Long Time No See: Diaries of an Unlikely Messenger

By Carrie Triffet

One part deeply personal memoir and two parts rip-snorting spiritual adventure, Long Time No See is a powerfully moving, occasionally profane, and often hilarious account of one person’s single-minded search for enlightenment. Winner of a 2010 Independent Publisher Book Award! This book also contains Carrie’s acclaimed synopsis of A Course in Miracles, titled THE CRASH COURSE.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780983842149

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Carrie Triffet

www.carrietriffet.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages for review purposes. An exception is THE CRASH COURSE, which is available as a free downloadable PDF at www.carrietriffet.com.

Second edition, 2014

Published in the United States by:

Gentle Joyous Industries

Ventura, California USA

www.gentlejoyous.com

Printed in the United States of America, UK and Australia

Book Design: Carrie Triffet

Author photos: Isabel Lawrence Photographers www.isabellawrence.com

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009911842

Triffet, Carrie.

Long time no see : diaries of an unlikely messenger / Carrie Triffet.

ISBN13: 978-0-9838421-3-2

ISBN10: 0-9838421-3-2

1. Spiritual life—New Age movement. 2. Enlightenment (Buddhism).

3. Jesus Christ—New Age movement interpretations.

THANK YOU

Does anybody really read the acknowledgements? Or is it like that guy at the Oscars® who wins for Best Teeny Tiny Documentary, and insists on thanking his accountant, his 5th grade English teacher and each of his children by name on national television?

Well, I’m doing it anyway.

Many thanks to Natalie, Dawn, Deb, Kate, Adam (whose name is not really Adam), Steve and Claudia for reading, suggesting and commenting on these many, many revisions. Many thanks also to Kathy, for laughing in all the right places. I couldn’t have done it without you guys.

Belated thanks to the members and leaders of SGI-USA for doing your best, against all odds, to teach me Buddhist practice. Thanks to Fran Duda at InnerVision12—so much of this story could never have happened without you.

And thanks to too many friends to name here, for all your support and love and eagerness to toast my authorial accomplishments with rounds of champagne. I’m truly blessed. Either that, or you all just really, really like champagne.

Oh, and thanks to my children.

Nah, just kidding.

(DON’T SKIP THE) PROLOGUE

Messenger—that’s some job description, you may be thinking right about now. How did she land a gig like that?

Funny you should ask.

My qualifications are simple. I hear a Voice.

I didn’t always. The first time I heard that Voice I was twenty-seven years old. My best friend Johnny and I were inseparable; two very cool peas in an ultramod pod, we prowled the local thrift stores for vintage clothing by day, and by night we hit the dance clubs, decked out in our finest hipster couture. Life was good—that is, until one day out of the blue he confessed suddenly that he had become a Buddhist over the weekend.

Just like that. A Buddhist, for Christ’s sake.

He set up a stylish little altar, the sleek black box remaining carefully closed whenever I was around. That was fine with me. I wanted no part of this irritating turn of events. Then one afternoon many weeks later, out of boredom or curiosity I finally asked whether I could see it, this mysterious Gohonzon I’d been hearing so much about.

Johnny opened the altar doors and that’s when it happened. Visible waves of sparkly, effervescent joy tumbled out to greet me, followed by a crystal clear Voice that spoke out loud inside my head.

And the Voice said:

Long time no see.

It’s not as strange as it might seem, y’know. I’m pretty sure a lot of people have experienced clairaudience* at one time or another—but the common tendency is to dismiss that little voice along with the guidance it gives.

I didn’t dismiss it. And maybe that’s the only thing that sets me apart from so many others. I learned how to listen.

Well, ok, maybe listening is not the only thing that sets me apart. My life was pretty uncommon long before the Voice showed up. Yet when that Voice spoke, I listened and it led me on a strange and wonderful journey of faith that continues to this day.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I tell you about the spiritual journey itself, we’d better go back to those seemingly unspiritual early days when the story first began, so you’ll better understand everything that came after.

* The power to hear things outside the range of normal perception. Like clairvoyance, in other words, except with hearing instead of sight.

