A plan with no downside.
wash your bowl
On my rock the next morning, I achieved a moment of near-perfect insight. I mean, I know I was only fake meditating, but come on—don’t cubic zirconiums sparkle too? For once, I forgot about my breathing. I forgot about forgetting about my breathing. I forgot about my dad, and telephones, and avoiding my dad and telephones. Hot and cold, money and no money, Woody and ELL sitting in a tree, it was all one. And all not one.
If someone had handed me a basketball then, I could have sunk ten straight, nothing but net. The sun was upon me, the clean wind was around me, and the air smelled of fresh snow and…oranges?
The next thing I knew, I was on my back. Woody was jumping around over me, laughing, rubbing her hands together to remove the small amount of snow she hadn’t smushed into my eyes from behind. I wiped my face and smiled up at her. She was wearing a cable-knit sweater and jeans. No gloves, sneakers with no socks. And those purple glasses. Her cheeks were flushed with the cold, and her hair was blowing around her face. She was beautiful.
I mean, if earthly desires are your kind of thing.
“Good morning, Woody. Thanks for the wake-up.”
“The pleasure was all mine. Now, guess what? I have it!”
“Have what?” I asked as I propped myself on my elbows.
“The project, silly! I’ll teach you how to shoot foul shots—Zen hoops! That’s what you were doing in gym the other day, right? The beginner’s-mind thing you told me about? Dowd used to coach the basketball team. He’ll love it! Plus, I know a ton about basketball, because my father spent my whole childhood trying to turn me into a boy. Might as well make it work for us, right?”
“Hmm, well, that’s definitely a plan. But I have an idea too. Can you come somewhere with me after school today?”
“Where? For what?”
“The soup kitchen. I was thinking, since we sort of planned to go there together anyway, why not use it as our project? You know, because of the compassion concept. We could start today, I bet.”
“But doesn’t that seem kind of unfair, San? Like if we were planning to do it anyway, we’re not really showing any extra compassion. We’re just using the poor people to help us get a grade.”
Which was so untrue. I was also using them to avoid showing respect to my parent, and get a cheap date. “Well, I thought about that, Woody. But then I thought, how can feeding people be immoral? Right action is right action.”
“Is that, like, a Zen saying?”
“Yes, it is a lot like a Zen saying!”
She sighed. “OK, San. How about this? We’ll do both: the basketball and the soup kitchen. Then we’ll definitely get an A. Unless you’re getting too sick of me already? Peter says I sometimes come on too strong and…”
Grrr. What was with Peter anyway? All I knew was that he and Woody sometimes got a ride together, that he had a great right jab, and that his initials weren’t ELL. “No, that’s fine. I mean, it’s okay. It’s great, I mean. It’s excellent. But I am really bad at basketball.”
“I know. I saw!”
“So, what if I don’t impro—”
“You will, San. You will. Just give yourself over to me. And to, you know, the Force or whatever.”
“Uh, Woody, the Force isn’t actually a Zen concept.”
“Yeah, I know. That was a joke. In case give yourself over to me sounded too, um, intense or anything.”
“No, it didn’t sound intense.” I took a deep breath and released it slowly. Here was the big question: “Uh, should it have?”
She looked away as she spoke. “Did you want it to?”
Good God. This could go on forever, or until I had a heart attack. Plus, we were going to be late again, and Woody’s heart was pledged to ELL anyway—so what was the use? “I try not to cultivate…uh…earthly attachments. Buddha said that releasing one’s attachments is the key to attaining peace and enlightenment.”
Woody turned her head sharply so that she was facing even farther away from me, and I heard an artificial-sounding laugh. “Right, of course. Let’s go, San. We’re going to be late.” As I got up off the rock, she looked back at me. “San, there’s some snow in your hair.” She wiped it off with the backs of her fingers, then pulled them away like my eyebrows were on fire. And truthfully, I felt like they kinda were.
