The term ‘swami busters’ crossed my path a few days ago and amid sparkles of internal laughter, memories of adventure and friendship flew front and center.
Here we go:
Living in Boston in 1970-ish, a special friend of my brother’s on whom I had had a high school crush, bumped into me and I into him in a Cambridge ice cream shop.
Byron was from Houlton, Maine. he was lean and tall and freckled, with a lively, mischievous way about him, and to me he looked as if he should be chopping down trees in the woods and building a cabin for US. The ‘bumping’ made me blush and speechless.
‘Well look who it is! I remember you, dancing to the Drifters at the Andover prom with Bink, and all I wanted was for you to dance with me.” (said he)
Pulling myself together….”You should have asked me!”
Moving on to a bench in Harvard Square.
Byron had dropped out of Dartmouth because he had wandered into a meeting being held by a Hindu guru and was so captivated by his message that he gave up his life and his essence to follow the demands of this man. He missionaryed me into joining him. I am allergic to missionaries, but it was Byron, so I obeyed….for the moment. He wrote down an address on a slip of paper and told me that my life would change if I would go ‘there’.
I was teaching pre-school at the time and was in and out of hospital therapies and so it took several days to sort out my schedule for this Sherlock Holmes visit.
The following Friday afternoon I rode the MTA to Brookline and followed the instructions on the paper scrap. In a non descript neighborhood, a ranch-style house, with a flagstone walkway which I was tempted to hopscotch on, I rang the doorbell and a tiny old woman with blue hair, wrapped in a mink stoll, opened the door and said “Follow me.”
Another rabbit hole?
I followed her around the house to a door that led into a finished basement, that was filled with burning candles and incense. I began telling her my name and that I was a friend of Byron’s and she cut me off saying that she didn’t need to know any of that, but that she had a dream about me and had been spoken to, and that I was to live with her for the the next few months.
Alert! Alert! Alert!
I stood up, saying that this was a misunderstanding and that I had come in support of my friend.
She dynamically dropped the mink stoll,. stood up and said that I could leave, but would be back, because this was a religion of living masters, that there were six around the world now, as the world was in crisis, that there were no women, but I was IT and one of the six. That I could not escape this.
I excused myself and caught the MTA home.
Two weeks later, my best friend Samm, a musician, who had a gig as the piano player at the Gardner Museum, got the weekend off and we decided to hitchhike up to her family’s summer home in Jeffersonville, Vermont. Samm was robust and heartily oblivious to restrictions of any kind, and so when she and I were picked up by an auctioneer who rattled and prattled his auctioneering lingo to the point of hypnotism, she joined him exuberantly and I just watched. When we turned off the main road, Samm didn’t notice, I questioned, but was met with energetic auction talk, with his ‘I need need need need a banana now now now and know a p-p-p-p-p-place’, I didn’t argue.
The ‘place’ was an ashram and I was whisked up to a room and locked in, while Samm was told that the ride was over and she should leave.
Hahahahaha.
I stayed in my room with water and bananas and books galore wirtten by this guru, for three days.
Of course there is much between the lines here, BUT Samm made it back to Boston and then returned full on with passion and a James Bondish plan, and she RESCUED ME!!!!!!
The End
I never heard from these people again, but the Byron story has another chapter, another day.
All of this because of ‘Swami busters!’