Ice Cream for the World: A Zen Lesson from Winston Oregano Black

Twice I have said Monday did not go as planned.  Work, however, was the norm.  It always is.  I work at a residential treatment center for teenage boys with addictions.  These are adaptive youth, which is a nice way of saying that they are used to manipulating the adults in their lives to get what they want.  Because of their addictive behavior, they don't really view people as people, but rather as objects to get what they desire--namely to not grow up.  Our lead therapist, Doctor Zeeloff, or Doc Z, as he prefers, says that they are on a "developmental vacation" and will do anything, absolutely anything, to avoid maturity.  He says they view themselves as the center of the universe, and their primary job is to keep you, the adult, in orbit, circling around them, catering to their every need.  They do this by tricking you, the adult, into falling into one of the two effective ego states--for them, not you: 1) the nurturing parent, or 2) the critical parent.  The ego state you want to be in is the adult: someone who is open, but steady; someone who is caring, but not emotionally dependent; in short, someone who has their own life to lead and neither orbits others nor expects others to orbit them.

Conceptually, it sounds very clean, and in the process, makes the boys I work with seem like little monsters.  But, if you go back through it again, you'll see the same thing could be said about, I'm ball-parking it here, based on 17 years of teaching, 80% of the youth anywhere, including your children and mine, and oh I'd say 60% of adults.  Fact is, few of us want to grow up--ever!  Hard things are hard.  Who wants that?  We cling to anything and everything to avoid standing on a high cliff on a cold, hard star-studded night, looking over the black void at our feet, while calling out to our creator, "Here me, my Lord, I come to thee fully prepared to accept whatever trials you wish to give me in order to forge me into a better man.  I submit; your will be done, not mine."  That simply doesn't happen.  We kick and scream and throw tantrums every single time that life doesn't submit to our will.  We are all kids.

So, I love my job.  I am working with kids as I always have.  I enjoy their creativity, I enjoy their humor, and I enjoy their cynical outlook on life.  What I enjoy most though, is that they love music.  Teen worlds revolve around songs.  I don't especially like rap, like they do, but I like anyone who orbits around music.  It's an unconditional admiration.  And I've found unlike most adults, teens are open to new sounds.  I listen to a lot of jazz funk and blues, and they are receptive.  They ask questions like, "Who is that by?" or "What is that song?"  When I tell them, they write it down.  Although they don't say it, I know they are planning on adding it to some play list when they get free.  Songs are knowledge; music is currency; you can buy cool with them. Sometimes, those are also just manipulations, and I know "Who is that by?" will be followed with, "We had to go to group last night, so I wasn't able to finish my paper; would it be a big deal if I turned it in now instead?" Usually not.  They genuinely like music.  So do I.  A lot.  So I like teens.  That's all I really expect from them--to like music.

Occasionally, I get one who doesn't, and then I struggle.  I about lost it one day when, in the middle of the first cannon firing of "The 1812 Overture" Winston Oregano Black asked, "Can you turn that shit down; I'm trying to take a test!"  I felt like failing him right then and there; I struggled towards my adult ego state--I mean I literally crawled.  And here I don't mean literally literally; I mean it the way your teenager means it; I mean that I metaphorically crawled towards my adult ego state, but I used literally to emphasize that struggle, which is absurd, of course, because that is what a metaphor is designed precisely to do--to emphasize!  Okay, perhaps I expect more out of  your kids than to like music.  I literally expect them to use literally right.  Of course, they won't, and there will always be some dweeb, such as Winston Oregano Black, who cares more about concentrating on his grammar test than bowing before the majesty of Tchaikovsky.  And that's where Zen comes in.

I turned it down.  The other students, of course, all groaned.  "Why'd you do that?  This is the best part."  They are right, of course, but they don't understand Zen.  Zen is not a teenager understanding.  It is clearly more part of the adult ego state.

"Bless you, Oregano."

He looked up at me with way too blue confused eyes and a strange baffled expression on his chubby, round too blond, pink-skinned head.

"What?"

"For teaching me the art of Zen."

"What?"

"I killed the last kid who told me to turn down Tchaikovsky."

He smiled.  "You're strange."  He went back to his test.

I would have given him ice cream if I had had a scoop, but I didn't.  Then I thought, someday I will though, someday I will.  

Ice Cream for the World: More conflict; More Ego-Eating Buzzards; More Slow, Gradual Enlightenment

As I started to say, Monday did not go as planned.  I hate gravity.  I always have and I probably always will.  I hate designers who have no clue how gravity works even more than I hate gravity itself.  Designers of kitchen utensils seem especially unschooled in the way gravity works.  Designers of spatulas and stirring spoons seem spectacularly inept. 

