a comic interlude

I very much appreciated Will Buckingham's excellent and very kind response to my post yesterday. In the very gentlest of ways he pointed out how his review of Ralph Flore's magnificent book concentrated on themes that I didn't fully address in my own response, and his conclusion, the danger of taking both reverence and irreverence to extremes, is one I very much agree with.

Of course I imagine we differ in the level of irreverence we are comfortable with, after all I'm the kind of person who instinctively recoils when I read a Zen master calling the Buddha a shitstick. Buckingham almost certainly giggles. There's room for, and lessons to be learnt, in each response. No wonder Jack, on his blog, calls me a saint, while others call me all kinds of things!

But some lovely humour came my way this week and, though it hardly makes the criteria for this blog, I just had to share. It's so sweet, and in its portrayal of the characters, my enthusiasms and Ikumi's patience, so true. It happened like this. I've been sick all week with the flu, with only one daily crawl down to the Internet cafe, and Ikumi, naturally enough, was concerned about me.

She sent me a list of symptoms, pointing to H1N1 no doubt, and encouraged me to get to the hospital if I had them. I wrote back asking her not to worry and playfully promising, as you do, that if I die I'll see her in the Pure Land, and could she be sure to chant some Namu Amitabul at the funeral. Well, I often talk about how good a writer Ikumi is, but her response was the very best yet!

"Are we going to meet up in the Pure Land when we die?" she wrote. "I can just imagine the situation:"

"Excuse me, I've just arrived here and I'm looking for Marcus. Do you know where he is?"

"GTM Marcus? Oh yes, of course! And you are Ikumi, right? He often talks about you. But I'm awfully sorry, he left a few days ago. I believe he's gone to Heaven."

"What? Heaven? Why? Is he coming back?"

"Erm, yes, I think so. He said that there was something... erm... Christmas? Anyway, after that, he'll be back."

"Oh, okay, thank you. I'm sure he'll be back by the end of December, he won't want to miss the bell at New Years. I'll just pick some flowers while I wait for him."

Thank you Ikumi!