I'll start by saying this - I don't actually know if it's Buddha.
See, I've got this wooden figurine. Weighs about two pounds, nice dark wood, only two pieces. I've always called it my Buddha, but I can't honestly say if that's what it's meant to be or if I'm just ignorant. Or, I guess, it's more that I am ignorant, but I'm so used to it by now I just take it as a given.
It's a carving of a man with a walking stick. That's the second piece - a removable walking stick. It's a smiling man wearing loose robes that open at the chest, displaying an enormous, round gut. He's got a big rucksack hanging over one shoulder and that removable walking stick in the other hand.
He's bald. He's got a wide face. His earlobes droop down like Basset Hound ears. He looks like he's got someplace pretty dandy to be getting along to.
But that's all I really know. And based on that, I've always assumed he was a representation of the Buddha. Because I'm not a Buddhist and I only sorta know what Buddha looks like.
I got the wooden Buddha from my great uncle Bill. My uncle Bill was an academic. This is a polite way of saying that he slept on his own porch every night.
Bill was an English professor. I don't remember where he taught. He lived across the street from my great uncle Maurice in Machias, Maine. These are the things I remember about Bill:
He always had a dog. Usually a little terrier. I remember a little black and gray gentleman by the name of Duffy who served at Bill's side for many years. As a child, I liked Duffy because he was a dog and I've always been fond of dogs, but even more so, I liked him because he wasn't an old man or an old woman. Because if I was in a location where Duffy might appear, I was invariably surrounded by scads of old men and old women. And it wasn't that I disliked all the old men and old women, it's just that they were so very old, and nothing they said made any sense and they always had a way of turning the conversation back and around to other old men and old women whom I'd never heard of or had supposedly met but fuck if I remembered that, and then everyone was talking about the Leonards and the Agathas and Duffy didn't say anything - just sat there and let me scratch him - and that was a right little blessing.
I don't know if Bill had a blood sugar issue or not, but in the later stages of what I remember, he always had a piece of candy in his mouth. And so he talked like he had a piece of candy in his mouth - all wet and slurry and with a few more S's than most words require. He was an intelligent man; I don't really recall him ever losing that sharpness, but he always sounded like a verbose, sloppy child when he talked. Have you ever come upon someone happily sucking on a lollipop and asked them a question, and before they can answer, they have to take this big, passage-clearing slurp? So that, but after every third word.
His house was a horror. A wonderful, Gothic shambles. It was big, and damp, and cold, and creaking, and it always seemed to have sprouted an extra bedroom or two since the last time you were there. It just went on and on. As a child, it seemed immense and terrifying. I think most kids can relate to visiting their grandmother and seeing that one shelf full of wide-eyed, opened-mouthed porcelain dolls, with the tight curls of human hair and the mildew darkness just around their yawning orifices. This was like an entire house made out of that awfulness. Every corner was dark. Every floorboard threatened to give way. Every bare room seemed suffused with sad history...like no one ever had an especially good time anywhere in that house, they all just sat in their hollow, echoing rooms and decomposed, one by one.
I did not like the house - not when I was young. It was scary, and I have never been fond of scary things. We didn't go there very often. I remember once, after my Uncle Maurice's house had burned down and was in the process of being rebuilt, we stayed at Uncle Bill's. And when I say we, I mean my sister and me. I don't recall my parents being there, but memory is funny like that. It's a better story in my mind if they just shuffled us off to that lonely fortress to fend for ourselves against the melancholy ghosts and demonic bric-a-brac.
And oh, the fucking bric-a-brac.
It's funny how things reframe themselves in your mind as you age. I'm not sure what I made of Bill when I was younger - an eccentric, aging bachelor in that cavernous mess of a house, five percent of which was livable space, 45 percent given over to books and statues, and the rest a whirling pile of rotting detritus representing places, people, and lives once lived, now lost. The foreign debris that floated around Bill seemed interesting to me, even if Bill didn't, but I never really asked - never probed. He obviously wanted to tell - he was a man with stories living in a land that seemed to have no need of those stories. He was odd for the world at large, but odder still for Machias, Maine. Odder still for that quiet intersection at Lund Corner. He had the stories, but I didn't have the interest, and so he stayed a simple oddity to me; the complexity lost behind a veil of yellow, candy-stained teeth and old hardcover books, stacked eyeball high.
Like I said though - he tried. And I was it. I was his great, white hope. I couldn't fathom it at the time, but I think when Bill looked at me, he may have seen something of himself - although what elements of himself, I've never been quite sure. Because Bill was a smart man; an independent thinker; but, like I said, the man slept on the porch every night and collected erotic art from Indonesia. There are some parts of that reflection I'd like to shy away from, given a say in matters.