Anyway, after I struggled to free myself from my dream of the girl with the little pointed puppy teeth, I staggered to the kitchen to make my routine egg.  All went well until I rested the spatula in the pan with the sputtering egg.  It was a big, grand pan, and the two eggs slid down to the far edge, so rather than gunk up the counter-top, I just let the spatula be in the remaining portion of the pan.  However, due to the spatula's stupid design, gravity did not.  It yanked on that incredibly fat heavy handle with all its might, flung that thing up, over, and then down on the dirty, dog-hair covered floor.  Damn!  Who makes the handle of a spatula heavier than the spatula itself?

I thought to myself,  Nope, ice cream can't solve every problem in the world.  Who knows what to do about the worm infested minds of inventors who don't seem to grasp the very essentials of their art.  I'm thankful the same can't be said for bridge engineers.  Some people in this world deserve ice cream.  Others deserve firing squad. 

I picked up the spatula, threw it in the sink, and sat down at the table, mad at myself for getting angry at such a little thing.  After regaining my composure, I thought about wiping up the greasy spatula-spot on the floor but decided to leave it for the dogs to clean up. I sat down and opened up my scriptures to read while eating my breakfast.  This day 2 Nephi 4:15-16 stood out:

And upon these I write the things of my soul, and many of the scriptures which are engraven upon the plates of brass.  For my soul deliteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them, and writeth them for the learning and the profit of my children.

Behold, my soul deliteth in the things of the Lord; and my heart pondereth continually upon the things which I have seen and heard.  

I set my thick, black leather quad (King James Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price) on the crumb-cluttered green table cloth, open, so as not to lose my place, and took my fork to the egg.  Not to be egotistical, but my fried eggs are simply the best.  The secret is to season them with Old Bay and Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning.  It gives them a slightly sweet salty taste.  That bite was so good I almost forgot about gravity.

I thought about plot, daily conflict--how so much of it leads to nothing.  That is what is wrong with Victorian novels--or art in general, I thought.  The plot has a point.  It does in life too--to piss us off so that we have to deal with our ego, with our constant desire to be in control of things we can't control, until we are forced into that corner of uncertainty and are finally willing to just let go and turn things over to God.  But, in life, it's not neat and tidy.  Nothing is wrapped up and tied together; there is no chain of seemingly small little coincidences that come together in some great resolution--or at least not anything we can see from this side of the veil.  Some people do die and return to tell about it.  Most of them do actually claim it does kind of add up like a Victorian plot.  But here I am eating my eggs, all wound up from a flying spatula, and I just don't see it.  That little crisis might add to the rising action of what is obviously going to be a stinking day, but I just don't see that it matters!

I had a gulp of watered down 5 calorie grape juice.  Not that it bothers me.  Delighting in the things of the Lord isn't the same as delighting in each day.  It is narcissistic to expect to enjoy each moment.  What I delight in is writing down on my soul the slow eroding of the natural man as a steely blue-eyed raven plucks the flesh of my ego away bit by bit and I feel myself soften in the ways of the Lord.  This occurs precisely because of gravity-flung spatulas and other daily travesties.   For instance, I said grandly inside my head, not once today did I say the F-word.  There was a time that surely would have come out.  Perhaps a cupboard door would have slammed too.  Marci would have tucked her head under the covers thinking, What kind of maniac did I marry?  But instead, here I am, calm and cool in the face of dealing with gravity, reading my daily scriptures.

I looked up and noticed it was 8:22.  I was suppose leave 12 minutes ago.  More conflict; more ego-eating buzzards; more slow, gradual enlightenment.

I thought, It's an ice cream of some sort.  







  

Ice Cream for the World: Small Moments of Caring without All the Ugly Awkwardness Surrounding Human Emotions

Monday did not go as planned.  I passed a bladder stone though, and that was quite the relief.  The day started in a hazy dream, literally.  I was in a big lumber/hardware store, and it was dimly lit, dusty, and almost empty, not of goods, but of customers.  At first, I was looking for some batteries.  I'm not sure why.  I think I'd found them and headed to the cashier.  The checkout stands were empty; a ghost-like light poured down through a high window, specks of dust floating aimlessly down towards them.  I must have found someone to help, because over the loud speaker, someone called "Customer Service wanted in Lane 4". 


A ghostly girl, with long, dark hair and a pale face, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, emerged out of the darkness.  Just as she approached the check-out stand, I remembered I needed a radio, and I asked where they were, got my answer, and took off.  I'd taken oh about 10 steps when another girl, about the same age, said, "Well, that was rude."


I stopped.  "What?"


