In October 1991, Tom Joyce was one of three partners in a successful San Francisco advertising agency. He had been blessed with a precocious nine-year-old son, a beautiful pregnant wife and what looked like a bright future. Life had other plans. The...
"On Kailasa mountain, Shiva lives as a naked yogi. His wife Parvati is the most beautiful woman in the universe, capable of bewitching even the best of yogis.Though Shiva is the enemy of Kama and is without passion,he is her slave when he makes love to her...He is tortured by longing and can find no peace as he wanders everywhere, weeping and behaving like a lover in distress."
—Shiva Purana
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10 MAY 1994, KATHMANDU, NEPAL
Poof!Made itall disappear. That life you thought you always wanted? Gone. Distractions? Gone. Excuses? All gone. Time to return what doesn't belong to you and reclaim what does. Best regards, Shiva. [RSVP regrets only.]
On October 22, 1991, I received that incendiary invitation from the mythic arsonist who incinerated my home in the Oakland hills. The Lord of the Dance now causes the sun's rays to ignite ice crystals on my bulkhead window as the Boeing 747 banks into the Himalaya, a blinding array of uncut diamonds thrusting from the Earth's backbone.
Beyond this snowbound fortress, in a land called Bhöt by the people who live there, at the summit of a mountain believed in ancient times to be the Axis of the World, Shiva awaits my reply. I hold his lucent gaze until the vision dims, slowly extinguished by a hydrocarbon haze draped like a brown shroud over the landscape below.
Yesterday morning was wet with mist and good-byes. Nicholas, now twelve, pulled open the heavy oak door of my former home and reached up for a perfunctory high-five. Climbing the redwood-paneled staircase, I watched my golden-haired son shuffle sleepily back into the kitchen to finish his breakfast.
Upstairs, my two-year-old daughter was snuggled into her mother's king-sized bed. Little hearts peppering the fuzzy fabric of her pajamas, Eli was torn between her ritual morning bottle, her father's attention, and Sesame Street. Her puckered mouth smiled a greeting around the latex nipple as her limpid eyes shifted focus back and forth between Cookie Monster and her approaching father. I wrapped my arms around her tiny body, still warm from sleep, as if it were the last time I'd ever have the chance.
Through the bedroom window of the home we'd made for our children after the fire, the gray wedge of Mount Tamalpais hovered over a silver bay framed by gnarled boughs of live oak and veiled in coastal fog. Kate stood backlit against this Japanesque watercolor landscape, her posture bent in heavy thought. It was the same spot from which she'd delivered her parting shot nearly a year ago.
"I think you should look for a place of your own," my wife had told me.
She was 38 now, and only creases of laughter on her face and hips re-sculpted by childbirth altered my memory of "Katie", the defiant 18-year-old summer intern and blonde of complexity. When she moved into sunlight, common straw was spun into gold. Alchemy happened. Young men fell hopelessly in love.
