Bensonhurst Sutra: Tales of an Italian American Buddhist (eBook)

Chapter One.

My Beautiful Cousins
in Bensonhurst

I used to listen to an album by a Canadian singer named Ferron. Like Joanna Macy, she was an activist. In one song she asked her listeners the question: “Don’t you want to see yourself that strong?” I imagined myself marching, chanting, holding a sign, over and over, showing up, and I knew, “That’s not me.” I was not a performer, not brave. I couldn’t get on the bus. I bargained on the virtues of a quiet life. But now, finally, having cleared away some of the conditioning that kept me hidden, I say, “Yes. I do want to see myself that strong.” And it’s about time. But it means something different now. Now I understand that for me being strong means continuing to put my words on paper. I am a writer. Writing is my way to do the work that must be done.

Can I heal the burning forests with my words? Can I open a heart? Heal an ideological rift between me and a cousin: someone just like me, who went to the same church as a child, someone with whom I now have a huge disagreement. It doesn’t seem to diminish our love for one another, but it is important. He and I have to know one another more deeply, learn to talk with love in our hearts. And how will that happen?

We had a family gathering several years ago. One of my cousins told me that they had made up a list of things they could not talk about with cousin Geri: global warming, racism, guns, abortion.

Global warming? Really? They don’t believe in global warming? Is there any point in driving 75 miles to get to this cousins’ party in my polluting car?

We drink wine and eat good food. We sit with one another and remember the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, where all my aunts and uncles moved. My father, who was a lawyer, found houses for everyone. All of us were in the same neighborhood, within walking distance of one another, within walking distance of our grandmother, who loved us fiercely. We remember Uncle Johnny, with his hearty laugh, his face so animated when he smiled. He died at age 53 in a fire that burned in his house in the middle of the night. He had almost made it out through a window when he collapsed from smoke inhalation and his body folded on itself at the windowsill. I can hear my grandmother sitting in the mourner’s chair in the funeral parlor—the funeral parlor that was called DeLuca’s, no less, that’s how connected I am to that institution in the heart of Bensonhurst where we all grew up. My grandmother sat in front of the casket where my uncle lay, in his dark suit. And she wailed, “No more Uncle Johnny.” The room was carpeted, and the air smelled heavily of flowers. There was the great broken heart of roses from my uncle’s wife, my Aunt Carol, who was also my godmother. The other uncles stood at the edges of the room in their suits, their young sons tall and straight next to them, like an honor guard, and the women, the aunts and daughters, sat with their handbags in their laps, and we murmured words of comfort to one another.

I realize as I write this how much I miss it all, even the mourning: the closeness of us loving one another, holding one another, showing up. This was what it meant to be Italian and Catholic and family. On Christmas and Easter, we would climb the stairs to our grandmother’s second-floor apartment with our new shoes and our beautiful hats, gleaming-faced children in holiday clothes. Grandma would hold our faces, she would kiss us, and she would say to each of us, facia brutta, ugly face, to ward off the evil spirits. And I know that feeling exactly now as I see my own grandchildren’s luminous faces. And all my cousins, they too now behold their grandchildren’s faces and they say, either aloud or to themselves, facia brutta, because we learned that kind of loving early, and those memories and those feelings never leave us. Still today we laugh and whisper about our common stories, the grandfather whom everyone adored but who had his dark alcoholic moments, the uncles as boys bringing home live eels for Christmas Eve dinner and watching them escape from their bags on the subway. “I’m telling you, Ger’,” says my cousin Barbie, “you can’t make this stuff up.”

I love these people, my cousins, my sisters and brothers. I love you! Do you hear me? And I worry now, as I write, that if you ever read this, you will feel betrayed. But I write not to betray you, but to register my support for our children’s home, for the health of the earth, the air they will breathe, the sky above them. I write to register my concern for all of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren. I may need to say this on every page!

There is one particular cousin whose opinions I know now mostly from his observations on Facebook. He is a graceful writer, commenting eloquently on the state of a football team and its lousy coach, or on his wife’s delicious manicotti which he gets up to eat in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep, or on the state of the country. And even though I often disagree with his opinions--this dear cousin, who has been struggling with cancer for years, who is so brave, undaunted, bordering on miraculous in the face of his suffering--I admire his courage and the ease and authority of his voice.

I sometimes write back to him on Facebook, because a lot of my cousins and his friends read his posts. And I can tell that some of them, the women usually, hear me sometimes. But he won’t let me in. I try my best to write from a place of cousinhood and compassion. But it’s hopeless. “Get real, cuz,” he says, when I complain about guns. Guns! We are surrounded by grandchildren who go to schools just like the ones we see on television, the ones filled with mourners to whom we are enjoined to send our “thoughts and prayers.” But he cannot let himself be afraid. He was my little cousin, a boy with hair like corn silk standing on a stoop in Brooklyn, where one could try out the world under the watchful eyes of parents, hidden like birds behind porch window shades. It was a form of pastoral, the green world of “springtime, the only pretty ring time,” where the trees kept us safe.

But now we are in the red world of violence, in the smoke of global catastrophe: But only if you admit it to be so. Otherwise, the flooded basement is just a bad storm, a singular event. Never do we put two and two together unless it’s about some girl whose belly is growing and she’s doing you-know-what with you-know-who. Shit happens, cuz. No worries. He does not have time for my nonsense. I refer to myself on his Facebook page as his annoying cousin who still loves him. And I know that beyond our deep disagreements, he loves me back—as if our love in person, at this cousin’s party, is deeper and more real than the argument over whether our children are being killed by young men with automatic rifles or whether the planet is being destroyed.

So at our cousins party, we don’t talk about anything on the list. We just revel in each other’s presence. But can we ever move forward that way? Who can intervene for us? The beings of the future? They are here already. All the beaming little faces, one more heartbreaking in its beauty than the next. Can our grandchildren tell us that they are becoming afraid to go to school or that the world has grown too hot for them, the forests are burning, the shorelines are eroding, the surf is littered with garbage, the glaciers are melting, the birds are dying. Joanna Macy lists the hundreds of creatures we have allowed to become extinct. What do we say to those beautiful children whose photos we post on Facebook for their first Holy Communion, their Confirmation? We live in our suburban worlds and we keep our blinders on.

II

I think often of the Buddhist ideal of the Bodhisattva: the ones who take a vow that they will not enter heaven (or become enlightened, as some of my Buddhist friends would prefer me to say) until every other being has entered heaven. Thich Nhat Hanh called Martin Luther King a Bodhisattva. Mahatma Gandhi was surely another. And there is Thich Nhat Hanh himself. And Joanna Macy? We can all name someone. It is an impossible ideal, but it puts one in an exalted state of mind. Be your best self. Vow to keep the faith (until, unfortunately, somebody understands how powerful you are and kills you). At the end of Buddhist sittings, we offer the merit of our practice to all beings everywhere: may they be happy, may they be free of suffering, may they be joyful, may they be at ease. We count on that state of mind to spread itself throughout the world, and thus, in however many small ways, to change it.

But for the moment, I am just a misguided liberal to my cousins. Or part of me is. The other part is my beloved father’s daughter, the one who stood with them in my Easter hat, the one who loved and was loved by our grandmother, the one who joins arms with them at weddings to sing and sway to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” that famous song about loneliness that is woven into the dream of our lives.

The day after the cousins’ party, I wake up with a sense of guilt that there is this tension between us that dissolves as we hold one another’s hands, as we embrace to say hello, to say goodbye. Another dear friend reminds me that it is not okay to mourn all the time. We do not need to ignore our sorrow. But we have miraculous lives. There are miracles of seeds exploding into flowers....