When a face peered in from outside my 28th floor condo window, my stomach leaped up to my throat. To my horror, the head, unattached, floated up, beyond my sight. I had entered a Stephen King world.
After a moment, I realized that the “head” might have been a crinkled piece of brown paper, about one foot square. Its wrinkles created highlights and shadows that imitated the contours of a face. My heart’s rhythm returned to normal. I ran to the window and saw the wrinkled paper dancing in the wind at a distance. In all my years on the 28th floor, I’d never seen such large flying trash at this height.
At the moment the “face” appeared, I had been talking to my writing partner on the phone, debating the best form of the word “imagine” to place in a sentence: imagined, imaginary, or imagination. It seemed as if the word itself had suddenly displayed an example in front of my eyes.
In my life, there’s been two other instances when an unexpected face loomed close. Each one shocked me. When I lived in a cabin in a forest, I kept a wood pile on the front porch. While sitting near the living room’s picture window, a face with nearly human-sized eyes popped up on the other side of the glass, only inches from me. I screamed and ran across the room. When I cautiously looked back, I noticed a tell-tale bandit visage. A racoon had climbed to the top of the pile of wood and calmly watched my antics. I laughed at myself, but didn’t return to my chair, too close to the racoon for comfort.
Another time a face burst upon me proved to be stranger still. In an emergency room, I had never felt so ill, vomiting non-stop. I waited near the imaging machine for a respite in the stomach upset, so I could lay still enough for the machine to get a clear picture of my innards. Misery enveloped me. All at once, I saw the Buddha’s face come close to mine. I felt enormous relief. I was filled with peace and a new feeling I could only describe as “okay-ness,” a deep sense that I would be fine whatever happened, whether I lived or died. At that moment, dying seemed possible and I savored the calm Buddha brought me. Physically, this vision helped to heal me because relaxation allowed my body to become still enough for the imaging machine to do its work.
Buddhist sutras, in several places, speak of Buddha’s face revealing itself to a person, which is regarded as a sublime experience; it certainly was for me. Perhaps because I had chanted the sutras hundreds of times for thirty years, this possibility implanted itself in my subconscious.
The next day, when I felt better, I met the doctor who had been treating me, Dr. Ito, a Japanese American. Much to my embarrassment, I realized that the previous day, when leaning over to examine me, he had become, in my semi-delirium, the Buddha. I didn’t mention this to him. On the other hand, the emotional experience felt real to me at the time and had provided relief when I needed it: I deeply valued that part of “seeing the Buddha’s face.”
In my experience, faces that suddenly appear at close range have inspired extreme feelings, from horror to grace. In retrospect, each one had been strange and delightfully ridiculous.
Real Life – Real Laughs:
Humor When You Need It Most
Cate Burns’ thirty-eight non-fiction stories of heartfelt humor explore society’s foibles and personal snafus with insightful zingers that will delight readers. Burns casts an unstinting, cock-eyed look at personal change, friendship, sanity and courage.
“Absolutely LOVE the descriptions in this work. Very, very, very clever and, dare I say it? -unique. This is refreshing, funny, inventive and delightful.” -Sharon Whitehill, Ph. D.
