Midlife Meditation

An-Di-Fan is no more. My grandmother took possession of the house 71 years ago, purchasing it, sight unseen, from the botany professor who'd owned it, I think, since it had been built. She bought it as the most tangible part of her new life: my grandfather, had died suddenly, and rather than retreat into widowhood, Grandma chose to make her own mark in the world. She'd led a productive life already, working alongside him in his positions as a missionary in Shanghai, then a college president, first in McMinnville, Oregon, and finally in Redlands, California. She'd already established herself as a free-lance writer--I remember seeing a feature of hers in one of the old (1940?)  Life  magazines she kept upstairs in her house--but she aspired to more. She earned her doctorate and returned to McMinnville to be a professor and administrator at Linfield College. This house was waiting for her when she arrived. "An-Di-Fan" was a name brought back from Sha...

An-di-fan, soon to be someone else's house of tranquility. I never had a home town, but I always had this house. My grandmother moved into the house on Baker Street in 1945. She'd been widowed for a year, and had decided to return to McMinnville to teach at Linfield College, where her husband had been president in the 1930s. Now, at the age of 54 (my age now), and for the first time in her adult life, she needed a house that was not provided by my grandfather's employment. The house on Baker Street had been built forty years earlier, and had been the home of a botanist. It stood on a double lot, the huge back garden filled with mature flora that he had planted. It had, the realtor told her, a good hearth, and this was important to her as she entered this new phase of her life. She named it "An-di-fan," after the name she and my grandfather took as missionaries in Shanghai. It was something of a pun on our Swedish family name of "Anderson," a...

  Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Wait and see,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Wait and see,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Wait and see,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Wait and see,” said the farmer. --Zen parable Across America, families will gather around tables laden with comfort food and share their gratitude for events ...

Milderson Manor? Mark-Amy Acres? Milsh-Mark Manse? First things first: we closed. It took a solid hour of signing, dating, and initialing documents, many of them near duplicates of each other because, for some arcane titular reason, we had to break the purchase into two different mortgages; and then, called back from lunch, another hour because the bank rejected some of the dates we had scrawled as unacceptably sloppy; but finally, at around 3 p.m. yesterday, we became the proud owners of 6420 NW Starflower Drive. So here I am, married, mortgaged, joined at the wallet as I haven't been with anyone in fifteen years, and even then only for a few weeks, as that house purchase came at the very end of my short, troubled second marriage, and I was bought right back out of it by my ex as soon as we separated. Buying a house with my wife and actually getting to live in it with her is a whole new experience for me. There will be many more new experiences associated with t...

  To forgive others is to be kind to ourselves--Dharma Master Cheng Yen I'm not big on bumper stickers, but then again, this wasn't actually on the bumper of the minivan I saw this morning during my run. It was painted on the tailgate, along with a string of Chinese characters I assume stated the same aphorism in Mandarin. At any rate, this little motto stuck in my head more stridently than anything I've seen on a car in many years. The author of the proverb is a Buddhist nun who, since 1966, has headed up Tzu Chi, a Taiwan-based relief society with global outreach, including hurrican and tornado relief in the United States. I found this out with a Google search this afternoon when I finally had a chance to seek out the source of these words. Tzu Chi sounds like a worthy cause, and Cheng Yen (sometimes called the Asian Mother Teresa) seems a wonderful saintly woman; but all of that is a sidebar, a diversion from a teaching that cut me to the quick. You see, I h...