Free Lost In Place by Mark Salzman Page B

4:32 to 4:34 all we knew was that it got dark out. It looked like the end of any ordinary cloudy day. Several of the astronomers around us were so frustrated they cried; one tore at his hair, kicked the wheels of his car and shouted things I had heard only once before, when I was ten years old, had my brother and sister on my lap in the car and tried to scare them by opening the passenger door while Dad was driving.
    My father, on the other hand, was entirely under control. He had already dealt with the loss by lying quietly in the tent by himself before the disaster actually occurred, so while many of the other astronomers were just beginning to realize what had happened and were only now writhing in agony, my father was already figuring out our route back to the main highway. He emerged from the tent and began pulling up its stakes so that we could be on the road before dinner. It occurred to me then, with so many heartbroken grown men around me to compare him with, that he was unusual in the way he dealt with disappointment. I thought, What an effort it must take for him to spare us the sight of him rolling around on the ground and pounding the earth with his fists, as one astrophotographercamped next to us was doing. I realized that this was the first opportunity of my life to reverse our roles—to act like a man and console him the way he had always done for me when I was disappointed. I prepared as much of a speech as any twelve-year-old can compose in his head in a hurry and approached him.
    Just before I reached him, however, Dad stood up stiffly and started touching his mouth with one of his hands. He turned toward me and I saw a puzzled expression in his eyes. When he moved his hand away, I saw that both his lips were bright purple and swollen to comic-book proportions. We both stood there, too confused to say anything, when a woman, whose lips were also swollen, walked over and said, “Don’t worry—it’s a kind of spider that lives around here. My husband got bit this morning, too. The swelling goes down in about an hour.”
    I’m sure it was Erich who started giggling first. He was always the one who started things. Rachel and even my mother got into it, and before I knew it I was laughing harder than any of them. The puzzlement faded out of Dad’s expression and turned to annoyance, and he finished pulling up the tent stakes without a word. That doomed eclipse was the only time nature gave me a textbook opportunity, plump with symbolic as well as concrete value, to become a man right before my father’s eyes. Unfortunately, what nature giveth, nature also taketh away: the spider got to my father before I did.
    So when Dad told me at the town dump that I had to get used to things not working out in my favor, I was prepared to agree with him, but how does one get used to disappointment? I’d already tried, without success, to get used to physical pain by making myself feel it a lot; settingmyself up for disappointment on purpose as a means of building up a tolerance for it probably wouldn’t work either. I imagined that a Zen master would say that the root of all disappointment is expectation, and that all expectations are illusions. If one could accept the present moment as it was and let go of the need to control the future, disappointment wouldn’t have anything to hang on to. Like all of my Zen insights, however, the idea of letting go of the need to control the future sounded great but I had no idea how to put it into practice. Accept the present moment—immaturity, unpopularity, anxiety, celibacy—and let go of the desire to become an adult, have good friends, discover a way of life I could enjoy and find out, at last, why the French call an orgasm “the small death”? Not bloody likely.
    My dad’s approach seemed to lie somewhere between a Zen master’s (“Come to think of it, this broken leg allows me to experience a new kind of physical sensation, and presents new challenges for