"She walked all that way to help you, and you just leave."


"I forgot something.  Besides it's her job.  Her job."


I then headed for the back corner where I had been told the radios were.  It seemed forever far, and it was so dark in there, I wasn't sure I'd make it.  I kept telling myself.  It's only a hardware store, you can do this.  Only I realize now, that it wasn't really a hardware store.  Or if it was, it was the type of hardware store you would find in a small town, except it was giant.  Stores in small towns always contain more than what they promise, and also less of what the they promise.  For instance, when I was a kid growing up here in Sandstone, Pioneer Market, a grocery store, sold shot guns not 10 feet from the children's toys.  Right above the toys were art supplies, such as acrylic paint, oil paint and chalk pastels.  In the back corner, down a slanted wooden floor,  the frozen pizzas were right next to the women scarfs.  It was hard to get a whole meal of food there, but you could supply yourself for an enjoyable evening of landscape painting or a rollicking good time bunny blasting in the process.


Anyway, I did make my way through the giant building of dry fog and eventually found the clock radio that I was seeking, a small pill-shaped gray plastic battery operated one on a giant, orange metal and wood plank shelving system--the type you would pull a fork lift up to and unload a pallet of bags of concrete.  There, on a shelving system that ran the length of a football field, was the alarm clock I wanted.  It was the only thing.  I was creeped-out about it for a second or two, but then grabbed it and headed back across the enormous gray void to the register under the shaft of dusty light.


When I arrived, the girl with long, black hair and ghostly white skin was waiting.  She was terribly thin and small framed.  She wore a pale pink sweater.  Her head was a bit long, but she had  enormous dark, brown eyes.  They might have been inviting, but they were sunk in, circled by shadow, and when she opened her mouth to ask if I had everything I needed, I noticed she had little tiny pointed teeth like on a small puppy.  I realized they were all but rotted away.  She noticed I noticed and seemed embarrassed.  I noticed she noticed, and I was embarrassed that I noticed.  Teens are so overly self-aware as it is.  I tried to ease the tension by making small talk, but I've never known how to do that.


It was long, awkward minute.


I woke up and I realized my life was rich with such awkward moments, and I hated them.  If I had had an ice cream cart in a situation like that, I could have just said, "What's your flavor?"


She would have told me, I would have gotten it and handed it to her.  Tasting that cool sweetness--I'm thinking she would like strawberry--she would have forgotten I had noticed her very unattractive teeth, and I would have forgotten she noticed me noticing.  I could have gotten a scoop for myself too.  I prefer clean, pure vanilla.  We could have enjoyed a silent moment of eating ice cream and then I could be on my way.  And it could be like that anywhere.  You know how you never know whether or not to give money to drunken panhandlers?  Well, what harm could ice cream possibly  do?  See what I mean: small moments of caring without all the ugly awkwardness surrounding human emotions.

Ice Cream for the World: Should I Buy the Ice Cream Truck? Should I Not?

Later that same Sunday after the sun had dropped and shadows were long, and the back of our old single-wide trailer across the field from our house was a blob of deep blue-purple with the Juniper hill behind it softened in the sodium light of the frosty pollution-rich inversion, I was staring at a rectangle of sunlight cast against the family room wall when our youngest pug, Buddha (short for Budapest) broke into frantic yapping, growling and scraping at the sliding glass door in the dining room.  I thought perhaps she saw or heard a deer.  She never seems to think our two big outdoor dogs, a blue heeler and a German shepherd/golden retriever mix, might be better equipped to handle an invasion of revolutionary-minded deer armed with shot guns better than some yappy flat-nosed, baby-bite pug.


I had been reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as I thought perhaps I should.  As stated previously, I'd had a dream in which I'd created a data table for a school to be used for tracking school improvement (or more likely, the lack there of), and had randomly placed the following words from the novel in the table:  Kasahara, occurred, Creta Kano, surrounded by darkness, sleep no border, wakefulness. 


The words probably meant nothing.  I don't read too much into dreams, but it was odd that I would remember them, quite odd indeed.  I can never remember names, especially when I have to.  I would tell my students that it is impossible to know what you are going to write before you start because without some trick, a mental trigger, like a rhyme scheme, the human mind can't hold much more on its mental screen than three sentences.  And I believed it.  Energy, not thought, carries human communication forward--one word, one image, one phrase, one clause, triggers the next domino to fall in a chain reaction that can ultimately produce something as beautiful as War and Peace.  Okay, time to admit here that I've never actually read War and Peace, but you get the idea.  What I always left out during this great oratory on the merits of automatic writing is that my mind can barely hold one sentence.  If Marci wants me to get more than three items at the store, I make her write it down, or better yet, text me, as I also frequently lose bits, sheets, or even slabs of paper.  So, that I would actually remember what I assumed were random words from a dream was a bit of a miracle to say the least.  I wanted to find out if they actually were in the novel, which I hadn't opened for at least five years.


