Today Is Thine

"Yesterday returneth not,/Perhaps tomorrow cometh not./Today is thine, misuse it not..." writes Ethel Tatham of Hardingham on October 5th, 2003.

What else, I find myself wondering, might have happened on that day, now more than a hundred years ago? No matter, Ethel expresses a sweet sentiment, not incompatible with the dharma, did she know it.

We were going through our storage bin on the busy San Fernando Road in Glendale the other day and I came across one of my grandmother's albums, dated 1899-1903. She would have been, by my reckoning, about 20 years old. Her name was Gladys W. B. Stuteville-Isaacson, and she was born in the East End of London. She maintained stoutly throughout her life than this was the "non-Jewish Isaacson" family--despite the heavily Jewish presence in that part of London during her youth; and despite her treasured possession of a small table inlaid with Hebrew lettering and symbols. She became a Williams, marrying an Anglican minister--well, Church of Wales--who was the Vicar of St. Gabriel's in Swansea for many years, and Chancellor of Brecon Cathedral, and was a devoutly practicing Christian.

The Victorian album was the place where a young lady would collect mementoes from friends, in the form of snatches of poetry, quotations from the greats in their own languages--Latin, Greek, German, French, Spanish, Italian--and small drawings or paintings...

... or perhaps little cartoons...

... all dedicated to herself. The inscriptions in my grandmother's book are quite beautiful and moving. They must have meant a lot to the young woman, growing to adulthood, who would, I believe, have taken their messages to heart. Some are romantic, some whimsical, some inspirational, some religious. As you can see, they are copied into the album with extraordinary care. Since my grandmother traveled to Germany--I suspect as young ladies did in those days, to expand their horizons--many of her entries are handwritten in the (to us) virtually illegible but tantalizingly beautiful script that was universally taught in German schools at the time...

It touches me to think that these good people are all long dead and gone, but that their mark survives them in this little book of personal memories. It touches me that so much thought and care was devoted to these expressions of friendship; I think of our emails and text messages, these days, our yearbook scrawls and our Facebook "friends," and it seems to me that we have sacrificed something important along the way. Perhaps it's care-fulness; perhaps a willingness to take time for a friend. Perhaps a love of the intricacies of language and the things it can express. Without wishing to wax nostalgic, I do honor my grandmother for all the love that went into her album. Each entry is a tiny work of art that will never go further than the family that survives her, but which glows with its own forgotten history on these fading pages...

I wonder if everyone who reaches my age thinks so often about the legions of the dead? I do it all the time. My grandmothers on both sides, my grandfathers, my own parents. I hear the snatch of a Beatles song and I thing, ah, well, two of them gone, John and George--John, now, these thirty years! Impossible! I watch a television special on the Kennedys: another John, and Bobby, Teddy, Jackie... Not to mention Lyndon B. Johnson, George Wallace, Krushchev... All gone. Fidel is still with us, but Che left us many years ago. At the Bernstein celebration last week, there was mention of the Holocaust and I thought immediately of those six million lives no longer lived, each one of them intimate, personal, valued, seemingly so real. I hear a news report from Egypt and I think not only of those killed needlessly and heedlessly in the violence there today, but of those long, long, long dead in the tombs along the Nile, in the Valley of the Kings... Dust.

Is this peculiar to me? It can't be. I suppose, with age, it has to do with the approach of my own death. There's fear, of course, lurking somewhere behind the calm with which I try to contemplate it. I find absurd the belief that some appear to have in an afterlife, where we all gather with loved ones in some happier place--or burn in eternal damnation for our sins. How many souls, if it were so, would be dwelling there by now?

So then I think that these "leaves" of The Buddha Diaries are nothing more than my own little album, not unlike my grandmother's, though in a different, perhaps even more ephemeral form. The words I write, unlike those neatly inscribed on the pages of her album, exist I know not exactly where, somewhere in the ether. They appear when summoned, but otherwise not at all. I don't wish to sound lugubrious or maudlin. I'm just curious, that's all. It's all very odd, when you stop to think about it.