Read A Lotus Grows in the Mud Online
Authors: Goldie Hawn
A Lotus Grows in the Mud (31 page)
The camera follows me into room after room, stacked floor to ceiling with tusks and ivory and elephant skulls, big and small. Wandering through this vast skeleton graveyard, which smells of the sandalwood they’ve also confiscated, I’ve never seen anything like it. How can they slaughter these beautiful animals just for their tusks? What a terrible waste. I didn’t expect this part of the journey to be so sobering.
We move on and eventually reach the beautiful reserve I remember so well, where I first saw Belly Button seven years before. Arriving at night, we find a guard jumping around like a madman in the middle of the road. His ashen face glares pale in the headlights of our car.
“What is it?” asks Aditya, frowning.
“A lone tusker, sahib,” he replies panic-stricken, pointing down the darkened road. “He’s been standing there for over an hour. It is most unusual, sahib. Most unusual.”
The driver turns our car so that the headlights pick out the big bull elephant standing regally across the road, ears flapping, his tusks glowing white. In India, only the males have tusks, and the lone tuskers are considered the most dangerous.
“He’s come to welcome you, Goldie,” Aditya whispers. “He has come to thank you for what you are doing. This is his salute.”
As I turn to look at the tusker again, openmouthed, he lifts his great trunk into the air, blasts a trumpeting call into the warm still night and lumbers off into the jungle from which he came.
Kabini River Lodge is a little more run-down than I remember it,
with its peeling Raj villas and rickety ceiling fans set in a forest of rosewood and teak. Thankfully, dear Papa is still in charge. Having chosen to stay on after independence, he is now older and a little frailer, but he is still full of such passion for the creatures he loves. It’s wonderful to see him again.
Later that night, I sit around the campfire having dinner with Papa and the crew, learning more and more about elephants. Papa is full of wonderful stories, many of them from firsthand experience. He tells me that when an elephant goes into labor, she is tended to by three or four other female elephants, who act as midwives.
“And when an elephant is dying, the rest of the herd try to hold it up. Using their trunks, they lift and caress and encourage, until they can do no more. Then they hold a funeral. They cover the body with leaves and twigs; they gather around in circles and they weep. Later, they return to draw the tusks, burying them deep in the jungle or smashing them against trees, almost as if to defy the ivory traders.”
Listening to his stories, I can’t help but wonder. “What if my Belly Button is dead?” I ask him. I can hardly bear to think about it.
“Well, if that is so, then it would be the natural cycle of things, but she would not be forgotten,” Papa tells me. “Not by you, and not by her herd. Elephants cannot pass the bones of a dead elephant without stopping to examine the remains. They seem to be remembering how their loved ones looked. I once found an orphaned baby elephant, dehydrated and weak after days of standing over its dead mother, rhythmically caressing the bones of her face.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “I had no idea they had such a strong emotional life,” I say.
“If they feel so deeply, then why do they kill?” the director asks.
Papa nods sadly. “Elephants rarely kill unless they are threatened. I knew of one who accidentally killed his favorite mahout, thinking he was the one who abused him. When he realized what he’d done, he circled the body and wouldn’t let anyone near it. Bereaved, he wept real tears. He even tried to revive him. Only when he realized there was nothing he could do did he let the family take the body away.”
We listen in stony silence.
E
arly the next morning, the crew are up and out before dawn. “Stay here,” they tell me. “We’re going to look for Belly Button.” They have been speaking to the wardens on the three vast nature reserves, and several reports have come back of a blind ellie living in the same area where I saw her before.
When they return, several hours later, I cannot tell from their faces if their search has been successful or not. No one tells me anything. They just ask me to go with them, and they lead me to the riverbank and a boat. We speed down the beautiful Kabini River, past crocodiles and cormorants and fishing eagles, all the while looking, searching for my elephant.
We see many elephants, but, sadly, not Belly Button. As the day goes on, the sun beating down on my neck, I grow steadily pessimistic. Is it possible that I’ll come all this way and miss her? When the water becomes too shallow, Aditya and I shift into a tiny coracle boat made of bamboo and buffalo hide, which spins and twirls out of our control, a metaphor for life.
