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Daily Connect: The Last Falafel Ever - An Incredible Personal Story of Impermanence
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Last night, Patrick Groneman and I grabbed some falafels and hung out after work at a small place we sometimes go after meditation class at IDP on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, The Three Monkeys. It's a nice wrap and falafel place, but there's no use recommending it to New Yorkers right now. We hung out for a while - Patrick reading for a Shambhala class on emptiness (he's like that), while I took a short break from preparing the five dharma talks I'm giving this weekend, reading The Hunger Games, a dystopian scifi novel (I'm like that) that is pretty damn engrossing, and probably not really suitable for the pre-teens it's targeted toward. An Italian soccer match blared on the tv above us.
We hung out for a while after the falafels were gone, studying, relaxing. I felt at ease, despite the arc of January duties that have left me without a full day off before February. Then the girl behind the counter stepped out into the tiny restaurant area and said quietly, almost playfully, "Um, you should all probably leave. There's a fire that we can't put out."
We looked up and saw a grease fire flailing from the grill behind the counter, and the cook struggling to figure out what to do about it. Slowly (too slowly, my nervous mind thought), Patrick gathered up his notes on the illusory nature of appearance and followed me outside. "It's gonna blow," the cook, also surprisingly nonchalantly, said when we were just outside the door. I didn't know what he was talking about, but my thoughts perversely go to an action movie cliche. By the time we were 50 feet down the sidewalk, brown-black smoke was pouring through the door and filling the air above the street. After that, it probably only took 60 seconds for Three Monkeys to become Zero Monkeys. By the time we rounded the corner we heard the firetrucks. I'm guessing the youtube clip below (it's all online now, isn't it?) was shot two or three minutes later at most.
A block away around the corner, two gentlemen in front of a nightclub were wondering what was with all the smoke and sirens. We told them where we'd been, and how quickly a small grease fire had gone crazy.
"Damn," they said. "I hope those wraps were good."
"They were," Patrick said.
Practice like your hair is on fire, my dear friends.
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Comments
hey
"(he's like that)" -- according to joe mauricio (ck sp) in the intro to med tech class, this is one of those phrases that indicate a frozen view of self and should be seen as a red flag. is he always like that? are you always like that? maybe so. I can't say.
sincerely,
your confused vajra editor/dedicated student who seeks to apply what she hears outside of class
ps cool experience. glad you're both ok
um omg
the most unenlightened comment in this thread. omg.
WHATTTTTTT?!?!!!!!!!?!!!
lesson: follow lani to yoga after work instead. so glad you dears are O.K.
whoa...
glad you guys are ok!
curiously enough i caught my hair on fire lighting my woodstove last weekend. There was that hideous burning hair smell and a burn on my face that hurt like hell. I was annoyed, but then i remembered that phrase, which is one of my favorites: practice as if your hair is on fire. and it made my smile. i've been thinking about impermanence a lot these days. thinking about Tasmanian tigers (extinct), which i am obsessed with, and thinking about my mother.
on new year's day my mother was making cookies with my nephew and she cut her hand to the bone, getting it caught in a blender. Frightening for anyone, as the doctors tried to sew the severed tenons back together... but for her so heartbreaking because she is a pianist. She plays 8 hours a day, and it is her joy and her life, and she travels around the world playing in competitions. For all the time I was growing up, she taught music, struggling as a single mother to keep the rent paid, waiting for the day she retired when she could return to her playing. Two years ago she retired and was able to follow her long deferred dream. Now she doesn't know if she will be able to really play again. I have been amazed to talk to her and find her not wallowing in self-pity, but embracing the process of healing, pausing in her expectations, and as she said to me, finding the self who is not identified with that one thing she has been identified with for her entire life. If I can't play piano, she said the other day, I will just garden.
who are we when we lose what we love most (or what we are profoundly attached to)?
my husband lost a son who was the love of his life. when i was a child, i lost the father i adored and totally identified with. 6 years ago, i lost a marriage that i thought was everything to me. in that abyss, who do we find? it is a such a waking up, shockingly liberating, beyond sadness and joy. just... alive. impermanence is absolutely terrifying. but it is the only solid thing in this world that i know of.
No fire extinguisher in the
No fire extinguisher in the kitchen?? How is that even legal.
Strange Fascination
There was a wierd moment too, where I felt fascinated by the fire, the smoke and the gathering crowd and just wanted to stay with that feeling along the way.
Glad you and the firetruck sirens were there to remind me of the importance of GTFO there!