Before that, I had been reading in my Book of Mormon.  Nephi I, Chapter 22, verse 18 stood out:


Behold, my brethren, I say unto you, that these things  must shortly come; yea, even blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke must come; and it must needs be upon the face of this earth; and it cometh unto men according to the flesh if it so be that they harden their hearts against the Holy One of Israel.


I thought about the fires in California, about the smoke.  Skies were seldom clear anymore even in a county of less than two people per square mile with an area of 6,828 square miles.  And compared to China, our air was a pristine glacier-fed stream, China's the Ganges River.  Perhaps we were living in the time of the vapor and smoke prophesized.


I thought about the firefighters and those who lost their homes.  I thought about how, although a nice bowl of cold, pure vanilla ice cream couldn't undo all the sorrow and pain, it could sooth the parched throat and temporarily bring relief to the broken heart. 


It was a simple act, but perhaps that's what the world needed now more than ever.  Simplicity.  Good simplicity.  Kindness without motive.  Something without too much ego.  How can you tell someone who has had their home wiped out by a wall of flame that everything is going to be okay?  I wasn't even sure myself everything was going to be okay.  In the long run, sure.  I was convinced that there is a grand plan that ultimately leads to joy for all but the most wicked.  But, science indicated we were headed towards climatic catastrophe and the predictions of the prophets of my religion and Christianity in general seemed to confirm that this indeed might be the end.  But, one could, with a small gesture, still say "I care" with a scoop of ice cream.


I also thought about my dream, about the student-data table, about how meaningless most of our activities are in the grand scheme of things.  I had been in education for nearly twenty years, always working to better things, and yet, as far as I could tell, things at best remained the same, and in some ways they were spiraling out of control--mainly because of the disintegration of the family.  Life wasn't meaningless.  I just had to look out side and see that.  It was the way we choose to spend our time that meant diddly-squat. 


Maybe my dream meant something.  I picked up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I knew that was silly.  I don't believe in fortune cookies.  Yet, I wanted to find something in black and white, something that would tell me what to do.  I wanted an answer, quick:


Should I buy the ice cream truck?  Should I not?


Just then Buddha went off barking like a maniac, and I went to see what was up.  It wasn't a deer.  It was one of our home teachers bringing us goodies for the holidays.  In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints every family is assigned a set of priesthood holders who visit and check in on them to see how they are doing and report back to the bishop if there are any needs.  For example, an elderly couple might need yard work in the summer or firewood split in the winter.  Or, perhaps a family where one of the parents had lost their job or was laid off would need financial help.  The pair of elders would report that back to the bishop so that the family could temporarily receive help through the church welfare system.  Generally though, home teaching is just a time to socialize and share a short gospel message.


Ray, my home teacher, was a cop.  He didn't stay long, but he told a story about last Christmas, how he was called out because there was a semi-truck going down the freeway at 110 miles per hour.  That, in itself, would not have been so bad, but it was in the middle of a heavy snowstorm. 


"Why was a truck going 110 in a snow storm?" I asked incredulously.


"Oh, it was stolen."


So, I realized ice cream can't solve everything; in fact, I doubted it could solve most problems.   Still, I was pretty sure, despite its limitations, it could definitely bring joy.  Did data tables ever do that?  Not unless you were laughing at the futility of your efforts.  Then sometimes they did, but I was sick of finding mirth in meaningless daily existence.  I wanted results, and positive ones at that.


Maybe I had my answer.  Maybe not.

Ice Cream for the World: Why Do Women Always Have to be So Dang Practical?

It was 7:58, Sunday morning, December 10th, 2017, to be exact--twenty-one days and three hours and 32 seconds before we would pull out of the lane at our place just east of Sandstone, Utah and hit the pavement for our new life on the road in our  new very rustic ice cream truck.


It was a cold, dry morning.  23 degrees.  I had woken up with a cold, dry cough and gunky eyes and thought about taking a shower.  I had had a dream where I was making a data table of some sort for a school.  I must have been a consultant.  It was an Excel sheet, quite pretty, if I remember correctly, with big, bold lines for major divisions, and thin, little lines for minor divisions, and lots of pretty colors, from vibrant brights to ever so subtle pastels, and I was showing it to some colleagues.  They weren't really colleagues.  I was some outside consultant making twice each of their salaries, because that is the type of thing school districts do, and I have been on both sides of it, the lucky consultant and the overworked teacher, and generally, it all amounts to nothing in the end--oh I won't worry my life away... (It's okay to hum a bar of Jason Maraz's "Remedy" here.)  