But anyway, whatever it was, there it was. That's how I always ended up over at Bill's house. Now mind you, it's not like I was missing out on anything over at Maurice's house - old people chatting quietly about a universe full of nothing in particular - but I always felt an unspoken expectation from Bill. He was an academic. If anyone was ever going to discuss the works of James Joyce or quote Oscar Wilde, it was going to be me, but really, I was never going to do those things because I wasn't that kind of person. You know how sometimes, in small sample size towns, parents will jam two kids together because "Johnny likes football" and "George is always playing those sportsy video games," but Johnny and George don't actually have anything in common, just the vague idea that there's something there in common. Some relative closeness. Like how we think of Mars - it's strange and it's red, but Jupiter is like ten times farther away. That was Bill and me. In the microscopic nexus of Lund Corner, there was an idea of commonality, but no actual common bonds. At least not then.
I was, at the time, the "smart one," which is a label that means less and less the further you get away from it. What I really was was a boy who'd figured out the system. I understood how to be an A student, even if none of it really translated into any actual intellectual curiosity. And anyway, I was a fucking kid. Kids don't get James Joyce. Adults don't get James Joyce, for that matter.
So I'd go to Bill's house and we stand around his study and look at the books. Big, tottering piles of new and old books. Bill was a reader, but he was also the sort who just liked having books, so there were more than a few that hadn't even been read - just rows of shrink-wrapped paperbacks, like an abandoned wing of an especially unpopular Barnes and Noble.
"Take whatever you like."
It was a loaded invitation, or at least it felt like it. This was the collection of a 70 year old college professor. My tastes were narrow and barely formed at the time. Looking back, I'm sure I walked away from a treasure trove of good, classic books, but I just had no idea how any of it could be any good. It all just seemed so, so boring. Many of the books were missing their dust jackets, so all I had to go on were titles I'd never seen and authors I'd never heard of. I'd always manage to throw together an armful - even if I had no idea what the books were, I couldn't say no. I'm not sure if that was my love of free stuff talking, or my fear of proving Bill's assumptions about my intelligence to be fraudulent. Either way, I always left with something.
And sometimes I left with things that were not books.
That's how I ended up with my Buddha, assuming it is a Buddha. Bill had such an odd, extensive collection. But his house was not a museum. It was more like a permanent, dimly lit garage sale. Here were a thousand varied and unique items with forgotten back stories. I couldn't tell the cheap trinkets from the real deals, and neither, by then, could Bill. So he was free with his possessions. Any minor sign of interest ended with that thing stuffed into your hands.
"Take it. It's yours."
So I got myself a Buddha.
I broke Buddha's walking stick about a week before I left Los Angeles forever; never to return. I was drunk. These things happen.
I had gone out to a British pub with my "roommate" and some of his friends. I put roommate in quotation marks because by then it was more of an honorary title. But not super honorary. He still had to pay for it. It was basically like being in one of those Who's Who books. Costly and ultimately valueless.
It wasn't that we had issues, it was just that he had a girlfriend and he more or less lived at her house. He very rarely, if ever, spent time at our apartment.
And it's probably important to say that we were at that pub, playing bar trivia, with his friends. Because I'd lived in LA for about 15 months and made no friends. I had some friends from college who also lived in town, but we saw each other rarely. In that way they weren't much different from my roommate.
So LA was winding to a close and it was hard not to feel like the whole thing had been a failure at worst, or just terribly misguided at best. That seems to happen, though, when you make big decisions at 22, allowing your fear of not making a decision to be your driving force. I was leaving Los Angeles because I wasn't sure I was supposed to be there. I had gone to Los Angeles because I wasn't sure what else I should have done. Life wasn't propelling me forward so much as it was dragging me along behind it, like a pile of empty cans attached to a newlywed's convertible.
Anyway, I came home from the pub. I was less than a week away from driving crosscountry to Brooklyn in the first of what would become many attempts to remake myself through the simple act of putting everything I owned into a sedan. I was sad. I was afraid. I picked up my Buddha and stumbled sideways, just a hair. The walking stick in Buddha's hand pressed against the edge of my bookcase and broke.
I was distraught, but it felt desperately out of proportion. My sudden, gasping despair felt much bigger than a splintered piece of wood, belonging to a religious idol that represented a faith I didn't have, which had come from a relative I had never fully understood. I grabbed some Scotch tape and tied the two pieces together in a quick, ugly fix.
The stick stayed that way for a long time. Broken, but whole. Held together by a crooked wrap of cheap adhesive.
It was like that in Brooklyn. It was like that in Buffalo and Providence. It wasn't until a few months ago that I looked at Buddha sitting on my file cabinet, saw the clear, yellowed tape under Buddha's closed fist, and realized it didn't have to be that way. I ripped off the tape. I layed down some Super Glue in the jagged grooves of each piece. Then I pushed them together. And they still fit. There are gaps in the bond - places where the splintered wood fell away over the years - but it's whole. It's strong. Better than it was.
Buddha looks like he's got many, many more miles left in him.
Of course Bill is gone now. And I don't know what became of my old roommate or any of his friends. I suppose the further you walk, the more distance develops between where you were and where you are. And that seems sad, but I've found that we rarely walk in a straight line. What's behind us today may be in front of us tomorrow. What we left behind may someday be reclaimed. Nothing is gone forever.
Just keep walking.