Sunday was as hot and quiet as a charcoal grill toasting its coals. I was on my second quart of cold tea when she drove up and just sat there in her little truck with roll-up windows.
It was almost too hot to open the brain. I went out on the porch, and we nodded. I asked her in for chilled, not iced, tea. No, she said, I don’t want anything. I just want to sit here in the shade.
Her head was sweating, something I hadn’t seen in our 40 years of friendship. It took at least two minutes for her to change her mind, unclose then reclose her door, and walk up the steps. She sagged into a chair like a pile of laundry.
“I always made fun of old people who complained about the weather,” she said. “Well, here we are.”
She reminded me that it was this hot in 1980, back when people with no AC slept on the front porch because an uninsulated house was so hot the devil wanted it back. People lucky enough to live in a stone house cruised right through the whole summer with hardly a glisten. The best jobs in town were at night.
“Animals that are stressed, including us, spread viruses at a higher rate when they’re too hot,” she said.
I asked if she had anything going on in her head that would get our minds away from discomfort.
“No,” she said. “The world is burning.”
“OK. Maybe. But why aren’t we doing everything we can to make life easier and more fun for the next seven generations? Are we really so ashamed of how we’ve altered the physics of the planet – so much that plants and animals can’t breathe normally – that we’re willing to die and take the next seven generations with us?”
She said she didn’t really think physics was the right word, she preferred the word karma.
We both sat upright. It was on.
“Karma and physics are both all about energy,” she said. “We can’t do anything about physics, and we can do everything about karma.” She was so sure of herself that I refused to agree.
“Yes, they’re both all about energy,” I said. “But if we think physics controls us and we control karma, what’s the difference? They both vibrate, they both affect us, they both tell us things we ask them to repeat.
“For instance, physics helps us understand magnetic resonance ultrasounds and karma helps us understand the most confusing concept on earth, us.”
She said I made no sense and that I had no idea what my big words meant. She referred to them as a blunder.
We laughed hard enough to spill the last of the tea, but gem that she is, she had an iced cooler full of PBR in cans in the bed of her Datsun.
When we cracked those, we cracked the meaning of life.
It all came down to karma.
Karma might be more misunderstood than physics. She said karma is getting what you deserve. I said that would mean we only do something good because we think it will be repaid.
“It would be treating karma as a spiritual ATM,” I told her. “As long as we do good deeds, we can bank them and use them when needed. That’s like calling karma fate. Karma isn’t fate, reward, or punishment. Karma is energy. Karma is the action, not the result. We create karma with our every move, every day.
“When we tell someone to beware of karmic whiplash, we are asking them to hand over their free will, their power, to fate. We give up our ability to change our lives, outlooks, circumstances. Tell me I’m right.”
Instead, she wanted to tell me all about Buddhists believing that past lives are karmic, so if you did something unseemly in another life, it would haunt you in this one.
“That’s another reason I’m not Buddhist.” I emphasized the “another” although I had no reasons not to be Buddhist. PBR will do that.
We agreed on some things. We were in accord on people praying way too much – what is that about?
And we agreed that if we are ever judged, it will only be on how we treated our fellow man.