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Floating: The Art of Meditating While Dodging Fruit

Michael Gigandet

    The day my wife died I went swimming, and my daughter threw an apple at me. My decision to go swimming will sound harsh to people who form conclusions quickly. Harsh isn’t the right word, but the word insensitive doesn’t have any meaning anymore. Odd, maybe that’s the word. Odd for my behavior, not my daughter’s because that’s the way she is.
    The fact is, after two years of watching my wife leave me I had no feelings left. They got used up sitting in doctors’ offices, lying on my cot beside her bed listening to her breathe and standing on the back porch watching the stars and wondering how easily things could be different if any one of a thousand ifs had not been ifs.
    Swimming isn’t accurate either; I floated. That’s what I did.
    It happened like this: the hospice people were bustling around here for awhile and then they weren’t. Everything that needed to be done That Day had been done for a long time—the phone calls, the arrangements, the this and the that people do during a tragedy without talking to you about it first. They left me standing in the middle of our (or is it my now?) living room with nothing to do.
    So I walked into the pool and floated. I didn’t even take my clothes off. I lay on my back, my arms and legs dangling, my head perfectly balanced in my water cradle while I drifted, listening to the phone ring because I was too unmotivated to get out and turn it off, choosing instead to lower my head until the water came up and enclosed my ears like ear muffs, deadening the phone’s shrill, sterile insistence.
    My body went weightless as if I were a leaf too light to sink, and if I kept my eyes closed, my skin, the edges of my being, blurred and disappeared in my mind so that I melted into the water. It didn’t happen all the time, and it didn’t happen all at once. But, sometimes my edges would dissolve like a drop of ink in water until I became so diluted I disappeared, maybe not physically but certainly in a cosmic sense. When this happened, I wasn’t there anymore.
    My daughter came over to check on me that first day, carrying a fruit basket someone had left at the front door I wasn’t answering. I ignored her and tried to will myself back to the land of nothingness, but it didn’t work so I just smiled whenever her lips moved.
    “You have to come out!” She stamped her foot. “I mean it!”
    When I ignored her some more, she threw an apple at me.
    Kerplunk!
    “You can’t spend the rest of your life in there.”
    She left.
    Of course, you can’t float forever. The Day After I got out to eat lunch and the day after that I went to the visitation, and then there was the funeral. But, if I didn’t have a reason to get out of the pool, I floated.

*        *        *

    I should have prepared myself for the quiet in my house. It wasn’t like I did not have warning that all of this was coming.
    I’m a careful man, so I’m not noisy as a rule, but I became even quieter when my wife was sleeping which was all the time at the end. I learned where the wooden floors in my farmhouse cracked and wheezed. A creak, a pop, I learned the sound that each spot makes. I anticipated sounds like the sound of water splashing in the metal sink, the grinding spin of the food disposal, the whir of the A/C when it kicked in. When I placed my silverware on the counter, I heard the metallic click before it happened.
    A silent house killed my father. The authorities will tell you that it was a 22 caliber bullet in the brain administered through the roof of the mouth, but that was just the How of what he did, not the Why.
    After eight failed marriages, countless stepchildren and finding his son from his third marriage hanging from a basement rafter, my father decided he’d had enough. Some people say his heart had been broken too many times, but I think it was his house which grew so silent that his memories, unchecked and relentless, smothered his spark to live and continue his failing in life.
    Floating in my pool, I recalled my mother’s voice telling me that “he took the easy way out”.
    Shooting yourself in the head seems like a difficult thing to do to me, I told her, but she ignored me.
    “He was always selfish.”
    “Now that’s where you’re wrong. He died a thoughtful man, shooting himself in the bathtub where it was easier for me to scrub up the mess. Very considerate I can tell you.”
    It’s these little acts of consideration that show people you care.
    I can hear someone in my kitchen. The person is angry because pots are banging and cabinet doors are slamming.
    Must be my daughter.
    Something drops. “Damn!” She’s cooking.
    “Hey!” Her head appears between the drapes at the sliding door and disappears when I look.
    Soon, she is standing at the side of the pool with a plate. “I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.”
    “I wish you hadn’t, but thank you.”
    I start drifting away.
    “Get out of the pool daddy!”
    I smile.
    “You. Need. To. Get. Out.” Then: “Now, daddy.”
    I’m kicking my feet now, not hard, but enough to retreat to the other side of the pool.
    The sandwich skipped the surface twice and shot past my head.

*        *        *

    I tried to think of constructive things I would do if I could only recollect them once I got out of the pool. I could read a bookshelf of National Geographics which I’d gotten from my father’s house 40 years ago. If I ever went to a party again, I’d be able talk about anything.
    I thought about having someone tear out the master bathroom and install a sauna and a walk-in shower or place speakers throughout the house so I could play through my vinyl and CD collection: Marvin Gaye, Liz Phair, Beatles, Clapton, Sinatra. That would take care of the sound, or the lack of it.
    One afternoon, I decided to act upon a project and make a telephone call, but I went to the movies instead.
    This was a practical decision; I needed a place to be. I could stay out of the way of people who insisted that I stop ignoring them while I floated in my pool, neighbors, my children, widows with casseroles, friends who volunteer on committees.
    When I was a kid our theatre showed one movie all week, and they only showed it once a day. I went to the movies every weekend for the matinee, and I never missed the previews so I could have something to look forward to. These days the Belcourt in Nashville and the Franklin Theatre down in Franklin have gone artsy and show a lot of classics, cult and art films, sometimes marathons of Westerns, film noir, horror movies. For awhile, I spent entire days there, drinking (they serve booze now) and watching movies.
    The loneliest people in the world might be the people who sit in the dark at the end of a movie and listen to the music as the credits roll by on the screen. Either they don’t have any place to go or they need a reason not to go home.
    Isn’t that just floating?
    “You must love movies,” a teenage girl sweeping the aisle told me.
    “No,” I said. “I just lack imagination.”
    I felt bad about being a smart ass, so I returned to floating as a hobby; it seemed safer.