Farther down the river, which has been dammed, we come across the ruins of an old Ganesh temple, a shrine to the elephant god. Aditya and I swirl and spin around it, getting close enough for me to reach out and touch the sacred stone, asking for its blessing.
I float precariously down the River Kabini. It’s so peaceful here, but, instead of relaxing, I feel my eyes darting right and left to each muddy bank, desperately looking for this elephant. My heart is in my mouth. What if we don’t find her? We already have plenty of material for the documentary, but everyone agrees that it would be dramatic to wrap it up with the rediscovery of my Belly Button.
Spotting another wild herd covering themselves with mud against the sun and bugs, we clamber out of the coracle and straight into quicksand, where I sink up to my ankles. Trudging through it with Aditya holding on, I feel like I have moon boots on, the wet mud is so encased around my feet. Reaching drier land, we creep quietly on through the brush and trees to the edge of a clearing.
“Shhh!” Aditya whispers, pressing a finger to his mouth as we crouch closer and closer.
I must admit I’m a little frightened. I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never been this close to a herd of wild elephants before. My breathing becomes more and more shallow.
Aditya leads me forward through the grass, our crew filming a few paces off to one side. Through my binoculars, I spot three tuskers at the top of the hill, looking down on their family of female elephants.
“Do you think she’s in there somewhere?” I ask as I watch them grazing and bathing at the water’s edge.
“I don’t know, Goldie.”
I press my binoculars really hard against my face. “Look at that, Aditya! Look at that circle of family. There are aunts and cousins and sisters all together. There’s a lesson there, isn’t there?”
Quietly in my ear, Aditya replies, “Yes, yes, there is.”
“Oh my God!” I cry suddenly, pointing wildly. “Oh my God, Aditya! I think that’s her! I think that’s my elephant! Yes, there she is! Oh, Aditya, there’s my elephant!” My heart is racing. I want to jump up and down and scream. “I see her! There’s that ring around her eye. It’s Belly Button! She’s alive!”
“Shhh! They’ll hear you!”
“But it’s her, Aditya!” I squeal, tears streaming down my face. “Oh my God! It’s Belly Button! I can’t believe it.”
“And do you see anything else?” he asks in his deep voice.
“What? What?”
“Do you see anything under her legs?”
Straining through the binoculars, I see it. A tiny calf, hiding between her legs. “It’s a baby!”
“Yes, a son. Less than a week old.”
“Oh my God! How do you know that?”
“Well, actually, we’ve had a crew out here for weeks. They found her and her child. We wanted to surprise you.”
“You did? Oh my God, I don’t believe it. But I wonder where her other baby is?”
“You see that young elephant by her side?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s her!”
“No! Really? You mean, you knew this all along?”
“Yes, I’m a trickster.” Aditya grins wickedly. “But I didn’t know about the baby until yesterday. That baby was born just as you arrived in Kabini.”
I stare and stare at my elephant’s new calf, her tiny boy. He’s so small that I can sometimes hardly see him as he takes baby steps between the massive tree trunk legs of his family. Just like his sister before him, this new infant will grow up to help act as his mother’s seeing eye, shepherding her through life. My elephant will have another elephant, and that elephant will have another, and so the cycle will continue. The herd will perpetuate.
I feel such deep joy, watching this family taking such good care of each other in times of birth, life and death. Just like my family.
As one, the herd moves to the river to bathe. I watch as the little baby frolics in the water, happily playing, his tiny trunk up like a periscope. His older relatives flank him to protect him from crocodiles. They also take care of the disabled Belly Button, nudging her gently to the riverbank, making sure she doesn’t slip. She has not been cast away because she is useless; instead, she is being helped, assisted and loved.
My knees weakening under me, I slump against a tree stump and watch breathlessly.
“Now do you believe in destiny?” Aditya asks me.
