Zen and the Art of Speedskating

SALT LAKE CITY!!! Driving to dinner with our friends, the outlines of the Wasatch Range to our left, the Oquirrh range to our right, rain clouds swirling between them & the highway wet & full of buzzing traffic… so much going on… We unload the moving truck & begin to move into our new place tomorrow, I will start training hard again in a few days (I have had 7 days off!!! 3 days packing 4 days driving! I feel terrible physically after my cross country trip).. Our conversation ambled from happy anticipation of a new town, to the stress of moving, to where we will buy a new mop bucket… The endless etc etc etc…

During the mop bucket conversation, I looked at the beautiful mountains, dim outlines majestic in the clouds and rain…. In the background my mind was rolling around ideas of myth, what were the myths of these mountains to the Indians living here before the Mormons settled?

Then the cel phone rang, it was my uncle… Grandma has just died…

Its been expected for a long time, she has mentally been 95% gone for some time, her heart has been failing for years, but the actuality and finality of death is still a shock. She was 91, she hated being old, she did not “go gently into that good night”, and she is at peace now…

When I think of her, I don’t think of how sick she has been, my mind reverts back 20 years, I took this picture during a visit to their place in Florida around that time… This is the grandma I hold in my heart…. The woman who built towering bonfires of driftwood on the shores of Canandaigua lake, The samurai master of perfect grilled cheese sandwiches. At 70, she would swim about a kilometer out into the lake and back every day, even as a 15 year old fit hockey player, I had a hard time keeping up with her….

I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in any afterlife or other metaphorical happy hunting grounds/valhalla/heaven/sheol/karmic soul recycler. Neither did grandma, but there is a place for myth and symbolism within every human heart. So maybe Grandma is with the mountains now… hmm….. no, in her mythology she is happily swimming onwward in Canandaigua lake, in her flower embossed rubber swimming hat & 1950’s swimsuit. Somehow that thought gives me comfort…….

Filed under: on the road