Face it: the Now sucks.

Live in the moment. Uh-huh. Happy existentialists my ass. Most of us are content to live in the forever present of disaffection and regret.

The truly happy are those who preserve the delusion there is more, beyond now, beyond what is available, beyond the liars, me and thee, the shifty eyes and broken promises and forced grins of all the other miserable souls around us. Even the best of us put the game face on, have to learn to restrain and be patient, to dress up in goodness.

Some are different. The truly happy project their delusion with such conviction and goodness of spirit they bend us to their will. They love life, so they love the rest of us in spite of the duddiness of our fud. And will not be dissuaded.

The (un)rest of us? We want to be happy. I guess. But misery is so familiar, so reliable, so sustainable, it takes a rare radiance to thaw the slush in which we prefer to squat.

Hey, look, Spring!

Riiight.

Gurus, enlightened meditators, the professionally serene, are no more or less likely to be one of these truly radiant souls than the guy who delivers your heating oil.

Less likely, truth told. Else why would they work so hard at it?

Once in a while someone is both. The laughing Buddha incarnate. They are drawn to contemplation and compassion as bright birds must bend and sing to the good grain.

My friend Maria used to work for me. No one since has been as good. Six years ago, staying up to surprise her husband with a romantic home, her long dress caught on a candle on the floor and she burned. Racing to the shower she entangled in the plastic shower curtain, and it melted into her. Mark found her just in time.

Burned deep over 70% of her body, she was likely to die for weeks.

Maria was and is the most radiant and truly happy person I have ever known, before and after the fire. She has become a Buddhist now, stepped up her formal practice, but she was always a boddhisatva.

I am one of several hundred people who love her, are in love with her. My wife, my children, her doctors and caregivers, her many, many friends, the severely burned she visits and helps, we all know Maria as a center in our lives.

Her husband Mark, a man and husband like no other, wears both of their wedding rings because she has so few fingers left.

Less than a week after the fire we began visiting her at Westchester's burn center. One had to gown up and scrub in. Approaching her was like entering a cathedral of chrome and rubber and foam and steel and linen. Machines crowded her, a noisy, gleaming, downtown City of God. Tubes everywhere. She lay on a bed of air, a modern inverted pinchusion of small holes that prevented life-threatening pressure points.

Morphine made her pupils large as marbles. The first thing she did was grin, mimed a hi, Greg! hi, Deb! Everything but her face was swathed in drifts of loose-weave gauze, inches thick.

We "chatted". We loved her with our eyes, palmed her cheek. I had made CDs for her; I put on "Arrivederci, Roma", Dean Martin, and she croaked a laugh. The charge nurse rushed in, pissed, told us to turn it down.

Over the following weeks she had daily grafts and procedures, and everyone but Maria and Mark expected death. Most with her percentage of burns don't survive. Mark was always there, in endless overdrive of arrangements, staggering everyone's visits, maintaining the minute-by-minute information overload, but in her presence he was calm, loving, relaxed, funny.  We saw her once or twice a week, Deb and I. She was on maximum doses of everything.

Let's stop here, the history; it has defeated me every time I try to write about her. We'll do this quickly:

The years of grafts and re-grafts, the setbacks and crises and setback-backs. The years of indescribable physical therapy on what little muscle mass she has left, to keep her from becoming a pretzel. The forced unbending of constricting arms, legs, torso, the unimaginable daily pain and work of it.

The loss. That's what would defeat 99.9% of us: we would spend the rest  of our short time grappling with Fail to Accept. We would Howl Pointlessly. We would have a lost look in our eyes, our attempts to smile would stop at our cheeks. No matter how we tried to endure it we would find a way to succumb.

Our generation, me and thee, pay good money for help learning to deal with the loss of what, by comparison, are trivialities.

By the ordinary, shrugging, radiant, by-God never-flags happy of her.

This is biology. This is genetics. Her childhood was not the best. Half-English, half-Asian, she was always a bit different on both continents, growing up. She is not rich, or musically gifted, or a brilliant scholar. She's damn quick, wicked funny, and she and Mark are tireless and talented gardeners.

But sweetness is her sacred gift. Her laugh is the sound of Goodness beyond now, beyond what is available. She is the sound of better-than-this. She's everyone's favorite human being.

If all our favorites, the Uncle Henrys and Cousin Sallys and old pal Franks and former roommate Janes, that guy who lived down the street growing up, the woman we used to buy the paper from at the stand near the #6 train, the best of us, the .1% who radiate what we, the ordinary, in our struggle, hunger for and draw from; if all of them got the vacation they deserve? All of them holding each other, gathered on some lavendared hilltop in the south of France, laughing and gripping each other's arms?

They would part, naturally, happily, to let Maria step slowly into the center, at the highest point, and all would be strengthened and sustained and intensified by her simple grin. 

The Now would not suck; it would ripple out from good to good, best to best. Flow everywhere, the way the rest of us suspect it should, always and forever.

And all would lean in, bend to her, and like bright birds, sing to the good grain.

 

_{Mark and Maria, now}

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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