“Yes,” I say emphatically. “Yes, I believe in destiny. I have to. Because in India, anything can happen.”
N
ot knowing the outcome of an experience can be incredibly humbling and refreshingly liberating. Especially when we have to trust in strangers or lean on them for help and guidance when our course shifts unexpectedly.
We like to think we have things completely under control. We hold on so dearly to the things that define us—our houses, our cars, our clothes, our belongings, and even sometimes our opinions. But when we
become lost or are suddenly out of our element, we not only have to face up to the unknown, we have to do it without any of the things around us that we think are important.
If someone had told me how things would start out on that trip to India—that I’d be lost and frightened, or that I’d have to sit on top of a wild elephant—I probably wouldn’t have gone. But I did. That journey provided some of the greatest memories of my life. I learned so much. Mostly, I reminded myself how to surrender to the moment.
Letting go like that reminds us of the simple beauty of play. Children don’t plan. They don’t control. They laugh, they have fun, they go with the flow. There is a lesson for us all there.
Kurt and I go on bicycle trips where we are completely free. We don’t do what many of our fellow cyclists do: get up at dawn, pedal directly from A to B, have dinner and go to bed. We meander. We get lost. We stop at remote farmhouses to ask where we are. We have to try to find our way back, or hope, as darkness descends, that the support truck will eventually find us. It always does. It’s fun to be lost for a while; it’s humbling.
If we can just let go and trust that things will work out the way they’re supposed to, without trying to control the outcome, then we can begin to enjoy the moment more fully. The joy of the freedom it brings becomes more pleasurable than the experience itself.
postcard
O
liver, Kate and Wyatt burst out of our kitchen door in a dead race toward our car.
“I made it first! I’m in the front seat!” calls Ollie.
“No! It’s mine!” Kate hollers back.
Wyatt, six years old, and ten years younger than Oliver, trails along, picking up the rear.
I am still in the kitchen, waiting for the star of the night: my mother, Laura Hawn. It is almost sundown, and we should have left for the synagogue fifteen minutes ago to make the High Holy service.
I smell her heady perfume before she even rounds the turn of the stairs. Celia, our dear housekeeper, holds Mom steady from behind so she doesn’t fall. Her red lipstick is perfectly applied to her once-full lips. Her cheeks are finely dusted with pink blush, and her soupy brown eyes are adorned with a smattering of mascara.
“You look beautiful, Ma.”
“Thanks, honey. Celia did my makeup for me. I can’t see a damn thing anymore.”
Celia beams. There is so much love between them you can almost touch it.
“I could smell you before I could see you.” I laugh. “You smell real good.”
“It’s Shocking.” She smiles, enjoying the pun. I think fondly of the neatly wrapped bottles of perfume my father used to place under the Christmas tree for her each year.
Struggling to put on her coat, Mom looks around the room. “Where are the kids, already? We’ll be late.”
“They’re already in the car, Ma. Let’s go.”
Celia appears from the garage with a wheelchair. Mom’s face drops.
“I hate that damn thing! I don’t need it!”
She was always so independent, always so active. It pains me too that she needs to be pushed around, dependent on the kindness of others. But I have to be practical.
“Well, Mom, let’s bring it along, just in case. It’s a long walk, and maybe you’ll get tired.”
Laura Hawn gives me one of her black looks. Like the ones she used to give to Daddy, or Patti or me when we were bad. Boy, they burn right through you like a hot iron.
Oliver may have won the race to the car, but he is soon dethroned from the front seat when I open the door. Standing with Grandma, I tell him, “In the back, Ol.”
“Oh, let him sit up here,” Mom protests. “I can get in the back.”
“No, Grandma, you sit in the front,” Oliver insists, holding her arm, steadying her for a soft landing.
Katie leans over and touches her grandmother’s hair. “You look so pretty, Gram!”
Mom puts her hand on top of Katie’s. “Thanks, honey. I love you.”
“Love you too, Gram.”
