Dinosaur Bees

Guru-ville
Siri Scott

IT IS 1999. You are not partying, contrary to Prince’s vision of how those temporal digits would play out; you are standing in the small living room of a ranch house that could easily be mistaken for a common suburban lair, but is, in fact, the epicenter of a Sikh commune. Outside, in the driveway, a Rolls Royce competes with some strutting peacocks for who can capture the attention of the square-pupilled goats loitering nearby. A massive portcullis-like studded wooden gate warns outsiders of the severe consequences of breaching the secure perimeter of this Espanola, New Mexico compound. There are guns here, way more guns than peacocks. In the distance, the desert meets the sky without any talk of trees.

The only exceptional thing about this living room is the extreme size of its entertainment center, which features the largest TV set you have ever seen. It’s so large you could actually climb into it and go to sleep if only a black & white Bob Hope movie involving jungle safari hats and flat punch lines were not already occupying its insides with a flickering tumult. To your right you can see the guru, a Sikh yogi who, 23 years ago, named you Siri Lakshmi after the Hindu goddess of abundance. You have not seen this man since you were three and your parents renounced their turbans and the tyranny of ashram living.

The yogi is fat, grey in hair and complexion. His feet are up, his body nearly horizontal in the barcolounger’s velour reclined embrace, and there is a pretty white-swathed girl kneeling at his bare feet, rubbing them silently. He is aimed toward the TV and, even when he is not laughing at some joke from the movie, his rotund flesh mound is jiggling, vibrating continuously. You stare at this spectacle, this figure from the once-upon-a-time-ago legend of your hippie origin, a past populated by weak memories of food tastes or smells, but few other things you can claim as your own. This past marinates in the larger energy of a guru reputed to have been akin to the ‘all-powerful Oz,’ but who, now, is no more than a dumpling of decaying flesh in a lazy boy who complains to you that his followers will not let him ‘drop his body’.

What you don’t know yet is that he is not vibrating with some cosmic yogic frequency. He is merely an old man in a motorized vibrating chair, and the electric cord connecting him to the wall is a stronger tether than any strand of the past that might bind you now to him or to this desert cult.

Portent-ious

ON THE DAY I got scammed at a gas pump by a Gypsy con artist, I’d started the morning off wrong, chopping a carrot—so large it bested my forearm in girth—with a dull steak knife, resulting in carrot shrapnel all over my shirt, my face, and some in my hair.

The Gypsy had asked me at one point, “Do you work in a restaurant?” It seemed odd at the time, but I later discovered a large chunk of carrot crowning the cowlick above my right eye.

Amateur gumshoeing=gum-on-my-emotional-shoe?

IN THE THROES of writing my application essay for grad school about peak learning experiences, I took a foray into a long-neglected annex of my scholastic memory, which left me full of warm feelings for the science teacher I had from fifth through eighth grade at Talcott Mountain Academy, a tiny private school for “gifted” kids. While sitting here in front of the unnatural midnight wattage of my full spectrum lamp, I suddenly felt the urgent need to locate this teacher online so I could thank her for having been so awesome. As comedic happenstance would have it, I Googled her misremembered name (Mary E___) and ended up finding a profile featuring a woman by that name posed with a bee-costumed dog.

I was really excited by both the mere 3 seconds it had taken me to find her (yay internet superfast-highway!) and also the fact that after all of this time she’d chosen to represent publicly with a dog in a bee costume. “We are so kindred!” my line of thinking went, followed immediately by the smug sense of generosity engendered by my observation that my “friending” her would bring her friend tally up to thirty-three—oh, baby boomers on Facebook, your legions are small but heartfelt! But when I took my eyes off the hypnotic allure of the faux antennae and scrutinized Mary’s face, I started to doubt that it was in fact my old teacher nuzzling this fine canine specimen. Via Google Chat, I ran it by my friend, Lafe (who’d also had her as a teacher) and he was like, “No, her name was Kathy, not Mary!”

After cleansing my palate of this folly via that deranged sleep-deprivation laughter, I proceeded with a Google search for her actual name. Sadly, this yielded an obituary written by a loving daughter, which left me feeling shocked and bereaved. Upon closer inspection, however, it became apparent that this was a Baltimore listing and thus not likely my former teacher.

Internet! You have taken me on a roller coaster ride of joy and sadness, both of which were actually just attributable to the fiction my hard-working mind generated and believed. High on the love-juices of nocturnal childhood nostalgia, I really almost sent that stranger an effusive message. This stranger-Mary will forever be oblivious to the fact that some other stranger was, to paraphrase the sage and melodic Fivel, “Somewhere out there, thinking of [her] and loving her tonight.” I am reminded: I can love anyone, anywhere, anytime. It’s mine to project.

SIRI LAKSHMI SCOTT is a proponent of hugs, interspecies reincarnation, and the fine art of the over-share. She lives in Friendship County, Northampton, MA and divides her time between the future, the past, and the present. She gave birth to a fluorescent chapbook of essays, Refer To My Blog, this past spring, and can be found at threedogparty.com and teapeeandsaucers. blogspot.com.