Anyway, my "peers" had some issues with some of my squares of data.  They wondered where they came from.  I studied them carefully, thinking back, trying to come up with some reasonable explanation.  The terrifying thing that I realized is that these boxes did not contain student achievement scores; no, they didn't even contain student or parent perception data; what they did contain were single words that I'd isolated out of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.  Apparently, I'd been up late working on a class for my MFA program while also working on my consultant work, got bored, and started filling in my data sheet with random Murakami-words: Kasahara, occurred, Creta Kano, surrounded by darkness, sleep no border, wakefulness. 


The dream went on from there to places I will not follow that involved a close-up of a saltine cracker smashed to pieces on a pristine polished school tiled floor--the old type from the seventies, where each tile, itself, looks sort of like a saltine cracker.  I can picture an old heater by the principal's office blowing out hot air.  I would sit on it before school and stare at frost on the lawn, watching it slowly melt in the early morning November sunlight.  Perhaps that is why it took so long for me to find my true calling.  Nobody has a need for someone who sits and watches frost melt in the early morning rays.


Yet, after I dutifully read in my Book of Mormon, that's also exactly what I did on the Sunday morning we speak of.  I got up, walked to the glass sliding door in the kitchen, looked out to see if there were any deer.  There weren't.  Then, I grabbed the laptop out of the living room, which is really the family room--Marci switched them--and I headed to my blue chair in the family room, which is really the living room.  The sun slanted hard across the juniper ridge in front of our house, creating long, blobular shadows, sort of like the shapes of hot air balloons, but not quite.  There was the beautiful pink and gray twiggy tops of cottonwood along the creek bottom.  There was the old, rustic, leaning ranch gate, and of course, frost slowly melting off the rubble of dry wild rye.  I was irritated that there was also the red, iron arm of a digger--a snort, like in the book Are You My Mother?--sticking out over the edge of the side canyon, meaning they still hadn't gotten that pipe line laid right across our property.  They'd torn up our road more times than Trump had shocked the world.


I decided then and there, that it being a beautiful Sunday morning despite the smog slowly leaking into the valley from Salt Lake and Provo in the north, and the smoke slowly pouring in from the west from the fires in California, and the gunk slowly oozing out of my eyes from my cold... Despite, all this, it being a beautiful Sunday morning (and it truly was), the Lord's day, I would not bring up the ice cream truck idea again until Monday because it had not taken my relationship with Marci in a positive direction when I brought it up the night before.  Why do women always have to be so dang practical?

Ice Cream for the World: It Started Simple Enough

It started simple enough.  Marci and I were sick.  We had just finished watching Forest Gump.  I had commented that as good as that last thought of the last scene of the movies was, when Forest says—

 

 “I don’t know if it’s Mamma that’s right, or if it’s Lieutenant Dan; I don’t know if we each have a destiny or if we’re all just floating accidental like we’re floating on a breeze, but I think maybe it’s both; maybe both can happen at the same time”

 

—I said that as good as that thought was, it was an intrusive narrator speaking, not Forest. 

 

I then asked my son Everest to bring me a dish of ice cream.  He resisted, saying among other things that dairy isn’t good for you when you have a cold.  I prevailed, reminding him of all the many times I made dinner for him, hinting that it could all come to an end if he were not forthcoming with the ice cream.  All he had to do was dish it up.  I would crunch the sugar-free chocolate and strawberry wafers on it myself.

 

I did prevail.  And oh that ice cream felt so good against my sore, raw throat.  That’s when a thought formed in my mind, so simple, so clear, it could almost be pure religion—inspiration untainted by the ways of the world.

 

“You know, if this was it, if this was all there is, to come to earth, to get a body, to taste ice cream, I mean really taste ice cream, I think it would be all worth it.”

 

“Maybe you should start a charity,” said Marci.  “Take ice cream to those who never had it.”

 

“Ice cream for the children in Ethiopia,” said Everest.

 

They were joking, of course, making fun of me.

 

But I knew then and there, no matter how much I hated dipping ice cream at Braum’s after school, as a teenager growing up in Texas, I had just found my true calling.

 

I went to the restroom as I also had diarrhea and I Googled “ice cream trucks for sale” on my I-Phone.  It wasn’t easy.  My I-Phone is my enemy, but I did it.

 

At first I found a fleece blanket, “Ice Cream Truck” byAngie Turner, $74.99 on Wayfair.

 

That was pretty cool, but not what I needed.