Forking Roads
My Serpentine Life
Before I raided my piggy bank in the summer of 1954 I had never stolen a thing, not a dime, not as much as a discarded breadcrumb. But for the next nearly ten years, I grew into an enthusiastic and practicing klepto, a habit I didn’t (couldn’t) shelve until late one afternoon in very early 1964.
How I saw it: recouping what you need from your own money in your own piggy bank could not possibly be stealing, could it? And since I needed exactly 15 Swedish ore to replenish my weekly allowance back up to one full krona so I could see a matinee film I wanted to see (for, yes one full krona), and since my good friend whose family lived across the third-floor landing had recently showed me how to use a plain old dinner knife to tease coins out of the piggy’s slit, and since I found that I was good at it, I not only retrieved the needed 15 ore during this clandestine raid but nearly a full additional krona in small coins.
Looking back over my klepto-years, what strikes me as very odd is that I was always found out. I don’t know how my parents (primarily mother) knew that I’d pilfered a krona or two or so from my neighbor, but they did, and I then had to confess to the neighbor and ask for forgiveness and be very contrite and all. A few bare-assed spankings, delivered by reluctant and somewhat embarrassed father, worked themselves into the mix over the years.
Yes, I believe that every single episode of successful klepto-fingers was discovered, except the very last, and the very largest.
In retrospect, this was a semi-terrible decade, replete with hidden deeds and an ailing conscience.
Going Klepto was the wrong fork number one.
::
>>My maternal grandmother, Mommi, was a devout—bordering on crazy—Christian. She did her best to steep me in Biblehood. Had we lived in the same village permanently, she might have succeeded to drive me into the pen and shut the gate behind me, but we didn’t, we only visited over the summers, a circumstance I think I have to thank for a less-than hard-core Christian life.
During one of these summer visits, I decided to repay her ongoing efforts by being saved. Accordingly, I attended a tent revival meeting where the pastor, who (fascinatingly, to me) had spent many years in India converting heathens, invited anyone who felt ready to step forward and kneel before Christ to do just that.
Two or three people did and then, after some deliberation and looking around me, I did too, sort of vaguely aware of my legs transporting me in the forward direction, and then of them kneeling.
The pastor smiled at me and put his hand upon my head and yelled something about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and told one and all that I had now been saved.
Officially.
Everyone (knowing well that I was Mommi’s grandson) congratulated me, some even cried.
When I came back home to Mommi I told her the good news, and she cried too.
Later that night, I realized with a rapidly sinking feeling that this had been a terrible mistake.
Wrong turn number two—reversed the following morning when I fessed up to Mommi that the saving hadn’t really “taken” all that well.
::
Number three grew out of my father’s refusal to give me one of his spare slide rules. He had tons of them, well, four to be more precise. He never used three of them.
His favorite joke was for someone to ask him what seven times three is. And when someone did (mostly Mom just to make him shut up about it) he’d whip out the one slide rule he did use, move the slider about a bit and then say, “Twenty-One. Approximately.”
“You have so many.”
“I know.”
“So, why can’t I have one of them?”
“You can’t.” No elaboration.
Well, fuck you, I thought, though the Swedish translation to that is nowhere near literal. Even so, not something to say aloud. Not to Fatherhood and his slide rules.
At this time I had not given engineering much thought. I was in eighth grade and very good at math and physics, but I was equally “gifted” in Swedish composition, which was my favorite subject, truly. I guess you could say that even then I loved writing.
Discussing future school choices with my best friend one day, he told me that he was definitely going to apply to Technical Gymnasium. He wanted to become an engineer.
“Do they teach you slide rules in Technical Gymnasium?” I wondered.
“Sure. Yes, they do.”
“Well, then that’s what I’ll apply to as well.”
We both applied. We were both accepted.
On the sunny day of my junior high graduation, my Swedish Composition teacher asked me what line I had applied to for my next educational step.
“Technical Gymnasium,” I told him.
“Oh. That’s a mistake,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “Look at my grades.” And I had very, very high marks in math, physics, chemistry and such.
“But you love reading and writing,” he said.
Since that was true enough, I suddenly had an inkling of where he was going with this. “Sure. Yes,” I said.
“Do you love math?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said, being honest.
“Or physics or chemistry?”
