Sometimes, when afternoons turn heavy as used furniture, when I close my eyes on the bus, or open a window at home to create a dot-to-dot flight pattern to the nearest mountain, I think of my brother floating. My brother in 1978, with Bob Dylan hair, in the lotus position. In a meditation room, in Israel, suspended between floor and ceiling, buoyant as a soap bubble. He went there, with his wife of five months, for advanced training in transcendental meditation. No, TRAN-scen-DEN-tal MED-i-TA-tion. That's how I learned to say it, filling my mouth with perfect trochaic syllables - and feeling hip and very California. No small accomplishment, given that I lived in Idaho. TM for short: code for the initiated.
The night before their international flight to Jerusalem, I stood with them in my parents' drive making a bon voyage of the cold, our breath coming in little gasps. They'd driven straight through from Seattle.
"So what is it you're going to learn?" I asked.
He flipped up the collar on his pea jacket:
"Longer meditations, deepness, clarity. They say you go into these moments when you're there and not there, and sometimes you float."
"Float," I said, "as in off the ground?"
"It just happens," he said, "but never on purpose."
And then we were on to more pressing matters, such as the question of my babysitting his Volvo.