yard.  Seems like every night for a couple of weeks, and 12 hours on the the weekend, my dad and I were out back, literally hammering away the warm June evenings.

My dad was the third of three children born to his parents during the Great Depression.  His mom, the stalwart Campbell Scottswoman, brutally abused him for much of his boyhood.  She didn't know how to mother a boy, and had some crazy fear of  raising a "sissy."  Suffice it to say, she supremely overcompensated in her determination to make him tough.   My grandfather died when I was eight; I remember him as a kind and gentle man rendered fairly ineffectual by the shell shock blasting him during World War I.  Grandpa worked as a bus driver and a nightwatch man.  There wasn't much money in dad's family.

My father's first job was cleaning turkey cages when he was 11 years old.  He made 11 cents an hour.   He and my aunts really DID walk miles to school in the snow wearing threadbare coats and their only pair of shoes.  Of course, that was after they rose at daybreak, walked through the fields of their small farm and broke the ice in the water troughs so their horse and cows could drink.

Dad was the first in his family to go to college.  He completed a Business degree at Oklahoma City University while he worked three different jobs and fell in love with my mom, an 18-year-old sorority girl working a couple of jobs of her own.  They married two years later.  In the Methodist church they still attend, much to the chagrin of my paternal grandmother.  She was a strict Baptist. Six months after their honeymoon at the Wichita home of my mom's cousin, my dad was drafted.  The newlyweds got a second honeymoon in Wertheim, Germany, compliments of the United States Army.   Mom says it was three of the happiest years of her life.  She was pregnant with my oldest brother on the ship bearing her home across the Atlantic.

Dad got a job as a fire insurance investigator at the company he retired from a little over 30 years later.  He traveled Monday through Friday to small towns in the farthest reaching corners of the state to calculate the insurance rates on just about every building erected.  He made the living; mom raised the children.  She should probably be credited with coining the phrase, "Wait 'til your father gets home."  It was her primary form of discipline.  When she said it on a Monday, it made for a long wait.  Many a joyous reunion with dad on Friday afternoons was prematurely interrupted by her reports of our misbehavior.   I never thought of it this way, but it was probably pretty hard on my dad to walk through the door after a long week on the road and be met by a tired, exasperated wife and his mischievous offspring .  "Hi, kids.  Missed you.  Love you.  Sorry I have to get the belt out to spank you for something you did on Tuesday."

I am my dad's only daughter.  I look like him, walk like him, think like him, work like him, obsess like him, despise dumbasses like him.  Mom tells me he always loved me best.  I suspect it is true, though he was profoundly ill equipped to let me know it himself.  So I essentially focused my entire girlhood on molding myself to the version of daughter I believed would please him.  Hard working, perfectionistic, tough as nails.  Daring, athletic, smart.  I didn't cry, didn't want, didn't need, didn't complain.  It helped that I was constitutionally a tom boy.  No better accomplice for shed building.

When we built the shed in the summer of 1973, my dad's recreational drinking was subtly sliding down the slippery slope of alcoholism.  In my memory, Dad was Bunyan strong and sergeant strict.  Take a break?  Nah, it hasn't even been six hours yet.  Get a drink?  Water is for whusses.  Ninety degrees in the Oklahoma humidity?  Here's a sweat towel.   Expect a 12-year-old girl to hold up her end of an 80-pound plank of ship lap?  You bet.  Hold 'er steady.  Balance the level with your other hand.  And don't let it slip while you nail 'er in.

Building that shed with my dad is one of my fondest memories.  As the days went by, our movements became efficiently synchronized.  We talked less and less as we labored in the raw physicality of building that shed.  Constructing.  Erecting something where nothing but rusted patio furniture had previously stood.  At first, we communicated through monosyllabic exchanges, then grunts, then points and gestures.  We started to anticipate each other's needs. Well, I anticipated; he grunted and pointed. We fell into a rhythm measuring the ship lap, making the cut, carrying the plank, overlapping it with the previous one, leveling and nailing.  Plank by plank, four walls rose from the foundation.  Eight foot high at the eaves, 12 feet at the peak of the gabled roof.  Air tight, water tight, probably tornado proof.  Dad builds things to last.  With all due respect for Impermanance, that shed will probably rival the pyramids for longevity.

I remember tramping into the kitchen every day after sunset, sweaty, dirty, filled with a tremendous sense of contentment and accomplishment.  Father-daughter bonding at its finest.  My bones ached, my fingers bled, my sunburn stung, and I couldn't wait until the next day, when me and my dad sauntered out to the back yard, picked up our hammers, and wordlessly resumed shed construction.  Curiously, I don't remember another living soul ever entering the backyard while we worked.  The brothers likely feared being forced to help.  Mom never liked the heat.  I can't recall a thing dad and I talked about.  Chances are, we didn't.  Talk.  About anything outside the immediate requirements of our project.   Under the hot summer sky, we were giving birth to moment after moment, day after day.  And neither of us had ever sat a second of zazen.  Buddhas, nonetheless.  The both of us.

Late one afternoon Dad and I were perched on separate ladders as we nailed planks on the windowless back wall of the shed.  We were high up at the top of the 12-foot wall, handling boards that grew shorter and shorter as we neared the roof line.  My ladder suddenly lurched away from my dad's.  One of the legs had sunk into a hole muddied by the previous night's rain.  The ladder skidded along the recently mounted planks, gaining momentum as it tilted precariously sideways and abruptly crashed to the damp ground below.

It all happened exceedingly fast.  One second I was balanced and stable, stretching up with both arms, one hand holding the board, hammer poised in the other.  The next second I felt my legs dangling in empty space, like a cartoon character who has run off a cliff and gives the camera a sheepish grin before dropping out of sight.  Except, I didn't drop.  I heard my dad exclaim, "I've gotcha!" and felt his strong arm gripping me tightly around my waist.  "Hug my neck," he instructed as he somehow managed to guide the falling piece of ship lap away from the ladder now supporting us both.  In a flash, he nimbly descended the ladder, dropping me gently on the grass as he stepped off the last rung.  We stood there speechless, glaring at the errant ladder resting at an awkward angle against the back fence.

"Thanks, dad," I said after a moment's hesitation, wondering briefly if he was going to blame me for the lurching ladder before I recalled he had been the one to place it against the shed.
"You're welcome, Sugar," he answered.  "I would never let you fall."

The shed story is my metaphor for this year.  It captures and exemplifies everything a year on the cushion entailed:   Showing up, working hard, exerting effort, maintaining sincere intent, paying close attention, shutting my mouth, opening my eyes, sweating, getting dirty, bleeding, waiting, tipping over, falling down, getting up, staying the course.  Every feeling imaginable came up while me and my dad built that shed, just like they did while I sat on that cushion:  love, hate, anticipation, pride, frustration, glee, boredom, happiness, lethargy, delight, exhaustion,contentment, hopelessness, grief, exhilaration, belongingness, loneliness, connection, worry, disappointment, elation, attachment, bliss.  Ultimately, we got 'er built.  Ultimately, this year has come to an end.

When that ladder gave way and I almost crashed to the earth, my dad caught me.  In the midst of the chaotic, uncertain, challenging, complicated, fraught complexity of the relationship between father and daughter, his instinct to save me was unswerving and lightening quick.  He caught me.  Held me tight to his side, keeping me balanced until he grounded us solidly back on the earth.  Just like the Buddha, he promised, "I will never let you fall."

To all my Readers, known and unknown:
Gassho,
With Love
And Gratitude,
CycleBuddhaDoc