dressed quickly, getting out the door by 7 a.m. as the sun poked up over the hills. Alan had three suitcases full of his travelling clothes and the last minute items that inevitably get forgotten during a move, and I tossed them into the back seat before returning my overnight bag to the trunk. Alan slipped on his signature aviator dark glasses, looking like a red headed Tom Cruise from Rain Man. Portland is a lot like Seattle with a Starbucks located on almost every corner, but out in the suburbs we had to settle for Peet’s for our morning lattes and muffins. The drive-through went quickly, and by 7:30 we were on the road.
I reversed my course from the previous evening, heading north on 217 then going east on 26. When you emerge from the tunnel going east, downtown Portland appears like an Arcadian oasis rising out of the forest, as does the sun shining brightly and directly into your eyes. In silence we proceeded over the Willamette River and finally merged onto Interstate-84—our asphalt and concrete conduit for the next two days until we hit Interstate-80 in Salt Lake City.
While driving through the city, Alan seemed satisfied with the quiet, sipping his latte and casually munching his poppy-seed muffin. But by the time we passed through Troutdale, with Mt. Hood towering off to our right and the vast Columbia River flowing to our left, Alan tossed his empty muffin wrapping towards the trash and abruptly picked up where we had left off last night.
“Alright, so tell me about this ordination crap.”
I bit my tongue, being all too aware that the trip would be filled with colorful and irreverent language. If I challenged him on it now, the rest of the trip would be filled either with manic shouting or sullen silence. I preferred something resembling a conversation, and so I ignored the tone.
“Well, a week from today, after writing innumerable papers, presenting myself at innumerable interviews, not to mention the acquisition of an expensive Master of Divinity degree, and serving for four years as a pastor of some form or another, the Bishop will lay her hands on me, pronounce the historic words, and I will be an Ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church.”
“You know,” Alan said, “I didn’t really understand a word of that. You made it clear that Methodism doesn’t exactly run in the family, except of course for the highly influential Uncle Sam the Bishop, so I am still puzzled where all of this came from. Wasn’t your mom a Zen Buddhist or something?”
“She practiced Zen for a while when I was a kid. I never did, but it’s astonishing how those early childhood experiences really shape how you view the world.”
“Still, that doesn’t really explain becoming a Methodist minister. I’ve known you for quite a while. You weren’t particularly interested in religion when we first met, be it Zen or anything else. In fact, you were as skeptical as I am. Did something happen that I don’t know about that has caused you to go all religious on me?”
“Yes, something did happen . . . or maybe, more accurately, some things happened. But it’s not perhaps what you’re thinking. I wasn’t ‘saved’ by some charismatic evangelical, and I wasn’t knocked off my donkey by Jesus like Paul was. Actually, it was a long process that began, I guess, before I was born. In order to understand, you kind of have to know the whole story.”
“You do realize that I am completely turned off by the church and conventional religion, right? But if I were to become anything, which I won’t, I’d be a Buddhist.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and convert you to Christianity, or to Buddhism for that matter! And I think the attraction to Buddhism may be more because it is exotic and appears deep, when in fact Christianity can be just as deep even if it doesn’t appear exotic. But I have been wondering myself what brought me to this pass, and how things that happened fifty or more years ago have recently become so important, including my mother’s dabbling in Zen Buddhism.”
“Well, my friend,” said Alan as he sipped the last of his Peet’s coffee, “I assume there’s still plenty of road and sunlight ahead of us. Explain to me how our beginnings precede us, or how we precede our beginnings, or something Zen like that.”
My mind’s eye turned backwards to those days so long ago, and the events and people who have since passed out of my life. Finally I said, mostly to myself, “God! I wonder what the neighbors were thinking!”
“What . . .?”
“Had our neighbors been paying attention, they might have noticed a non-descript automobile entering our driveway in the spring of 1966, when I was ten years old. After it entered the driveway it would have disappeared from their view into the plum and cedar trees growing wild to the left, and the chrysanthemum bushes lining the right side of the short driveway that gave our rural/suburban home a great deal of privacy. The neighbors would have had to walk to the head of driveway and peer down the asphalt lane to see where the automobile had parked. Hardly an unusual experience, but they might have been a bit more surprised when the driver emerged from the car. The diminutive oriental man had a shaved head and was wearing flowing maroon robes and traditional Japanese sandals. Such a sight might have startled our nosy neighbors, and even twenty years after the end of World War II the sight of a Japanese man in a California suburban neighborhood might have been alarming. They might have guessed from his attire that the man was a Buddhist monk, but what our neighbors would not have known is that a visit from Shunryu Suzuki to our home was somewhat unusual, but not surprising or alarming. Suzuki-roshi—roshi means teacher or master—was indeed a Zen Buddhist monk, and he had been invited for dinner in our home by my mother. His presence in California during the 1960s changed my mother’s life profoundly, and unknowingly laid the foundations of my own spiritual development.
“We lived northwest of San Jose, California, in the small community of Los Altos. In the mid-1950s Los Altos represented the ideal suburban community. Land and homes were inexpensive, lots were large, and my father, Norm Hiestand Jr., was able to purchase a home big enough for his growing family on a large lot near the golf course. He had married my mother, Barbara Johnston, in 1947, and in 1949 my oldest brother Norm was born, followed in 1951 by my sister Harriet, whom we called Hattie Lou in those days. A few years later Dad added an addition on to the home, a swimming pool, and two more kids: my other brother Charlie in 1955, and me in 1956. For the first nineteen years of my life, I never knew anything except the security and freedom of semi-rural suburban living. Surrounded by vacant lots, yet close to the Rancho Shopping center, which I remember fondly as having a world class bakery that created the best chocolate chip cookies a kid could possibly want. Life seemed to have a veneer of predictability, security and conventionality that was the hallmark of a white, middle class family in those times. It was not until I was older that I came to see the rips in that veneer, or that my definition of conventionality was not completely in sync with popular conceptions.
“All of these material privileges were made possible because my father had gotten in on the ground floor of the high-tech industry, which later came to be known as Silicon Valley. In the fifties, high tech pioneering companies like Hewlett Packard were gathered around Stanford University in Palo Alto. My father had received an Electrical Engineering degree from Stanford, and became employee number nine for a new start-up called Varian Associates. When Dad started with them, they were making klystron tubes, an obscure but necessary component of microwave communications equipment. Because this equipment was used by the government, Dad had to travel a lot, including internationally, which later became a problematic lifestyle for him. But in the beginning, it was exciting to be in a cutting edge industry, and Dad used his success to purchase the American dream for his family.
“Dad had started this American dream by wooing and marrying a beautiful and intelligent grad student named Barbara Johnston. My mom had acquired a Master’s Degree in Art from Claremont University in Pasadena and married