IN THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER ONE

Toxic Avenger

My soon-to-be mother had a bad case of the flu. Just before Christmas of 1957 a snowstorm began to pummel the Midwest, bringing record low temperatures with it. As he prepared to leave town for the holidays, her obstetrician made the decision to admit her to the hospital for the final days of her pregnancy, just to be safe.

That big, drafty maternity ward was the last place anybody would choose to spend the holidays, even in the best of weather. Dreary and institutional, it was also the worst possible place to be pregnant in a snowstorm; cracked panes in its upper windows sent the snow swirling in on gusting winds, where it settled in delicate drifts by my mother’s bedside. Over the next several days her flu bug ripened rapidly into pneumonia, abetted by a well-meaning skeleton staff of clueless candy stripers.

Save the mother or save the baby? barked the on-call emergency doctor, striding down the hall as he addressed my shell-shocked dad. It’s too late to save both.

My father hesitated. Save my wife, he whispered at last. We can always have another child.

And so my mother was hustled into emergency surgery. Under anesthesia her heart began to fail; a rabbi was hastily brought in to witness the end, yet somehow, against all odds, she rallied. We both did.

Many years later I remembered this birth-and-death experience and its aftermath firsthand:

July 6, 1986

I knew I was killing my mother. I didn’t mean to. I wanted to tell them—the doctor, the rabbi—that I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I couldn’t help myself. Something about me was poisonous, and it was her fault for getting too close to me. She should’ve known better than to trust me with her life and body.

I was whisked away from the scene of the crime and shot full of drugs that made me woozy and sick. Then it was off to solitary confinement. I went willingly, gladly. I knew I was guilty and wanted to pay for the monstrous thing I had done.

Alone in the dark, I had plenty of time to think. These were my conclusions:

1. Babies kill their mothers, so I’d be damned if I would ever give birth to one of the treacherous little bastards.

2. Since I couldn’t control the toxic effect I had on others, I would never again risk letting anyone love me. One murder on my conscience was all I could stand.

Home at last from the hospital, a cold and wary little ex-con, I was surprised to find my mother alive and waiting for me with open arms. Though not nearly surprised enough to ever forgive her for abandoning me.

Out of the frying pan, as they say, and into the brimstone and hellfire. By some celestial mistake, I’d been allowed to live. And that clerical error didn’t seem to sit well with the universe at large.

Supernatural

In some ways my childhood was as normal as any. I rode a trike, and then later a bike adorned with long handlebar streamers that fluttered in the breeze; I played hopscotch, went through a horse phase, owned a stuffed animal or two. To the casual observer it might have seemed like the typical suburban experience of the 1960s. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot.

I knew I was different, that I didn’t belong here. The universe knew it too, and loved to torment me with glow-in-the-dark ghosts that no one but me seemed able to see. Least of all my parents and sister, three solid citizens who were as normal and down to Earth as they could possibly be. Think of the Munsters, except in reverse: They were all Marilyn, and I was that spooky little werewolf kid, the one who never fit in at school.

I coped with this supernatural state of affairs as best I could. Life was always most terrifying after the sun went down (since that was when the glowing ghosts came out to play), yet daytime wasn’t much better. The physical world of houses and trees and blue-sky sunshine seemed pale and unconvincing, a cheap B movie set. Bleeding through its veneer of bright normalcy was the ever-present dread; big, juicy Technicolor horror that whispered my name from every dark corner, its cold, sticky tendrils lying in wait beneath the floorboards for that foolish, unguarded footstep.

I mostly kept this ongoing phantasmagoria to myself. Sure, my parents were aware that something was up; they knew I was afraid to go upstairs by myself, the lingering byproduct of an unfortunate afternoon spent watching Chiller Theater at the neighbor kids’ house. The Crawling Eye had taken up permanent residence in our second story after that terrible day. Having watched it murder dozens of European mountain climbers, I felt sure this awful eye would do the same to any careless Midwestern five-year-old if given the chance. So I made my parents watch me from the foot of the stairs every time I went up there to use the house’s only bathroom.

And I’m sure Mom and Dad were aware of the terror I felt each time the Magic Hand appeared on our after-school TV screen. Silent sidekick to the host of Cap’n Jim’s Popeye Club, the Magic Hand was just a white hand that interacted with Cap’n Jim between Popeye cartoons. Yet that eerie, dismembered hand crawled deeply into my waking nightmares.

