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Photo by Lee Weingrad
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Memorial to Mary Smith
By Lee Weingrad
27 October 2011
Two weeks ago, on coming back from Tibet, I called up Julie Carpenter. Julie is a Foundation Board member and somewhat iconic Boulder OB-GYN. I wanted to give her the news on what we'd done at Surmang. Julie is also Mary's doctor and common friend. She told me Mary was dying from degenerative kidney disease and had decided not to go the dialysis route, but had opted for home hospice. I spoke to her a few days later and although she sounded strong and confident, she let me know that she was not going to be around when I planned to come to Boulder in January. "My body is a mess," she told me, "I'm incontinent." I told her she didn't need anything, but the graphic description of her physical degeneration undercut any idea I had of a glorious death.
Mary had been a close friend for many years, and I first met her back in '73 and then we reconnected when our children were born and growing up. In the beginning, we used to sit in SF "Dharmadhatu" which was, in truth, Ernie Rivera's loft, subject, in the winters, to vast leaks from the northern California monsoons. And so we would sit under large plastic sheets.
My own route to California, via Pennsylvania, Iowa and the Navajo Indian Reservation, was almost as dramatic as Mary's. Despite being from different generations Mary had followed the spiritual path her whole life.
Along with 11 – 13 families in a caravan of buses, vans and station wagons, she came to California from New York with George Ohsawa on Oct 1st, 1961. They moved his macrobiotic group to Chico in the 60's to a place, according to Ohsawa, that would be away from any harmful radiation in what he predicted was an coming nuclear war. They started two businesses there –Chicosan and Erehwon. I remember seeing it on the TV news. Mary was part of that. She ended up leaving that group, and moved to San Francisco, first being part of the Gurdjieff work, then as a student of Chogyam Trungpa. When we met, I had been a student of Trungpa about 2 years. I think she had known him about the same length of time.
Mary and I both met the Vidyadhara during his first trip to California in 1970 that summer he gave a talk at the St. Thomas Moore Church in Berkeley. He had a brace on his left leg. He came back in '71 and from what I'd heard, Mary was at a talk he gave, again in Berkeley. I decided then that next summer I would go to the first seminar on the 10 Bhumis, at the "land" now known as Shambhala Mountain Center. When I came back there was a small Berkeley group, with myself, Craig Smith and a few others. There was no San Francisco center at the time and the Berkeley group was comparatively larger.
But we did sit nyinthuns at Ernie Rivera's loft in the City. I was still somewhat macrobiotic. One day during a nyinthun lunch break I took out rice balls. Mary said, quite loudly, "Do you realize what you are doing? You are eating bread! That's what you eat, bread." I did it for 10 years. "Get off it," she said, "eat food!" That was my introduction to Mary Smith.
In 1972 during a trip to Surmang, I met the 2 year-old who was recognized by Tai Situ Rinpoche as the yangsi or tulku of Chogyam Trungpa. Actually I was the first foreigner to meet him. It was a very intense and lovely situation and my first experience with meeting an incarnation of someone I had been close to in a prior life.
I had heard Vidyadhara say, on different occasions that he was the last Trungpa, that he would be reborn as a Japanese scientist. Knowing this only heightened my curiosity about the Trungpa yangsi. Although I felt very warm toward the child, I had absolutely no sense of connection that he was the Vidyadhara nor any sense of familiarity with him, any sense of déjà vu.
That winter at Mary's I told her this. Her response was memorable and pure Mary. "What we say is we want to recognize the guru. What we really want is for the guru to recognize us!"
Mary was very devoted to the Vidyadhara and like him had zero tolerance for bullshit. She saw the intrigue, politics and Tibetanization of Shambhala International as a dilution of his teaching stream. Her disaffection was such that at some point she didn't feel at home at the Shambhala Center. My last conversation with her was 5 days before her death. Her voice was clear and strong. She told me that when it became known her condition was terminal, someone from the Boulder Shambhala Center incredibly enough called her to ask her if she wanted her sukhavati there. She said, "no."
Then she asked me if I was in the Shambhala Center lately. "No," I said, "but I've seen the pictures. I haven't been inside the building for a few years." She told my wife that her connection to the place ended when they took the Vajradhara thangka down, and that she had no plans to return. To me she said that they had downsized the mahakala shrine and asked me: "How can the mahakalas protect us with such a small shrine?"
Mary was very kind to our family and heaped praise on our children, with amazement, and talked to them honestly, not talking down to them. We were close to her like a close relative, and like a close relative we had room in our relationship for the fire and sparks, as well as the butter and toast.
The times we visited her in Boulder it was our treat to buy a roasted chicken from Ideal Market, with potato salad, green salad and cole slaw. She always told me that I was spending too much money shopping there when I could get it cheaper in a few other places. In her last few years she had a skittish dog that her daughter Suzanne rescued in Africa. A cat or two. She drove an old lady's Toyota Camry and she loved the aloe wood incense we brought back from China. She always wanted to pay us back for it. "You guys have no money, so don't be that way!" Of course we would never take it.
In "Meetings with Remarkable Men," Gurdjieff says it takes two Jews to make an Armenian. It was certainly the case with Mary. She grew up in New York City in a Jewish neighborhood and had more than a few words of Yiddish. "Ver Vais!" (what can you do?) was her favorite. She would always laugh with her honest throaty laugh when I would quote my wife's former Libyan (shipping company) boss Mr. Shawesh, when he would look up to the heavens with his palms up and exclaim, "What can I do? I cry, I cry!" Sometimes she would say this herself.
Mary sounded good the last time I spoke to her a few days before she died. I told her I'd like to see her in January. She said, dropping her tone, "Oh no. I won't last that long."
"But you sound good," I said.
Be well Mary. Thank you for your friendship and the times that you were rough too. I'm sure you are an accomplished practitioner, among the best vintages that the Vidyadhara grew.
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Necessary Angel:
The Gradual Path of Raising Buddhist Children:
Inner Chronicles:
Work Sex Money: Seminar Three,
Ocean of Dharma: A Shambhala Sun feature on Chögyam Trungpa by Barry Boyce
Tribute to Arbie Thalacker
Chronicles Highlights 2011
Chronicles Holiday Sampler