CHANGING LANES

Long before the painting, decades before his first exhibition, ages before that faint, frisky glimmer of genius began to manifest itself and spoil any chance for a serene and contented life, my good friend David Schoffman had dreams of becoming a professional athlete. As an urban New Yorker of the Mosaic tradition, exotic activities like soccer and baseball were almost completely unavailable - the largest expanse of green in his neighborhood in Brooklyn was the astroturfed litterbox of his aunt Shoshana's Balinese - so like all good Israelites he chose basketball.

And bowling.

Bowling, as anyone who has tried it can tell you, is the closest thing the Americans have to Zen Buddhism. Once one becomes adequately proficient, all that is further required is the achievement of complete and total detachment. Theoretically, if you can roll one strike you can roll a dozen more since the variables remain numbingly consistent. 

All that stands in the way of perfect mastery are the bustling synapses of the modern mind. 

David's passion for pins was so vehement and his aspiration toward perfect esho funi (the Dharma of disciplined disengagement) so extreme that he moved to Shiraoi in northern Japan to study zazen or what we call in French, méditation assise. 

After three years he still couldn't properly position his ankles for a decent Burmese lotus-squat so he threw in his toga, turned over his bowl and returned with his stubborn 148 average to Sid's Seventeen Lanes on Whitestone Expressway in Flushing.


A couple of sprained wrists and a herniated lumbar convinced my friend David to hang up his slippers and give the low physical impact of painting and drawing a try.

The rest, of course, is contemporary art history and though he probably couldn't manage a 5-7-10 split anymore he can still deliver a decent Theravada Metta Sutta.

As long as he doesn't have to sit on the floor.