At the time, I made no distinction between my daytime shadow world of bloodthirsty hand and eyeball—which was, of course, imaginary—and my nighttime ghost infestation, which was unfortunately quite real. They frightened me equally. Yet even if I’d recognized and prioritized the difference between them, I still would have been unable to communicate to anyone the true nature of the nocturnal problem: The semi-permeable wall of perception that oozed endless other-worldly images; the shifting netherworld of competing realities that threatened at all times to swallow me whole.

No, I couldn’t tell them about any of that. The Marilyns, bless their hearts, would never have understood.

Lost In Space

Here’s another thing I never told anybody: Time and space used to play tricks on me. Nowadays it’s a fairly rare occurrence but when I was a kid, spatial and temporal hiccups happened a lot. Time stood still or skipped a step without warning. Buildings or whole city blocks appeared or disappeared at will from the neighborhoods where they belonged; sometimes I found them elsewhere, sometimes not at all. After awhile I lost all faith in my ability to get around in the world.

This sort of thing happened only when I was alone. If I wanted a house or a bus stop to show up in the same spot twice, I knew I’d better take another person along for insurance. It was always ok if I had someone with me—time and space didn’t seem to want any witnesses when they did their crazy dance.

Although seemingly not directly connected to the supernatural issue, I nevertheless interpreted each of these random pranks as yet more proof that the universe hated me and wanted me dead. Or if not dead, exactly, then at least lost in a strange part of town or hopelessly late for supper.

It wasn’t just the perversely scary antics of the unseen universe that made my early childhood so hard to navigate. There was also that other aspect of the unseen universe, the one everybody else seemed to take for granted like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Never Buy A Volkswagen

My hometown held a large, close-knit Jewish community, and within its population an unusual number of concentration camp survivors. As a young kid I had regular contact with two of these: The mother of my best childhood friend, a lovely lady who’d managed to avoid the gas chamber by random chance; the other, my Hebrew school teacher, who’d seized his moment to escape from camp into the relative safety of the frozen forest beyond.

These stories and others like them hadn’t yet taken on the safe sepia-toned patina of history. In those days the narratives felt real, and dangerously current. I was born a mere thirteen years after the war’s end, and in my formative years the Jewish community still grieved as one, unmoored by the staggering enormity of its loss.

I had nothing to compare it to. This all-consuming sadness, crushing isolation and paralyzing fear of outsiders was just business as usual. The Jews clung to each other for support and sustenance, seeming to take urgent comfort and lifeblood nourishment from religious observance and their shared Jewish identity.

I didn’t get it. The religion of my forefathers fit me like scratchy wool underpants two sizes too small, and I chafed bitterly against its restrictions. Nothing about Judaism—or God or religion in general, for that matter—inspired or comforted me, and I saw little point in pretending. I knew the universe was a malicious prankster, and this nonsensical insistence on worshiping it cramped my style.

All those hundreds of commandments. Why can’t we just have ten like everybody else? I wanted to know. Or better yet none at all?

He Who Must Not Be Named

And then there was that whole Jesus situation, which was…complicated. On the one hand He looked like a nice enough guy—His blond, blue-eyed portrait smiling down on my sleepovers at the neighbor kids’ house. And of course it was widely known that if you believed in Him, Santa brought you all kinds of magical swag on Christmas.

Yet He was also the reason I wasn’t allowed into some of the other kids’ houses. I was a dirty Jew, or so their mothers informed me, and Jesus wouldn’t like it if I spread those cooties around.

Meanwhile, school brought a whole different kind of challenge. I learned nothing at all about Christ or Christianity at home or in my Hebrew school studies, except that He was somehow associated with unspeakable evil, and so the name of Jesus was never to be uttered aloud.

Why? What happens if you say it? I figured it must be bad because nobody would ever tell me. Maybe saying Jesus’ name was what killed those six million Jews?

This was back in the day when public school kids were routinely made to sing religious songs, so for these occasions I was forced to adopt a weird sort of ventriloquist’s dummy approach:

Wag-wag (soundlessly my jaw moved up and down)

Loves me, yes I know

For the Bible tells me so.