With weird unstated vibes floating all around, we trudged into school. And we were late anyway. I swear, if I ever write a book, I’m going to call it Zen in the Art of Almost Picking Up Girls, Then Blowing It Forever for No Good Reason.
I walked with Woody to her homeroom, but we weren’t really together—just two people walking parallel to each other down an ugly green hallway. She did give me a little wave when we got to her locker, and I did give her a little wave back, but it wasn’t like things had been back in the glory days of our relationship, fifteen minutes before.
You know those stupid triangle football things that sixth graders make out of aluminum foil so they can flick them across the lunch table? There was one of those on the floor in the hallway, and I kicked it over and over again, all the way to my locker. I’m lucky I didn’t cut my toe—sandals aren’t the traditional footwear of placekickers—but it felt good to just kick something really hard.
I opened my locker, which was a very Zen locker: nothing in it but three textbooks, all neatly covered. I’m not actually neat, but not owning anything has a way of uncluttering a kid’s life. I hung my Astros jacket and pulled out the books. As I did, a note fell off of the top book; someone must have shoved it through the little vent slots in the locker door. It was folded over in fourths and typed on a piece of thick, expensive stationery, like the paper my dad had always used to print résumés on every time we moved. The font was one of those angular-looking fake-Asian ones:
THE PURPOSE OF ZEN IS
THE PERFECTION OF CHARACTER.
—YAMADA ROSHI
Well, that was cryptic. And it was the very same quote I had used in my English journal. How did someone know that and why did they want to throw it back in my face? I had no time to think about it too hard. There was only about a minute left in homeroom, and I needed to skim the first chapter of The Tao of Pooh really, really fast. Or, you know, check out the homeroom chicks and babes, now that Woody had ELL and I had no earthly attachments. There was this one girl named Stephanie who was pretty cute. She was tiny and red-haired, nothing like…well, nothing like some other girls I knew. And then there was this girl named Keisha, who had kind of a sophisticated hip-hop look going on. And she was really smart. But I bet she couldn’t throw a snowball like…She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. And over by the textbook shelves, there was Jenna, the official “it” girl of eighth grade. But I wasn’t into the “it” girl type. I was into the “smells like oranges” type.
Like I always say, homeroom sucks. And then the bell rings.
I got through most of the day fine, though. Lunch was even OK; Woody played her guitar the whole time, so I didn’t have to face her. Then, in social studies, we didn’t meet with our partners. Instead, Dowd gave a lecture on how religious traditions get passed down. He happened to mention that when Zen Buddhism first came to China, there were six successive leaders. The first guy, Bodhidharma, picked his replacement, who in turn picked his replacement, et cetera. Dowd said they were kind of like popes, except that the system broke down after the sixth guy, and Zen split into several different schools.
Big whoop, right? But as it turns out, you never notice the really important stuff until it comes back to bite you later.
When school let out, Woody sent Peter on his way, and then waited for me at the classroom door. “So,” she asked while staring at the gum on somebody’s locker, “are we going to the shelter and volunteering?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I told my sandals. “If you’re up for it.”
“I’m up for it,” Woody announced to the ceiling tiles.
“Excellent,” I exclaimed to the antidrug poster
on Dowd’s door. “Let’s go.”
We went.
The shelter was about half a mile from the school, across several big streets with traffic lights, so we had a good, solid fifteen-minute walk together. We talked about homework (we were both against it), and teachers (we both thought they were strange alien beings that couldn’t be trusted, although she thought Dowd was “interesting, at least”). But we stayed on the safe topics—nothing about our real lives, nothing about our real feelings.
Nothing about earthly attachments.
And then it was compassion time. We got to this old and decrepit-looking building with a line of maybe twenty-five people waiting in front. In the cold and the slush. Some of them looked like I’d expect people waiting in line for a soup kitchen meal to look: dirty, scraggly, old, pushing shopping carts full of blankets and random junk. But others looked like regular working people. And there were two mothers there with little kids. Somehow it had never occurred to me that there might be little kids lining up in the snow for a meal, in America in the twenty-first century. What were they thinking as they saw all the other pedestrians walking in a wide arc to avoid coming anywhere near the line, like being poor was contagious?
