Memories began etching themselves into my brain when I was, oh, maybe three-ish. Some of the earliest etchers were of passages. Doors and windows, trails and roads, archways and hallways, pathways and stairways. Whether open and free, or closed and blocked, maybe even more so the latter, passages have always evoked in me a feeling of wonder, wanderlust, and a driving passion to uncover the mystery of what lies around that bend, over that horizon, through that gate, beyond that door.
When I was born, we lived in a court at 616¼ San Benito Street in the East Los Angeles neighborhood Boyle Heights. I remember nothing of my first two years in Boyle Heights, before our move to Burbank. I do have memories, though – some faint, some vivid – of returning several times over the next three or four years for visits with Grandma and Grandpa and with Aunt Sarah, Uncle Charlie, and cousins Diane and Peggy.
My Dad’s parents, aka Grandma and Grandpa, lived above the general store they ran at 2443½ Brooklyn Avenue (in 1994 renamed César Chávez Avenue), the main drag of downtown Boyle Heights. They’d lived in that apartment for maybe 20 years by the time I came along. Grandma, slim and slight, ran the store downstairs while Grandpa, tanned and husky, delivered ice and peddled fruits, vegetables, and second-hand “junk” throughout Boyle Heights in a horse-drawn wagon. Dad and his brother, Uncle Irv, grew up there.
What I remember about their home is the arch at the front of the narrow walkway that ran along the left side of the store and up the back stairs to their apartment. There was something about that stucco arch that always intrigued the little-boy me whenever we’d come to visit. It was a gateway marking a sudden transition from a broad busy boulevard to a quiet, confined, concrete path that could only lead, at least in my young imagination, to wonder and adventure.
Mom’s sister and brother-in-law, aka Aunt Sarah and Uncle Charlie, meanwhile, lived with their daughters Diane and Peggy a few blocks away, on San Benito Street. If you were walk north on San Benito Street towards its end at State Street Park (where we kids would occasionally play during our visits), you’d see two courts extend up a hill on the right. First was the one we had lived in before our move to Burbank, then Sarah and Charlie’s. There were four units in each court, two on each side. Sarah and Charlie had the back unit on the right in their court. For me, coming to visit, climbing the stairs off the street up to the level of the court was like ascending a canyon only to emerge on a plain that sloped up to the ground-level basement and then further up to the still-ground-level front door to their apartment.
That alone was always an amazement to me, how the front entrance and the basement below it could both be at ground level. On top of that, this is my first memory of a basement. In my little imagination, it was a hidden place both underground and open to the outside, a storage space for mysteries just beneath the upper world of daily life – of eating, sleeping, washing dishes, doing homework. On a few occasions, I’d tag along with big and buxom Aunt Sarah or mustachioed, cigar-chomping, round-bellied Uncle Charlie, out the front door and down to the basement, and then watch, heart pounding with excitement and anticipation, as they would open the padlock and swing wide the gate-like door to shed light on all that was hidden inside.
These features – Aunt Sarah’s and Uncle Charlie’s basement door and the arched walkway leading to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s over-the-store apartment – looked to me like boundaries separating worlds and transitions from one world to the next. What lies hidden deep within that basement? What’s life like beyond the end of that arched passageway? Ditto for paths, trails, and roads – where do they lead? If I follow this trail around just one more bend or over just one more crest, what will I see, where will it take me?
It wasn’t until seventy years or so after toddlerhood that I was finally able to put words to another yearning that had been hidden and repressed within me from the very beginning. During a desert retreat in Joshua Tree, California, I came upon the scene I have described in another recent post, Freedom Road, and its “aha” message to me.
“Freedom Road”? Why did I give it that name? There’s definitely an archway and a road. But why “freedom”? And what does that have to do with passages?
Well, in a very real sense, as I learned on a later visit to Joshua Tree, passages are bardos. According to Lion’s Roar:
“Bardo is the Tibetan term for the intermediate state or gap we experience between death and our next rebirth. … More generally, the word bardo refers to the gap or space we experience between any two states. The lesser-known bardos described in the traditional texts include the bardo of dreaming, the bardo of meditating, and even the bardo of this life—which is, after all, the intermediate state between birth and death. … We actually experience bardos throughout our day. When you finish reading this article and look up, there will be a moment of bardo, a tiny gap following the end of one activity and preceding the start of another. If you notice them, these bardos of everyday life are places of potential transformation. … Bardos are spaces of potential creativity and innovation, because they create breaks in our familiar routines and patterns. In that momentary space of freedom, the fresh perception of something new and awake may suddenly arise.”
Yes, that’s it! A “space of freedom,” a “transformation”, a passage from one place or state to another. What adventures might await, what might I discover, if I were free to go through one of those doorways, follow one of those trails, peer through one of those windows – cross fearlessly into and through one of those bardos? What’s been holding me back? What have I been afraid of?
Well, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to answer that question, and I’m not there yet. Stay tuned.