Day # 256 Possessed

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouth’s.
Drank 'em in the car on his way to the
Shell station; he got a gallon of gas in a can.

Drove home, doused everything in
the house, torched it.
Parked across the street laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red.                    Tom Waits  “Frank’s Wild Years”

If I, like Frank in “Frank’s Wild Years,” have that final break with consumer reality and domestic life and set the whole thing ablaze, there are very few things that I would, following a sudden pang of regret, brave the flames to save.  I would not put the guitars on the pyre to begin with and I can fit them all in my truck, more or less.  Barring that, really, what else is there?

There is one thing that would cause me to risk a good singeing, and that is my pocket knife.  I was given this knife from the hand of Leslie E., my first true love.  (Wherever you are MS E., I still love you!)  The little Old Timer had been her grandfather’s.  It is a small two-blade folding knife with a stag handle and is of the variety known as a gentleman’s pen knife.  I received this petite implement in 1980 and it was at least twenty years old at that time.  I have had it ever since.

While unimpressive as an object, the power stored in this little tool is amazing.  The knife is endowed with the impish spirit of some long-passed Buddhist master.  Why the spirit of some long-departed lama would hang around in my pocket knife is just as much a mystery to me as anyone else, yet this is nonetheless the case.  I know this to be true because the damn thing likes to teach me lessons on the nature of attachment and suffering.

As we are all clear from our Comp-Religion classes, some of the most basic principles of Buddhism are that “Life is suffering” and that “Suffering is caused by attachment (desire).”  Like any other distillation of complex ideas, this one is fraught with simplistic peril, but hey, it’s a blog not a treatise.  Still, the simple idea is that when one becomes attached to something or someone, one is bound to suffer when that thing or person is no longer there.  Because all things are transitory, all things will eventually cease to be and when that happens one’s attachment to that object will cause pain in the object’s absence.

I know, I know, “Thank you Mr. World Religion…the knife?”  Yes, well…

My knife has the most annoying habit of disappearing.  It knows exactly how attached I am to it.  It knows that I prize this one object above all others in my possession.  No other physical object has the emotional power for me that this bit of steel and bone and brass has.  From time to time, whenever the knife feels like I am getting too attached, or to un-mindful or maybe just out of a capricious pursuit of mischief, the knife disappears.  It will stay gone for days, or weeks, or months.  The only way the knife will reappear is when I have given up hope, passed through regret and fruitless searching, and released myself from the attachment.  Suddenly, with an imagined smirk, the knife will appear in a place previously searched a thousand times or in the most unlikely of places that defied even the thought of search.

The most recent example of this has just ended with the joyous reuniting and the renewal of my attachment, which, of course, will only lead to another disappearance.  I never learn.  The knife had been carefully placed in the fob pocket of my leather moto pants, where it lives when I am riding.  When I arrived at the temporary illusion of home, the knife was gone.  Despite patting and searching and rummaging, there was not a sign.  It had, I concluded, fallen out of my pocket on the road and was now gone forever.  Eventually, after walking some of my route searching the gutters, I gave up and purchased a new knife, a beautiful little Bear Brothers made in Jacksonville, Alabama. 

It has been a wet summer here so I have not worn my leathers since that day.  This morning I slipped on my pants and then my boots and felt a lump in the boot.  After checking the boot and finding nothing I checked my pants leg for a bad zipper and felt the tell-tale shape of my little pen knife hiding in the lining of my leather pants.  It had fallen (or burrowed) through a hole in my fob pocket and dropped away into the depths of the lining.  Once hung up in the closet, it had fallen to the hem of the leg and waited there, chuckling to itself, whilst I searched in vain.

O frabjous day!  Callooh! Callay!  Jabberwocks and other creatures that need slaying ought to be aware that I am once more united with my precious vorpal blade and unless they want their heads departed from their shoulders, they had best be on their best behavior.  (My apologies to the late Mr. Carroll)

And I will never be parted from that which possesses me again.  Never, never ever.