Oliver jumps in the backseat with Katie and Wyatt. The car shakes as Celia slams the trunk shut, securing Mom’s chariot. She waves us off—one grandma, one mom, three children and one wheelchair—as we pull away from our house on a warm September evening. We are on our way to pray to God for forgiveness for our sins. This is Rosh Hashanah, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
We wend our way down Sunset Boulevard. The kids are unusually quiet in the back. I glance furtively over at my mother as she looks out the window. She has a beatific expression on her face as she watches the hustle and bustle of life beyond her cloistered world. It makes her happy to reconnect to the life outside her four walls.
She had her first heart attack six years ago during the
Christmas holiday. They had to perform emergency bypass surgery days later. Patti and I rushed to the hospital. Panicking, we clung to each other and didn’t let go. Dazed, we were both bewildered that this could happen to our strong and willful mother.
We walked into her coldly lit room in the same hospital where Daddy had died. Once again, we heard those horrible beeping machines that he was hooked up to ten years before. This couldn’t be happening, we thought. Not again. Not to Mom. Looking down at her, we tried to act as normally as we could. Hoping to cheer her up, we fixed fake smiles. But, of course, she saw right through us. She could see the fear in our eyes. Nothing gets by Mom.
“Why don’t you both go away now, so you can have a good cry?” she told us. “It’s all right. I know. Go.”
Our bodies stiffened in unison. We both bent down and kissed her. Our tycoon, our sage, our get-it-done mother.
“Okay, Mama.”
Glued together, still holding hands, we went outside to the hallway, grabbed each other and sobbed our pain and fear. Our sorrow flowed between us. We were one.
All these years later and Mom is still with us. But her health is on a downward spiral.
“W
here the hell is this place, Goldie? It’s almost dark already.”
Katie spots the sign to the synagogue. “There it is, Mommy.”
I pull up to the entrance and the kids pile out. Wyatt and Kate open Gram’s door and help her out, as Oliver and I manhandle the wheelchair out of the trunk. We struggle together to open it, while Wyatt and Kate hold on to their grandmother from either side, acting as her stanchions.
Oliver takes the wheelchair from me finally and pushes
it toward Mom, Indy 500–style, stopping on a dime at her feet.
“Come on, Gram,” he says. “Get in and start your engines.”
She smiles her crooked smile, all protests forgotten, sits down and raises her funny fist up at him as he pushes her along. I feel so blessed, so lucky to have my children and my mother all together on this night of forgiveness and prayer.
Oliver does a few wheelie-type moves. Katie laughs her contagious belly laugh, and Wyatt is running after Ollie, trying to push too. Under my breath, I try to make them all behave, but I can’t help laughing at the sight of my mother weaving around in the chair she hates so much. She is smiling that proud grandmother smile.
Entering the temple, we move down the aisle as one looking for our designated row of seats. Wyatt suddenly spots a box full of little white hats. He watches people take them out of the box and put them on their heads.
“What are those, Mommy?”
“They’re called ‘yarmulkas,’ honey. Take two. One for you and one for Ollie.”
Wyatt looks happily down at the box of hats. He loves hats. “Okay, Mommy.”
We park Mom in the aisle when we find our designated row. Katie takes her customary place next to Mom, and Oliver and I shuffle farther down the row.
“Where’s Wyatt?” I ask.
I look back and see him headfirst in the yarmulka box. He emerges, grinning, with three, one on his head and two in his hand. He runs down to Oliver and puts one on his head, and then he runs to Mom and plops one on her head too.
“Grandma,” he cries at the top of his lungs, “you need a Yamaha!”
We all fall down laughing, trying to stifle our giggles as the rabbi clears his throat to speak. Oliver tries to snatch it back from Grandma to save her embarrassment.
Poor Wyatt looks confused.
Seeing his crestfallen face, my mother says, in her gravelly voice, “To hell with it, give me the Yamaha!” and plonks it on her head.
Kate and Oliver can no longer control themselves.
“Looking goooood, Grandma,” Oliver laughs, giving her the thumbs-up.