“No, not really,” prevailingly honest.
“So, why?”
I almost said Slide Rules but didn’t. What I said instead was, “My dad’s an engineer and it seems like a good idea to stay in the family business so to speak. And you’re guaranteed to find a good job if you’re a good engineer. That’s what they say.
“All very good if you love engineering,” he said.
I had no answer to that.
So, come fall, I enrolled in Technical Gymnasium. By January the following year, I had dropped out.
Yes, that was wrong turn number three.
::
Based on my junior high grades I soon find myself gainfully employed as a mainframe computer operator in Stockholm. The year is 1966 and the make of the ferrite core RAM monster was Bull/General Electric 301. I was very, very good at this job, my math talent coming in handily.
Ah, and I had also discovered cannabis by now. The sweet gateway was Kif, a Moroccan version of pot which was/is so much better than pot that anyone who hasn’t tried it doesn’t have a clue what’s going missing.
This (as soon as my American friend/supplier ran out of stock) led to hashish of various and many kinds: Red Lebanese, Black Afghan, Opium-tinged Nepal, and others. A steady diet of this through 66, 67, and into 68, all the while holding down this computer job, and well at that.
Which is when I decide to become a poet. To quit my job, move to France, buy a small cottage north of Niece (with what money? one would be forgiven for asking, for I had none), and like Baudelaire and Rimbaud pour my life into brilliant and moving and everlasting poems—presumably in French, a language I did not know very well. Let’s rephrase, a language I did not know at all.
So, late spring 1968, I quit my rather well-paid computer job. Bought a single ticket for Paris and awaited the departure date, during which awaiting the Paris students decided to revolt which made the bus company cancel the trip and refund the ticket, Paris now considered too dangerous for innocent Swedes like me.
Refund in hand, and jobless, now what?
Wrong turn number four.
::
Summer 1968. My fiancé, yes, I had proposed and been accepted and everything, was off in London being unfaithful.
I remained in Sweden, down south now looking for computer jobs (on my particular Bull/GE 301 specialty) of which there were none, and now also being unfaithful.
Unfaithful with someone who was so much more my soulmate than my cheating London girl. So I wrote London to inform her pretty much of that.
This brought her back to Sweden in a hurry, and she came down to see me. During this seeing me, I decided to go back to her.
Wrong turn number five.
::
September 1968 saw a fantastic revelation. I was light, light, light, and only light. I was, said a friend of mine, a Buddha.
That shoe fit, and I looked to Buddhism to sort out what on earth had happened to me.
While now living with my cheating London fiancé up north and sorting and sorting and sorting things out as best I could I stayed in touch with my calling-me-Buddha friend who had just returned from England with some fantastic news, he said.
So much better than Buddhism. So much Twentieth Century. So perfect for him, and (he guessed) for me.
Explain.
Come see me, he said.
I did and he explained why this cult was the perfect answer for aspiring Buddhas and I believed him.
Wrong turn number six.
::
This detour was enormous and involved two marriages and precisely that many divorces. It involved children and it involved money (cults can never have enough of the stuff).
In 1974 I decided to ask her to marry me. She said yes.
Wrong turn number seven.
::
In 1979—recently divorced—I asked a second her to marry me. She said yes.
Wrong turn number eight.
::
Twenty years later—and recently re-divorced—I moved aboard my 36-foot Catalina sailboat.
Right turn number one.
::
Some years later I sold the boat. This, of course, brings to mind that old joke: The happiest two days of a boat owner’s life: When he buys the boat and when he sells it.
Sold the boat and moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Right turn number two.
::
Far away from the madding crowd and back among snowy winters (the first winter there saw eleven feet of the wonderful stuff), I finally severed my many strings to my long-term cult.
Right turn number three.
::
In the peaceful setting of forest and river and lake and not very nosey neighbors I turned toward Buddhism again.
Right turn number four.
::
In 2014 I found a snug little cabin that I could afford to buy in Crescent City, California, a ten-minute walk from the wide and blue Pacific Ocean, and settled there.
Right turn number five.
::
Years later, and still settled near the Pacific, I live an inexpensive and simple life that sees me rise and meditate before dawn every morning and sees me settle to meditate every evening and as I approach—distantly perhaps, but even so—what feels like true awakening, every morning I take a new right turn.
::
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