Dan asked that I wear my Buddhist garb to writing group on Monday night. He says he has a bet with the guy at the end of the bar where we meet. Two months ago I told the guy at the end of the bar a little limerick. (Perhaps you know it? It’s the one that begins “There was an old hermit named Dave….”) Dan was hoping I’d show up at 7 p.m. in full wah-wah Buddhist trappings: sandals, orange robes and all. I believe the guy at the end of the bar couldn’t fathom how a nice little Buddhist would know by memory such filthy drivel much less recite it willingly in public. However I confessed to Dan that I am only a lowly initiate to Buddhism and I wear a navy blue rakusu like a bib around my neck. It is only the great teachers who take advanced vows who wear the saffron robes that Dan was imagining.
People tend to forget that great vows or no, there is nothing too exotic about homosapiens the world over. Seven years ago I lived for some weeks in an ashram in northern India Ganges and though it’s hot in the summer it has severely cold winters. Ashramites live in little bungalows and take their meals in a large dining hall. While I was there I kept silence and learned advanced yoga teaching techniques. I rose at 4 a.m. to meditate for an hour in a small hut where camphor and ghee were sprinkled on a wood fire as a symbol of progress toward purity of mind, and I attended lectures in the evening, but I still had time to myself each day. One morning in the beginning of March, after meditation and yoga and breakfast, the sun warmed the air and the sky stayed clear blue. I decided it was time to wash my clothes. This was done via a bucket placed in my bungalow’s shower stall. After a good sloshing wash and a rinse, I rung out my yoga outfits and my blue silk long johns and my fleece jacket and pants and took a wooden drying rack outside to the small cement patio near my front door.
Outside I was greeted by the raucous mating-cry of a fat, green parrot on the electric lines strung across the ravine to the northeast and the fine site of drying rack, after drying rack placed on verandas throughout the ashram on the west. Nearly every resident had decided it was a good day for doing laundry. Then I noticed that the racks outside the cottages where the swamis lived were filled with saffron robes, saffron shawls and t-shirts. As I looked longer I saw saffron-dyed socks and yes, underwear, too, dyed bright orange, like the sun. I smiled, silently thinking that it was a glorious spring day in northern India
The next time I see Dan and the guy at the end of the bar I’m going to tell them this story. And maybe the limerick about the young singer named June who arrived at rehearsal too soon.