CHAPTER TWO

I had survived early childhood, learning gradually to ignore the daytime yammerings of TV monsters and other assorted beasts. Nighttime yammerings were not as easily dismissed, though I was working on it.

As for the oppressive religious atmosphere of my earliest years, some progress had been made on that front as well. I had graduated from Hebrew school, thus freeing up my weeknight evenings, and was looking forward to Sunday school graduation, which meant I might finally taste the joy of sleeping in one morning a week like regular people.

Well, a girl could dream, anyway. Just when things seemed most hopeful, fate tossed our family a game-changing curveball that permanently redefined the subject of Judaism.

It’s Ten O’Clock—Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

For most of my early life, our family’s brand of Judaism could have been described as solid Suburban-Orthodox. Meaning we kept a strict Kosher home, observed the Sabbath and all requisite holidays, yet we dressed and, for the most part, behaved like ordinary citizens of twentieth century America.

Then, in her eleventh year of life, my sister won free tuition to a Lubavitch summer camp for girls and nothing was ever the same after that. Lubavitch Judaism, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a branch of Hasidism named for the town in Russia where it first became fruitful and multiplied. Perhaps you’ve seen Lubavitch Jews on the street, walking to or from the synagogue on Saturday mornings. Bearded men dressed in black wool suits and hats regardless of the weather; modest ladies wearing blouses with necklines rising above the collarbone, sleeves falling below the elbow and skirts—always skirts, pants are strictly forbidden—demurely covering the knee. And if the lady in question is married, a wig covers her hair, for only her husband is allowed to see that hair, and only behind closed doors.

Something about this Ultra-Orthodox lifestyle called my sister’s name, and she fell for it body and soul. Eventually convincing my cash-strapped parents to pull her out of the public junior high school half a mile from our house and enroll her instead at the Yeshiva for girls two cities away, she embraced Lubavitch Judaism on its own terms and never looked back.

Although my sister seemed happy, she no longer wanted to sleep under our roof or eat off our plates since we weren’t Kosher enough for Lubavitch liking. And the folks who ran that Yeshiva for girls had begun to set their sights on my enrollment too, with the tacit approval of my parents, who were becoming uneasy with my budding black sheep tendencies. Clinging to the unlikely hope that a strictly gender-segregated lifestyle would keep me off the streets and out of trouble, they allowed the Lubavitchers to pursue me with abandon.

One incident comes to mind.

I was thirteen years old. The doorbell rang one sunny summer morning; an ancient rabbi and his small entourage had come calling. My parents welcomed the group into our home, then my whole family vanished mysteriously along with the entourage, leaving me alone with the antique Bearded One.

He smelled like dentures. Backing me into a corner of the dining room, he began haranguing me in heavily accented Eastern Bloc English-as-a-second-language on the joys of Yeshiva enrollment. I was angry and scared so I harangued right back, loudly defending all the reasons I didn’t want to go. At each of my increasingly impassioned arguments he would shake his head, perplexed, before launching back into his prepared speech. (At the time I thought he was only pretending not to understand my protests; I realize now he was unable to keep up with my rapid-fire American kid slang.)

The others reappeared and the school’s principal, a native English speaker, took over. Her eyes traveled down to my illicit bell-bottom jeans and back up to my flushed and angry face as she prepared her arguments.

I want to go to a regular junior high, I informed her sullenly before she could open her mouth. I don’t want to go to the Yeshiva.

Why not? We’re a very good school.

Because I want to play in the marching band! I bellowed. I’d practiced like crazy for my band audition and had recently learned I’d been accepted into the super-cool A band, the Tigers, instead of the loser B band, the Cubs, which meant I’d be marching at all the football games in the fall.

We could have a marching band, she volunteered brightly.

I eyed her caustically. Seven preteen girls in dresses dragging cellos up the road were not what I had in mind.

I want. To march. At football games.

We could have football games… she began, then her voice trailed off. Even she could see the absurdity in it.

