The Natural Laws of Good Luck (34 page)

Every evening we added sand, cement, sweat, and hours to the bulldozer's harvest of razor-edged stone until a smooth wall emerged from the mist. Made of blue-gray vertebrae studded with quartz crystals, the wall resembled a dragon's back. The ancients in China believed that the subterranean geomagnetic grids of yang energy could be tapped into for telepathic communication and four-dimensional time travel. They called them “dragon currents.” The only thoughts we exchanged telepathically were “There is a good rock for that space,” and “Slap a little more mortar on here, comrade.”

We pried, cradled, hoisted, rolled, and skidded, committing ourselves to the present dimension between ground and sky. Hours went by backward, stewarded by my husband. Besides the less endearing aptitude my husband and father have in common, having to do with cars run amok, falling debris, and man-made disasters in general, they share this mastery of silence. In their companionship, I have explored a vaster interior and more dazzling exterior because of it.

I remembered how my father spent a half hour here and there with me between the once-a-year camping trips. “How about walking over to the post office?” he'd say. Then off he strode without speaking or looking down while I half ran along behind him. We made similar trips to the hardware store, the Dairy Queen, and the library. Conversation? No. I noticed every grassy upheaval of pavement, every glint of chimney flashing, stout-waisted fire hydrant, tilted Stop sign, and rankly alluring alleyway. The silence invited the world closer. And though I sometimes felt yearning, abandonment, even anger in these silences, that was because my body hadn't learned how to carry them, and then, having learned, often forgot.
Cun
, or “meditate,” in Chinese, means “to cause to endure,” “to retain.” Silence, like the stones, retains fields of feeling.

Our dragon current that doubled as a retaining wall sported an oil-changing pit where the dragon's tail forked. A car could be driven up onto the split tail that the mechanic might wriggle into the crevasse below to examine the underbelly of the vehicle. The wall was not done yet, Zhong-hua said, because one fork of the tail needed to curl outward to enclose a small fishpond. Ours was perhaps the only wall in the great Northeast with a utilitarian tail. It seemed my husband had fashioned a miniature “Great Wall” with chambers for sleeping rodent warriors and snakes. Theirs, too, were the hidden stairways, the lookout towers, and the superhighways to the oil pit.

I drive up to the site, where there is finally a foundation for a house, and find Zhong-hua slapping mortar onto the wall and pressing it firmly into the cracks. It is nearly dark. The crickets trill, and swallows dip and dive. Brown and yellow leaves twirl into the open field. He doesn't look up, though I know he feels my presence. Sounds rise and fall along the wall like water, and I realize that my husband is singing. I recall the day Zhong-hua said that singing was an “in-the-past thing” and how those words had contracted my heart. Now I understand, by antilogic, that time is reversible. He is scraping the wheelbarrow with his trowel and
singing—not a full-throated song but something low and melodic, delivered in Chinese with head bent to the stones.

I sit in the dark on the wall. “Am I a problem wife?”

“Not big problem. Just have different culture material. You can change.”

“Nice to have that as a possibility, but what if I can't?”

“Is OK.”

“And you?”

“Never can change. This is me.”

“I sometimes have negative thoughts,” I said.

“Go ahead.” Zhong-hua folded his arms across his chest.

“Well, sometimes it feels so difficult to trust. When I get mad, I follow this image of myself with backpack disappearing down a dirt road, going, going, gone. But I always come back, and you are always here. We must want to be together.”

“Yes.”

“Now you talk.”

“Why me talk? You say everything perfectly. I just say one thing: make good relationship very hard.”

“I want to.”

“Too, me.”

“No, Zhong-hua, it's
me, too
, not
too, me
.”

“Listen to me: Just try. Maybe everything OK.”

I often think of the thirteenth horse who won the race. According to Da Jie's theory, the twelve who lost all had a change in luck to look forward to, and the thirteenth, the winner, needed to lose something, a shoe or a tooth or the next race. But winning or losing was perhaps not their concern as they stretched their necks to the wind with hearts on fire, following life.

That summer Kathy took me to a lake forty minutes to the northeast, and we paddled across it in her kayaks. On the far side, we slipped into the reeds and steered the winding waterways to a marsh where branchless pines stood around like a gathering of gray old men with big hair. It was a great blue heron rookery. The
hairdos were heron nests made of sticks where overgrown babies crowded one another, gawking over the edges into the world's airways. The mystery of where the heron came from and where he disappeared to was partly solved. He didn't just unzip the sky to appease the longings of imagination. He was his own true story.

Acknowledgments

Gratitude to The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for a grant that helped me start this book. Gratitude also to my agent, Gillian MacKenzie; Robin Desser, for generous advice on the rough draft; and Dan Jones at the
New York Times
for running an essay based on the book.

Gratitude to the warm, patient, exacting staff at Shambhala Publications, especially to my editor Eden Steinberg and her assistant editor Chloe Foster.

Thanks to my dear teachers Suzette Graham, Tom Bissell, and George Scialabba.

Special thanks to Dr. Tom Triscari, Dr. Robert Mayer, and Kathy Keyser for being the magnanimous characters they really are.

Gratitude to my parents for their soulful zest, my children Eula, Mavis, Athan, Paroda, and Tian Tian for being their own saviors, and my niece Nadine for her expandable love of family. Special thanks to Paroda Loy, who welcomed Zhong-hua with all her heart.

Credits

“I Never Wanted Fame” by Antonio Machado. Reprinted from
Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado
, translated by Robert Bly (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983). © 1983 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with his permission.

“Love Doesn't Ask Why,” words and music by Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Phil Galdston © by 1992 Dyad Music Limited (BMI), administered by Wixen Music Publishing, Inc. Copyright © by 1993 Universal Polygram International Publishing, Inc. and Kazzoom Music, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

Excerpt from
Taoteching
, translated by Red Pine. Reprinted from
Lao-tzu's Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past
2000
Years
(San Francisco: Mercury House, 1996). © 1996 by Red Pine. Used by permission from Red Pine.

About the Author

Ellen Graf, Zhong-hua, and Small Dog continue. Zhong-hua is currently studying to be an emergency medical technician. He offers private intensives in Chinese brush painting and Chen Style Tai Chi and Qigong in his home studio. Ellen is working on a collection of essays about improvisation and survival.

 

 

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