A Rabbit’s Dream of Saffron

As a myopic, bookish child, much of my time was spent mired in fantasy. When not absorbed in volumes of myths and ghost stories, I investigated what of the world I could, searching for evidence that the wonders I read about were not merely entertaining fictions, but rather messages from the past alluding to the mysterious true workings of the Universe. Now, nearing my 45th birthday, I see, for many people, that “growing up” means turning away from such endeavors, as it is seen as unbecoming to dream too much as an adult. I was never in danger of such a fate.

Whether it is “nature” or “nurture” that determines how the silver thread of a life will unspool is one of those mysteries. We delight in stories of outlier children raised by wolves or apes, searching for proof that no matter the circumstance of one’s upbringing, the spark of our humanity can never be extinguished. I have always related to those feral little ones, for though I had a roof over my head, I also wandered a vast and verdant wilderness.

The house I was born in sits perched atop a hill, nestled amidst a New England forest. Long ago the entire neighborhood was an asparagus farm that doubled as a pheasant-hunting retreat for some magnate of industry and his cronies. The manor is up the street a bit, a sprawling mansion that is much larger, creakier, and spookier than the quaint stone carriage-house I grew up in. Next door is the converted barn, its true function only evident if one knows its history.

The small Connecticut town I am from is a smush of old estates, older farms, and much newer subdivisions. Roaming these planned neighborhoods with friends always caused me to consider the stark contrast between the infrastructure of the older parts of town, like where I lived, and the newer developments. I was fascinated by the ubiquitous electrical and telephone distribution boxes to be found in these places. Even the most stately home might have one of these metal constructions, painted a shade of green not found in nature, humming away on its lawn.

I always wanted to open these boxes. The archaeology of my own home was so very different. We had mysterious stone structures in the woods and ceramic irrigation pipes crisscrossing the grounds. Though these artifacts were only a century or so old, to my child’s mind they were relics left by a lost civilization. Even back then I wanted to turn over every stone and pull open every door and hatch to see what links I could find between the way things were and the way they are.

Most of my friends were too fearful of electricity or authority to indulge my curiosity. Only in the company of “bad kids” would we unlatch the boxes, revealing hundreds of multicolored wires running every which way. Years later I would find myself responsible for similar systems in a professional capacity and sometimes stare at the back of a dimmer rack, tangled cables bursting from its ports, and be transported back to summer evenings in Suburbia, amazed at how the silver thread unspools.

I was born in that stone house on a perfect June day, my arrival attended by three midwives and two cats. My parents were hippies and I was weighed on a food-scale, then deposited into a world full of nothing but Love, summer sun, and gentle purring. Though I do not remember it, I count the chilly advent of that year’s autumn as the first betrayal of my life. Even the whispered echoes of lost memories affect the way things are. Summer is still my favorite season and it still tastes of saffron and mocha.

Food has always been important to my family, and anyone who does not believe in magic might find an epiphany in the way my mother expresses her love through cooking. Ours was a house devoid of overly processed foods. As a child I used to gaze longingly at the sugary cereals temptingly arranged at eye-level, but it was never to be. My parents ran a natural-food co-op out of our living room. As a result, I ate a lot of carob.

If you don’t know, carob is a sweetened paste made from the pods of an evergreen. For people who say “fruit is nature’s candy,” it is the analogue to chocolate, but marzipan has more in common with marshmallow than carob has with chocolate. Speaking from experience, if carob is all you have ever known, it’s fine. Decades later I can see the insidiousness of this aspect of the human condition. Things may seem “fine,” but if one seizes on certain transcendent experiences, they can affect a paradigm shift within themselves.

Upon tasting chocolate, ever after, carob’s formerly pleasant earthiness tasted like dirt to me. Chewing the chalky paste was akin to looking at the wax death-mask of someone once beloved. I was changed, a life-long sweet tooth had been awakened in me. Fortunately, the arrival of my sister somewhat freed me from the onus of constant clean eating. The cereals I coveted began sneaking into the house, two per multipack of tiny boxes.

Looking back, the double-edged sword of ignorance can also protect. Whether my mother is a witch is up for debate, but the fact remains that I see her speaking often to the murder of crows she calls “my boys,” and it seems that the Universe requires a black cat at her side. That her food is special is undeniable, and so, to some degree, I was sheltered from the culinary atrocities that formed the bulk of my peers’ diets. I will never forget how sick I got the first time I ate a pizza cooked in a microwave, a device my mother has never owned.

Early on, I began associating good food with good times. When television advertisements attempt to evoke this sentiment, they often depict a long table with smiling family members passing bowls back and forth, before gently reminding us that no gathering is truly complete without their product. My own recollections of good food and good times rarely feature furniture.

Imagine, instead, a sky full of saturated pastel pinks and purples as the sun sets over a placid bay. A blanket is spread out on the sand above the high-tide line. Clambakes are impractical so we are eating my mother’s paella as we watch the sun go down. When the orange orb finally disappears beneath the distant horizon, everyone on the beach will applaud. With the flowery taste of saffron lingering on my tongue, I will, too.