*        *        *

    When I wanted to tell the time, I opened an eye and squinted at the position of the sun. I didn’t need to change memory channels in my mind; it just happened when I felt a breeze waft over me or when some cloud cover moved and the sun reasserted itself warming me one degree at a time.
    I can’t say that my floating meditations gave me any clearer insights into Life, but I decided that smart people are unhappier than simple people.
    I remembered a man in Nashville who was frequently seen walking along 4^th Avenue outside my law office. He did’nt live under a bridge, but he didn’t appear to have the wits to draw a paycheck either. He had a permanent smile and nodded to everyone he met on the sidewalk. The only time I heard him talk was when the mood overtook him and he gave a five-minute religious oration on a street corner. We called him The Prophet. “I’ve seen the future! Repent!” These are the kinds of things he said.
    One day I saw The Prophet walking toward me with a pigeon perched on his shoulder. The people ahead of me smiled at him and looked at the pigeon as he passed them. He smiled, enjoying the attention his feathered friend got him.
    As he passed me, I saw a 7-inch streak of bird shit streaming down the back of his shirt. This must have happened to pirates in buccaneer times, I thought. Tropical parrots probably left a streak of guano as wide as a highway divider line.
    I wondered what the expression on The Prophet’s face was when he changed his shirt and discovered that he was walking around with a smear of bird shit down his back. Would he say to himself: “I didn’t see that in the future!”

*        *        *

    “You need to sell this place,” my daughter has returned. She is holding a coffee mug, and I am watching in case I have to dodge it.
    I’ve thought about selling the farm and moving to Florida where I’d lived a few years in the 1960s. It would be nice to smell the salt in the air again and listen to the waves while sitting on a patio with an Old Fashioned in my hand and a stupid look on my face.
    Perhaps I could find a bungalow near a beach with a beach-themed bar I can walk to, one with fishing nets draped on the wall and cheap ceramic shells and brightly painted, plastic fish glued onto it. No fruity drinks in coconut husks with umbrellas for me. My drink will be the Old Fashioned.
    My favorite bar will be the one where the bartender asks you how you like your Old Fashioned, sweet or on the bitter side, and whether you have a favorite whiskey. That tells you that the bartender knows what he’s doing.
    Since I will be living near the beach, I see myself in a straw hat. No colorful hatbands with a plastic tennis racket or golf club glued onto it for me. I have standards. I can see myself in baggy shorts and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt.
    I’ll start my day drinking shortly after noon. By late afternoon I should be ready to walk back to my bungalow. Walking is excellent exercise for old people. Hopefully, there will be a sidewalk although drunkenly collapsing into a soft sand dune has its advantages.
    I will not be one of those old men who go about on the beach with a tiny shovel and a metal detector. I’d rather drink and think about all the things that might have happened to me if I’d been smarter or more reckless.
    At night, I will grill shishkebab. If no one is about, and there won’t be because I won’t have any friends, not even a woman of questionable character, I will sit on my patio and eat right off the skewer.
    I can then collapse on the sofa and watch a mind-numbing reality show but with the sound turned down so I can insult the actors faking crisises and pretending shock, anger and surprise.
    Maybe on my next trip out of the pool I’ll call a real estate agent. That is, if I am feeling motivated.
    “This has got to end,” my daughter says and leaves. “I’m going to work.”

*        *        *

    Breathe calmly and the water won’t lap at your face. Adjust your arms and legs to maintain a perfect equilibrium. Floating may be the closest I will come to returning to the womb—isolated, nourished, free from anxiety and sound, a beautiful nothingness. That is my idea of Heaven. It exists side by side with my idea of Hell, a state of acute awareness where everything that ever happened to me is recalled, regretted and ruthlessly reviewed.
    “You’re going to grow fins daddy.” My daughter sounds unhappy. Again.
    “I’m meditating.”
    If you leave out the part about making your mind a blank, something I only achieved occasionally, I wasn’t lying.
    I thought a lot about Heaven, the Great Nothingness.
    I long ago gave up on Heaven-like ambitions, but when I’m on my own deathbed I do expect to be praying like a son-of-a-bitch. That right there is a good reason to just die in your sleep unexpectedly. If you don’t know you’re about to die, you can avoid being a hypocrite in this one final, crucial scene in your life.
    I’m not saying I’m not a religious person; I spent my childhood in church. I’m just saying I’m resigned to my fate. I am a resigned person.
    I’ve decided that there are three stages of religious belief for most people with a church background.
    First, you believe in a Heaven for good people and a real Hell for bad people.
    Sometime in middle age, when you realize that you’re ineligible for Heaven, you retain the Heaven concept with some eternal pleasantries associated with floating but decide that Hell is the Big Nothingness. People who go to Hell don’t know it; they just don’t get the reward of going to Heaven. Knowing my deficiencies better than anyone except God, I am resigned to divine ineligibility and to an eternity of nonexistence.
    If you live long enough, you reach a third phase and decide neither Heaven nor Hell ever existed, that they were created by men who could not accept that they were just biological organisms. Thinking about the state of nothingness seems like a waste of time. Still, you turn hypocrite on your death bed and pray like a s.o.b.
    I think I graduated from Phase 1 all the way to Phase 3 in that pool. That’s a kind of peace I suppose.
    “Get out now daddy!”
    “I’m doing water therapy.”
    “Therapy my ass.”
    “You need to work on your attitude,” I tell her.
    Kerplunk!
    I’m not sure what that was, a banana maybe, but she missed me.

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