My mother replies by turning around and looking down the row, shaking her fist at him with a look that says, Don’t think for one minute that I’m too feeble to get out of this damn chair and put you over my knee.
The rabbi begins to recite the prayers, but we are so far back it is difficult for us to hear. My mother’s face a picture of frustration, she says, “I can’t hear. I can’t hear!” To Katie, she repeats, louder, “I can’t hear!”
“What is it, Mom?” I ask along the row.
In a voice nobody has trouble hearing, she says, “I can’t hear! I can’t hear a damn thing!”
“Mom! Shhh!” I say, looking around at all the faces turned toward me. I smile apologetically, and they smile back.
“Well?” Mom barks.
I whisper in Oliver’s ear: “Go back and get some of those special earphones they have for the hard of hearing.” He jumps up and runs over to where the temple fathers keep the special apparatuses. Rushing back, he puts a set in his grandmother’s lap.
Mom fumbles with these earphones noisily and finally attaches them to her head upside down: the earpiece is on top, pressed against her yarmulka, and the clip part is under her chin. The rest is blocking her sight. She looks at Katie and says crossly, “Now I can’t see a damn thing either!”
By this time, we are just losing it. Katie reaches over and tries to put them on properly.
“No, Grandma, like this,” she says, patiently trying to figure out how they go. Parts of the contraption poke into my mother’s ear, up her nose and in her eye.
“I hate this!” Mom spits. When the earphones start to make a strange high-pitched whistling noise, like feedback, deafening her, my mother rips them off her head angrily and throws them into her lap. “I hate this thing!”
None of us are even listening to the rabbi by now. We are just watching Mother. Oliver is beside himself.
Up comes the fist and that familiar scowl. “Shut up!” she tells him. “Just shut up!”
I am almost under the seat by now, holding on so tight that I can barely see through my tears of mirth.
Dear Kate comes to Mom’s aid yet again and snuggles up real close to her. Not wanting her to miss the service, my darling daughter leans over in her gentle way and puts her little mouth close to her ear, her head pressed against Mom’s, and painstakingly repeats the rabbi’s every word.
My heart fills with such love at the sight. My mother’s only granddaughter, the only girl in our family of this generation, sits there helping her grandma so tenderly. I see in her such nurturing, such loving, such strength, that my mother passed to me, and that I now realize I have passed to my daughter. Their two little heads together is all that I can see for the rest of the service.
After it is over, we file behind Grandma’s wheelchair, Oliver pushing. Outside, we all stand around in communion with the rest of the congregation. I go to fetch the car, and when I look back I see my children surrounding Mom—an elephant grandmother with her children and grandchildren all around her. We are all, in our own way, holding her up until she dies.
A woman I don’t know passes me and says, “You have a beautiful family.”
Looking past her at this perfect tableau of family unity, I reply, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
As I climb into the driver’s seat, I silently pray that we can have one more year like this together with Mom.
Taking her home, we help her up to her room. We cross our hands and make a chair and carry her upstairs with an encouraging, “Come on, Laura, here we go.”
Wyatt runs ahead up the stairs to turn down Mom’s bed for her, to make her landing there more comfortable.
I tuck my mother into bed and kiss her good night. Walking to the door, I turn just before I switch off the light and look back at her.
Propped up on her feather pillows, still looking like the movie star that she could have been, she locks her eyes with mine with a look that penetrates my heart.
“I love you, Goldie.”
“I love you too, Mom…With all my heart.”
L
ater, I tucked little seven-year-old Wyatt in bed and began singing my usual song, “Raindrops on Roses.” Interrupting my aria, he asked, “Mommy, what are stars made of?”
“Mostly gases, I think,” I said.
“No, I don’t think so. I believe that stars are people who died long, long ago who did great things for the planet.”
I covered him up, kissed him and told him that he just might be right. I turned out the light, softly shut the door behind me and left him alone with his kind thoughts. Children’s minds are a fertile ground for beauty. Flowers grow there, I think. It’s up to us not to trample on them.