Woody pulled me past the spectacle, around the corner of the building, and into a side door. As soon as we were inside the shelter, an elderly woman came scurrying up to Woody. “Emily, dear, it’s wonderful to see you. And I see you’ve brought a friend. Are you bringing in your donation for the month?”
Emily? Who the heck was—
“No, Sister Mary Clare. I’m here with my friend San Lee to volunteer. We want to help out with serving. Um, it’s for a school project. Can we?”
Sister Mary Clare looked me up and down. “Well, he’s not much in the wardrobe department, but then again, neither was our Lord and Savior. Can you wash dishes, Stanley?”
“Um, it’s San Lee.”
“Right, Stanley. That’s what I said.”
“No, I—”
Emily, the artist formerly known as Woody, stomped on my foot and cut me off. “Yes, San is an excellent dishwasher. He’s quick and thorough. The trick is, you can’t get too attached to any one dish—you just have to keep moving on to the next dish with no emotion. And that’s San’s specialty.”
Ouch. Easy for Mrs. ELL to talk about how other people moved from dish to dish. I didn’t have time to respond, though, because at that very instant Mildred Romberger came barreling out of a door marked PANTRY holding a wedge of cheese. “See?” she cackled. “You’re the senile one, Mary Clare! Here’s the Parmesan cheese you said we didn’t have. Now we can make great garlic cheese bread with the butter you also said we didn’t have. Oh, hello, San. How’s my favorite Zen student today?”
What was this, the Soup Kitchen of the Ancients? And was Mildred going to blow my cover? I had to change the topic. “I’m doing great, thank you. I’m here to wash dishes. But I’m wondering…umm…no offense, but aren’t there any…uh…younger people helping out here?”
Sister Mary Clare answered that one: “Well, Stanley, far too many young people seem to be too busy to think about others. Not like your friend Emily here. When she came to me last year with her first donation, I thought, ‘This will never happen again; she’s just another little rich girl making herself feel good.’ Then she showed up again a month later, and a month after that, and so on—thirteen months and counting. Our Emily is a rare girl. So, are the two of you an item, Stan? If so, we’ll try not to leave you alone together in the dishwashing area for too long! Right, Mildred?”
Then the two oldsters started cackling together uproariously. Oh, good lord. Or jumping Buddhas. This might have been the first recorded instance of a nun and a librarian trying to set a fake Buddhist up with a dentist’s folksinger daughter for a hot soup-kitchen dishwashing rendezvous. Too bad they didn’t know that “Emily’s” heart was already pledged to the mysterious ELL. Or that I was famous for my emotional detachment and lack of earthly desires. All that was going to happen in the dishwashing room was the cleaning of dishes.
Darn it.
Sister Mary Clare gave us a quick tour of the dining room, pantry, and main kitchen area. Then she hustled us into the back of the kitchen, gave us aprons and rubber gloves, and taught us how to be dishwashers. First, these huge trays came through a little window in front of us on a conveyor belt. Then we’d stop the belt when a tray was over the huge sink, grab a handheld showerhead-type thing, and blast the dishes on the tray with the superhot water from the shower to rinse them. Next, we’d start the conveyor again, maneuver the tray into this stainless-steel box, and pull the WASH lever, which would start a five-minute cycle to get the dishes really clean. Finally we’d yank the lever back up, wait for a green light on the side of the box, turn the conveyor back on again, and shove the next tray into place.
It sounded easy, but that was before the action started. The trays were coming in maybe three at a time, and they were completely piled up with disgusting gooey dishes, plates, bowls, and silverware. But the silverware was supposed to be separate, so then one of us would have to reach in amid the tottering, muck-crusted piles on the moving tray and pluck it out. Also, you couldn’t put napkins through the machine, so we’d have to check for those too. And if you’ve never tried to separate a soda-drenched napkin from a moving bowl of halfeaten chocolate pudding without causing a dish avalanche, you haven’t really lived.
