“I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that.” Tom Lehrer
I had a friend named Maury. I called him Pops, which suited him in ways it would take a novella to explain. He was 75 when I met him.
Pops prided himself on being the ultimate curmudgeon, bar none. For him, it was true and effortless. Not a phony bone in his disgusted, cynical old mind and body.
I loved him. One of the best I’ve ever met. You had to be looking in the right place to see that, but when you did…simply the best.
I’d moved into a building he lived in, just down the hall from his apartment. We started getting to know each other right away. He had a twinkle in his eye, despite his best attempts to scare the beejeezus out of everyone who came his way.
He seemed to take to me right off the bat. I learned later I was about the age of a daughter he hadn’t seen since she was a child. Having lost my own father, who I was not close to, we seemed a natural fit. Two lost lambs needing and enjoying each others company.
Pops was a classic “Greatest Generation” kinda guy. WWII vet, blue collar, hard working factory worker. You’d never peg the old coot as an intellectual if you saw him draped over a bar stool after third shift near the auto plant, but boy was he. An intellect, I mean.
It was as if he had a secret life, his bookshelves filled with everything from physics, history, and engineering to the ancient scriptures of the Vedas.
He relished it all.
One day early in our friendship he found me in our building’s little library making a booklet of jokes for my friend and teacher, Prem Rawat, for his birthday. He asked me what I was up to. The words barely left my mouth when he erupted in a tirade of cynicism and rage over the very idea of someone having “a goddamned guru” as I recall him categorizing the man.
“Big surprise,” I thought to myself, having been berated many times before for simply having asked for help in life from someone like Prem, who offers it.
I quickly changed the subject.
A day or so later, a tiny note was slipped under my door that read, “If this person you told me about has anything to do with the way you are, I apologize and want to hear more about this.”
It was from Pops.
It would take another novella to describe all that happened after that, but nutshell version: He learned the techniques to go inside, what Prem calls Knowledge. He looked like a newborn baby that day. He thanked me for helping set it up for him to learn.
“It’s the best present anyone ever gave me.”
Pops died about seven years later. I was with him. He was in bliss, and I do not use that word lightly. About a day before he passed I came to prepare a meal and found him doing his practice, sitting in the dark, focused within.
I’ll never forget that sight, his body so weak from illness, barely able to stay upright, yet still trying, still wanting to be fulfilled, wanting to have that feeling he’d finally become familiar with.
I asked him if he was ok. He looked up with such dignity and peace and said quietly, about whatever he was experiencing:
“This is all that’s really mine.”
What a perspective, one I strive to understand every day of my life. Yes, this man knew he was going. The doctor’s told him. But I’m going too, one day. Hopefully that’s far in the future, but no guarantees as everyone well knows.
Yet and still, how often do I assume I’ve got assurances about my length of life? How often do I dilly-dally through my busy day as if I have endless hours to ignore all that’s “really mine”, that thing Pops so clearly understood by spending a few moments each day turning his attention within.
None of this is about good or bad, right or wrong, though. I renounced that “religion” years ago where I had to lash myself with leather strips all day to atone for the fact that I’m a spaced out chick way too often; that I forget what’s really important and get caught up in things that really do just waste my time here.
In the end all I can do, all any of us can do is just try; try to be a little conscious; try to be a little kinder, a little more aware of the gift in each moment of existence.
It’s sure a lot easier to sit here and write those glowing phrases than to make them reality, but what a noble effort and certainly worth every attempt to at least take a stab at it, mm?
I watched Pops take his last sweet breath with a tiny smile on his face. Did he go to heaven, some might ask?
I believe he’d been there many times, long before that final day. I suspect he’d tell us all that “heaven” really is available, way before we depart this lovely planet Earth.
Yep, I just bet that’s what the gentleman would like us all to know.