Every August we would pack up and leave our stone house to spend time on Cape Cod, that glorified sandbar extending far enough into the sea that standing at the peninsula’s very tip feels like being perched at the edge of infinity. Out there, on the lonely beaches at the end of the continent, with bioluminescent plankton glowing on the wet sand and the smear of the Milky Way spread out above, it’s like floating in a field of stars.

I am forever grateful that my hippie parents raised me largely without religion, but even if they had, no church could compare with the cathedral of the night sky, and no sermon could compete with the lapping of the waves at the shore. For as long as I can remember, I have been awestruck by the magnificence of the vast, chaotic Universe, and how, through its unpredictable machinations, it has begotten progeny capable of considering their own place among the galaxies.

At times I struggle to see a greater purpose in it all. This sentiment is not resignation arising from seeing a world out of balance, but rather comes from a lifetime of pulling open every book, door, hatch, and panel I could find, both literally and metaphorically, in a quest to understand how things work. I believe it is our insignificance from a cosmic perspective that behooves us to create our own significance.

Each moment in time is the output of a differential equation of such enormous complexity that Laplace’s Demon crumbles in the crashing waves of quantum chaos. This knowledge comforts me, providing me a firmament on which to stand, an island in a sea of existential crises. From here I can see my silver thread unspooled, and looking back, how it criss-crosses every which way, its circuitry tangled with the lives of others, indistinguishable from those telephone wires from this perspective. These experiences have become touchstones of memory for me, and so let us now travel back along the way to a convergence.

Out on the Cape, at the far end of a parking lot covered with alabaster shards of clamshell, past the restaurant with the enormous lobster clinging to the side, is a very special ice cream parlor. I worked at such a place as a teenager and witnessed first-hand how these chapels of guilty pleasure become oases of smiles and laughter. Many of our vacation days would end here at the end of the clamshells. I’d get a cup of chocolate.

The adults would sit at picnic tables on the screened-in porch jutting out into the marshy tidal flats that formed a blurry delineation between land and sea. I’d pester anyone with a cup of coffee to spoon some over the top of my scoops, a technique I’d been introduced to by my mother’s college friends, who would often join us on these forays. The sweetness of the ice cream undercut with bitter notes of java appealed to me. This was how I discovered mocha.

I cannot recall more delicious ice cream in my youth, but it was not the dessert that I loved most about this place. While the grown-ups would talk, my sister and I would exit the porch and walk toward the water. If the tide was out far enough, we would approach the rusting hulk of a ship’s engine that stood naked and decaying below the high water mark, the sand beneath our feet would be riddled with thousands of holes, each home to a fiddler crab.

The asymmetrical creatures would scurry before us as we neared the engine, which tilted atop a bed of decaying boards that once formed a hull. The flaking ship’s heart was corroded by sea salt, but to me it was a diesel Stonehenge, evidence of some great achievement now being eaten away, particle by particle, by time and tide. Its frozen bolts resisted all our efforts to dislodge them, but we tried anyway, curiosity thrusting aside any fears of tetanus.

Friends, other children, or sometimes an adult wanting to sneak a cigarette, would sometimes accompany us. If the tide was high and the engine out of reach we would demonstrate how it would spark when hit by a rock. As I write this as I remember the ping of impact and tiny flash of light. I can taste saffron and mocha.

Earlier I admitted to being an irredeemable dreamer and I invoke that now as I ponder what purpose recounting these memories serves me. I do not wish to exclude you, the reader, from this consideration, but as of the present you are but a hypothetical entity with no form or needs. What purpose is any of this? I ask myself.

As I have learned more about Zen and the Art of Mentalcycle Maintenance, I have developed certain techniques to keep myself balanced on a tightrope of mindfulness above a void of madness. In these times of uncertainty and not-knowing; and, worse yet, knowing that some things are simply unknowable, I find refuge in yet another dream.

The rock is flat beneath me as the sun heats my carapace. There is no wind in this distant Outback. As the scorpion bakes in the oppressive furnace of the desert it drifts off to sleep and dreams all of what we know into existence for the briefest of moments. It can be empowering to credit oneself with this much imagination, but I promise that we each contain multitudes. Even so empowered, the fragility of this scenario may cause dread until one considers that even that searing landscape and all it contains may be the passing thought of a purple rabbit eating blue grass under a red sky.

The unknowable stacks upon itself, turtles all the way down. The mind becomes a teacup in a tempest, but there is relief. Calling one’s experiences into focus will reveal a raft made of the flotsam and jetsam of self. These are the touchstones of memory and when one finds True Hope they will see that these dreams flow in all directions through time.

Examine more closely and you will see that what you cling to is a machine made of the vast circuitry of experience. In life, Love is a battery that powers every aspect of this system. Gather enough of that oh-so limited resource and watch your raft become a lifeboat. Pay heed to the traumas, though, for though the jagged rocks of those moments may be long in the past, they can act like capacitors, and, if triggered, can send pain and fear surging down that sterling thread in electric bursts that may send you off course.

With wisdom and luck you may eventually find yourself raising a sail above your craft. The people you share your life with crew your vessel, just as you do theirs. With their help, you may construct a Diesel engine or even a faster-than-light neutrino drive. The only limit is your imagination. So, what purpose these words? They are a flag raised in the hopes that we may form a flotilla to better navigate these waters. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a memory is worth a million, and after all, this may all be naught but a rabbit’s dream of saffron.