Rubbery Dmitry, the Mad Monk Holds Steady

Black Lightning Strikes The Trees - Photo by J. Scott, 1996

His life was preordained to be one of privilege, wealth, and luxury. He was conceived on March 2nd, 1918 in St. Petersburg, during a riot on the first anniversary of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication. Of course, not everything that's preordained actually comes to pass, and before he was born, Dmitry Kalashnik's parents had lost everything that they couldn't fit into two suitcases, fled the Russian revolution in the dead of night, and washed up on Ellis Island. He was born on Christmas Eve - over two weeks late, and "very large."

Things went a bit downhill, from there. Just before little Dmitry's fourth birthday, his father, whose only marketable skill had been investing and counting money, succumbed to being run over by a streetcar (as so many future hoboes' fathers were). His mother, who hadn't known a minute of work of any kind, back home, stretched her late husband's meager life insurance as far as it would go, but after two years, it was gone. She could bake, and her pirogi were the talk of their neighborhood, so she was able to find work in a bakery, and she followed the shop's owner when he relocated to Pittsburgh in 1928. She married him not long after that, and for her, life began to resemble life, again.

We all know what happened next. The global economy melted into the fire and burned into a stinky smoke, Dmitry's mother and step-father lost their home and moved into a tiny apartment, and focused all of their energy on keeping their sweets and pirogi shop alive. The boy rebounded for a while, but finally left home in 1930, barely eleven years old, and survived as best he could the competing ravages of homelessness and puberty. 

While he learned to live outside, eventually becoming a full-fledged hobo, albeit a terribly young one, his mother learned to live without him, relying on her faith to paint a mental picture of him that wasn't crushingly tragic. In St. Petersburg, she and her first husband had been among the last of the Russian Orthodox Buddhists, and she had spent Dmitry's formative years working to instill in him the values of the great teacher. As she absorbed the sermons of her new husband's American Catholic priests in Pittsburgh, she prayed that she had set her son upon a decent path.

A lifetime later (10 years), having rebounded a dozen times from a dozen different horrors that would have sent lesser men to their whimpering deaths, Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk held steady. He had next to nothing of his own, and that suited him fine. His life was simple. He was walking and riding the rails of freedom and migrant labor, and he was relatively content. He remembered neither the scripture, nor the teachings of Buddha - save for the lessons of stillness, from the latter. "Be still," he heard his mother whisper, "be still."

Life screamed at him to run, or to fight, or to run, fighting into the abyss of the horrible nothing, but he forced himself, shaking, to be as motionless as possible. He mentally reread the headlines of the day - Jews being rounded up and sent to camps, where there were reports of mass slaughter. War machines. Troops here, talks there, fleets, riots, death tolls, more talks, rumors, smoke, blood... 

He practiced his Buddhist breathing. He realized that he hadn't paid nearly enough attention to the lessons on breathing. He shrugged and tried to fake it until he made it, and he breathed all wrong. The world had gone mad, and it was all over essentially nothing, and the opposing forces were sworn to keep fighting until well beyond death, because the other side was so deeply, ungodly WRONG, and that, as they say, was that. 

Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk closed his eyes. He thought. You might say he prayed. You'd be wrong, but forgiven for saying that. He heard his mother again - be still. He snorted, for although he knew exactly what it meant to be still, he had yet to master - or even honestly attempt - the art of being still. 

He took a deep breath, told all of his personal woes - as well as those of the universe around him - to give him a minute, and searched for stillness.

And it stopped. All of it.

And he heard his mother say, "Good, good. Steady... Now what?"

Dear Stillness

Dear Stillness,

     My name is Joe, and although I very much doubt that you remember me, we have met several times.  To be fair, it's a bit of a stretch to say that we've "met."  Your carriers, I've met.  You, I've only seen.  I've admired you - marveled, actually.  I long for just a sliver of what you have.

The first time I saw you, when I was seventeen, you seemed utterly foreign to me.  You took the form of my best friend's aunt, a retired teacher from the island of St. Thomas.  You were constantly surrounded by activity.  Your husband laughed and joked incessantly, and your brother was - and I presume still is - a whirlwind of noise and adventure.  Yet, somehow, you maintained your serenity.  You had an elegance, a way of gliding through all the chaos with a calm, warm smile.  I'll never know how you did it.

Gossamer Cumulus Fluff Over St. Thomas - 1995

A few years later, I saw you in the person of my sophomore crush in college.  Everyone thought you were an airhead of some sort, so slow to speak up, so blue-eyed and faraway.  I knew you were more than that - smarter than all of us, and full of the same insecurities and nineteen-year old angst that plagued us all.  You were probably just counting to ten before responding or reacting to anything or anyone, but it came across to me as the kind of stillness that usually accompanies one much older than you were.  Even if you were totally faking your serenity, it was a skill that I lacked, and I envied you for possessing it.

[Photo deleted - release not obtained]

Then, you appeared as a fictitious character, portrayed by a young and relatively inexperienced actress.  I must admit that in 1992, I utterly failed to notice that it was you, but a few months ago, when I took a closer look, there was no doubt.  As portrayed by the not-yet-hated-at-the-time Christina Ricci, little Wednesday Addams in the big-screen adaptation of "The Addams Family" showed me a new facet of you.  You weren't just still - you were cool.  It was as if movement of any kind - physical or emotional or otherwise - was simply beneath you.  Ricci was like ten years old when she did that movie - how did you DO that?  I would be thrilled to have just a day of being so committed to motionlessness.

Finally, you might think that I'd been too busy to have noticed, but your presence in my father did not escape me.  Even before his stroke, you had him sitting quietly at the edge of the action.  Not quite a wallflower - he was perfectly willing to participate in a gathering, and when he did so, he was extremely capable.  But, he didn't need to move, to make a sound, to be heard.  He -you- would just as soon observe, note, learn, and be.  He could do small talk, but by that last decade, even I could see that he abhorred speaking in the interest of the avoidance of silence.  This was, to me, one of his greatest gifts and, Dear Stillness, he got it from you.  It made those few words he did venture to say just that much weightier.  

The Man and His Books

I don't regret the fact that I inherited his temper and his sarcasm - but not his stillness.  However, I do both rue and lament it.  Yes, I stole that line. I'm not as clever as he was, either.

Anyway, Stillness.  I like you.  I admire you.  I want what you have.  I don't even have the excuse of a house full of children, or a high-octane career, but for whatever reason I cannot reach you.  I won't stop trying.  

To be still.  To be at peace.  Just for a moment.  Must be nice.

Love, Joe 

Rock Creek Valley Elementary School.  Snow.  Night.  Stillness.