Byways

My Normal A to B

Byways and more byways — I have traveled little else Still, I arrive

No broad avenues down that way (whence I’ve come), no boulevards or streets or freeways. Just one offshoot after the other: forest paths, dirt roads, abandoned lanes (tarmac cracking or missing), darkly strange unsafe-to-enter alleys, and then stretches of empty, sandy beach.

There does not seem to be a simple A to B for me this time around, this life, rather: a comfortable A, I’m in good health, I have ample wherewithal, I have a clever and practical plan, my schedule is finalized and my route both mapped and tagged, and so I set out to never arrive at the intended B: that is the story of my life.

Still, I recall with a smile the tagline for Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable: “You will probably not find what you’re looking for in this book. But what you will find will be more interesting.”

I had a very well-planned and route-tagged B called “Civil Engineer”. Through most of grade school and all of junior high this was the writing on the goal-line banner. Whenever anyone asked what I planned to do when I grew up (as they say), “Civil Engineer” was the stock answer I never grew tired of supplying. Had anyone asked me (no one did) what a Civil Engineer actually did I would not have been able to answer. All I knew about Civil Engineers was that (a) they made lots of money, and (b) they were “better” than my dad who “only” was a normal type engineer who built machines that made roof tiling in cement. Not even a real engineer, I think his official title was Constructor. Sounds better in Swedish.

And so, for five or so years, the Civil Engineer road burrowed straight as any arrow through the vicissitudes and turbulences of life on Earth toward that goal-line banner, until ninth grade that is, when I discovered girls and alcohol and the British Music Invasion during the very same spring semester, and that was all she wrote Civil Engineer wise.

Yes, come the following fall, I did enroll at Technical Gymnasium to continue my Civil Engineer trek, but by the end of fall term, it was writ not only in the stars that this would be my last completed Tech term.

By February I had dropped out. And good riddance (both ways).

To become a freelance journalist for a small local daily. I took photos as well. I liked this gig even though I made no money for I liked to write. Was good at it. Had a flair for it, in my blood sort of thing. Dad, on the other hand, hated it and demanded I work for him and then return to do the first Technical Gymnasium year over again come fall. Yes, Dad, sure.

And took a new turn:

Factory worker. Drilling metal pipes, sawing metal blocks. Bending thin metal rods. Lots of metal, lots of dirt, dirty fingernails, dirt in the creases of young hands. I hated it.

Took another turn:

Off to Stockholm for the summer. Now a post order fulfillment clerk. Boy, did I learn how to pack stuff and tie string around boxes. I grew extremely good at it. Still, my boss asked me what on earth was I doing packing boxes with grades like mine (they were very, very good). Oh, I don’t know. Well, you’re wasted here, he said and arranged for me:

Another turn:

IBM punch card machine operator. We’re now into fall and luckily no noises made from home about returning to Technical Gymnasium. I grew very good at the IBM stuff, and after a year graduated from punch cards to mainframe computer operator, working a Bull/GE 301 computer. I grew very, very good at it.

Until I took another turn:

Off to France to become a poet. I was convinced I had been Baudelaire in a former life, so I was just returning home. Did I know French? Not a bit. But the goal-line banner kept reading “French Poet” and I kept running (and writing Swedish poems) in that direction. Until the 1968 French student revolution arranged for me:

Another turn:

Couldn’t go to France. Bus ride canceled. Too dangerous.

More turns and side roads for me:

Washing dishes.

Washing psychiatric patients.

And another turn: Bertrand Russell told me (very convincingly) that God (as I’ve always known Him) did not exist. What a relief. No, not Bertrand in person, but in one of his books. Godless now and feeling much better for it.

And another turn: A fountain of light chose me as gushing vehicle and I saw nothing but light for seconds, minutes, hours? There’s no way of telling time beyond time, is there?

And another turn: Off to sea, to help my guru, prince, philosopher, and savior save the world.

And another turn: Back on land, finding Gotama Buddha and seeing finally what the gushing fountain of light had been all about.

And suddenly I had come to the end of a road, perhaps the road. Still consulting Gotama, but also Dogen and Zen and Shankara’s Vedanta and Wallace’s Tibetan Wisdom and Maharshi’s revelations and most of all, and most of all my meditation mat and my sacred morning and evening hours where I leave the world and all its roads and turnings and goal-line banners behind to simply be.

Yes, much more interesting than Civil Engineering.

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