Not long after this incident the Yeshiva and my parents jointly admitted defeat, and I was left to enjoy the public school system in peace. Still my sister’s religious influence plagued me. The primary function of an older sibling, as I saw it, was to pave the way, to wear down parental resistance to dating and curfews and other acts of teenage autonomy. Yet my sister never dated. Never kissed a boy, as far as I knew. When the time came for her to be married, matchmakers arranged it all; my sister and her prospective husband, a rabbi, met once and sealed the deal at the New York Public Library.

All of which left my parents wholly unprepared for the next little hell-raiser in line.

It’s not that I was a bad kid. I just ached to get the hell out of that place, dreaming of the day I could blow town for good. Although my folks kept me on the tightest leash they dared, my mother’s long, heartbreaking battle with colon cancer, which was raging at this same time, offered an occasional power vacuum to be exploited while everyone’s focus was elsewhere.

Sleepovers were a prime opportunity. Slipping out of the house after the family went to bed, my friends and I would get high and spend the night roaming the city. Ending up typically at the town’s only twenty-four-hour doughnut shop, we’d enjoy the gray pre-dawn quiet with our powdered sugared breakfast before sneaking home to bed, nobody the wiser for our nocturnal wanderings.

I also hung out with, but did not belong to, two separate schoolyard gangs. They weren’t gangs in today’s sense of the word, of course. These kids were peaceable stoners, high school dropouts, mostly, with no job prospects and thousands of empty hours to kill. I considered it a privilege to help them kill as many of those late-night hours as I could.

Surprisingly, given my taste in recreational activities, I was never arrested. That includes the time I got busted with one of those gangs, illuminated plainly in the police cruiser’s headlight beam while passing a joint to the boy next to me. And the time a couple of years later in California that a bicycle cop glided quietly alongside my boyfriend’s parked car (good God, since when did cops ride bicycles?), demanding I roll down my window to let the swirling clouds of pot smoke billow out into the evening air.

Although the others were invariably taken downtown and booked, somehow I always got sent away with a sincere lecture instead. Authority figures have always liked me.

As if the supernatural situation wasn’t abnormal enough, a whole new kind of unwanted uniqueness was beginning to take shape—or not—as I moved into my teen years.

The Mirror Has Two Faces

I’m built like Olive Oyl, except without all the curves.

This one fact has single-handedly distorted my perception of the world more than any other. Or, maybe not single-handedly. Truth be told, I was feeling pretty unpretty long before anybody realized what my body would turn out to be. Long before it became clear that I wasn’t just a late bloomer, in the euphemistic parlance of my aunts; that in fact there would be no blooms at all issuing from this unnatural weed.

For the first five or six years of life I was a cute kid like any other. Then I entered, oh I don’t know, let’s call it an awkward phase. Walking home from elementary school, all gangly eyeglasses and knobbly knees, I’d encounter roving packs of older boys headed home in the opposite direction.

Uggleh, they’d mutter darkly as they approached, howling with laughter as I ran past them in tears, You look like you been hit with an uggleh stick.

By age thirteen or fourteen the uggleh incidents were thankfully a thing of the past (although I did carry the nickname Woof in certain circles until high school graduation); by then the vicious catcalls had mostly been replaced by equally vicious wolf whistles. The mystifying change brought no comfort. Approval or disapproval made little difference; it all sounded the same to my ears.

Try as I might in all the years since then, I never became more comfortable inside my own skin. I had no idea what I looked like as an adult, any more than I did as a kid. The world acted as one big funhouse mirror, shape-shifting minute by minute to keep me frightened and off balance. Sometimes I seemed to be attractive, other times a freak of nature. There was apparently no middle ground; love me or hate me, everybody had an unwanted opinion about my strangely unfeminine body, and I could never predict what that response was going to be.

Some found me beautiful, often going to embarrassing lengths to tell me so. Yet I never dared believe it, because for every one of those guys, two or three others would gawk openly at me with icy, incredulous disgust. God, I knew that hateful expression well. I came to think of it as the Death Stare, since it would have burned the scrawny flesh right off my bones if it could. It was a stare that said, You’re a blight on the landscape, an appalling genetic mistake. And now, having accidentally gazed upon you, I’ll have to wash my eyeballs out with soap.

I used to do whatever was necessary to avoid that Death Stare. Or any stare, if I could help it.