Plus the shower water was like a hundred-and-fifty degrees, and it splattered all over you if it bounced off a dish at the wrong angle. And you were constantly bouncing water off at the wrong angle, because you kept looking at your dishwashing partner:
—Was she looking at you?
—Darn it! She kind of was. Did she just catch you looking at her?
—Why was she trying to catch you looking at her anyway? Shouldn’t she be concentrating on the dishes? Or on her stupid three-initials boyfriend? Or on—
OWW! That water really was off the hizzook hot.
By the end of the three-hour dinner shift, we were totally soaked, and totally covered with grunge, and it was about ninety-five degrees in the dish room. We hadn’t seen a single guest (that’s what they called the people who came to eat) since we’d come in, but we’d seen enough plates to know that dinner had been a hit. And as the last tray rolled out of the washer, we were tired. Or at least I was. My arms were shaky from the unusual strain of slinging the trays and the hose around, my neck was stiff, and my feet hurt like a madman.
Mildred stuck her head into our little window and said, “That’s it, kids! You can relax now.” I took off my apron, threw it on the steaming pile of used dishrags, and hopped up to sit on the steel counter. As I flicked a strand of half-washed spaghetti off of my pant leg, Woody jumped up next to me. I waited for her to say something. She waited too. Just when the waiting was starting to feel like some strange Zen duel, Sister Mary Clare popped in with two plates of food.
“Here you go, kids! You did a great job of keeping up for first-timers. Why, I remember once in 1978, the chief of police lost a bet to Mildred and had to wash the dishes here for a week. On his first night, the trays were backed up five deep, and then his pistol got stuck in the conveyor and went through the pressure-wash unit. We were all diving to the floor—I thought the heat would make his bullets shoot all over the place! Oh, was that a wild time!” She nodded happily. “Yes, a wild time. Anyway, we kept some food warm for you.”
I hadn’t thought about it, but I was starving. It was going on seven o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten a thing since lunch—which, for me, was like a miracle and a half. Woody and I both dived into the food like we’d just spent eleven years as island castaways, and didn’t come up for air until the last crumb was a fading memory. Then we started back in with the waiting contest until Mildred barged in.
“Aha!” she crowed. “What are you two youngsters still doing here, all alone together? In a church building, no less. And don’t tell me you’re just eating either. Your
plates are empty, and I’m no fool. I know what it means when two young people look at each other like that!”
Strangely, we had been avoiding looking at each other for hours. But when she said that, of course, we both looked. I could feel the heat in my face, even above the general swelter of the dish room, as I turned back toward Mildred. “Uh, Mrs. Romberger? Now that we’re done eating, what are we supposed to do next?”
She looked absolutely jolly. “You should know this one, Zen Boy: Wash your bowl!”
I did, while Woody left the room for a minute or two. So I washed her bowl too. Although I must have missed a footnote in a book somewhere, because I didn’t know what washing bowls had to do with Zen.
Woody came back in, and gave me the no-look look we’d been developing. “Uh, San, this was…umm…good. I mean, I’m glad we did it.”
I no-looked right back at her. “Yeah, uh, me too. And, uh, I washed your bowl too. You know, it’s a Zen practice.”
She looked puzzled. “What does washing a bowl have to do with Zen?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow, when we have more time. Right now, I have to get home fast.”
“Oh, I just called my mom on my cell. Do you want a ride?”
I couldn’t accept a ride from Woody’s mom. Then Woody might see my mother or something. But then again, I couldn’t say no gracefully either. Plus, it was cold and dark out, and I was wearing wet clothes and sandals.
I hesitated too long thinking about all this, and Woody started angrily yanking her coat on. “Yes,” I blurted. “I’d love a ride.”
As she walked out of the dish room and down the hall, her voice floated behind: “OK, San—if you don’t think it’s too much of an earthly attachment or anything.”