It’s hard to remember how they met each other with their coming from such differing places.
The Buddha from a Bay Area factory tooled to mass produce exotic oriental plaster sculptures for visitors to San Francisco’s Chinatown. In fact, He wasn’t a Buddha at all, but was a facsimile of Hotei, a Chinese god of prosperity and good cheer. Somewhere down the line of American capitalist imperialism, Hotei had lost his street cred and his identity for the convenience of consumers, as had every other overweight Chinese deity as all were referred to as Buddhas. And for the convenience of us and our need for a pretty alliterate title, we’ll refer to him as a Buddha as well.
Did he start out as white or gold? The keeper’s memory, now feeble, can no longer see the Buddha perched amid the cacophony of dragons and Quan Yins (often called a geisha by the same misinformed consumers). The Keeper had painted the Buddha immediately upon taking him home, mimicking the patina of that famous bronze boar sitting just outside the Villa Borghese in Florence , Italy. His belly glossy gold from pretended rubbings by million greedily wishing fingers while the rest of him receded into the darkness of faux oxidation.
The Bass had been painted as well. She hadn’t always been blue. And, she hadn’t always been hanging on the wall either. One spring day as the sun had probed her Ozark mountain lake with its warmth and her fecund belly full of millions of possible basses, the Bass had been ripped out of her comfortable lair, a victim of a combination of her own voracity and hunger and the despotic choice of just the right jitterbug plug by some air breathing fisherman. And once plucked, she had been photographed and awarded posthumous prizes, gladly taken in proxy by her plucker, for her beauty and size and perfection. Then plopped in plaster (from the Bay Area? Not likely), cast by a master taxidermist and presented back to her Plucker, whose home life showed him more a fucker, in the worst terms that that word entails.
The trophy Bass was left to the trophy wife in a bitter divorce proceeding and proceeded to collect a trophy amount of dust in a decidedly untrophy-like garage in northern Missouri. Years later, the once plucker’s wife gave the Bass away to the Buddha’s keeper in exchange for undisclosed kindnesses.
In the interim, between the Buddha’s purchase and the Bass’s presentation, the Buddha had spent quite a few years in a tiny corner of a succession of the keeper’s gardens, first, in the temperate California sun and then in the wildly fluctuating weather of the Missouri mid-west. He had seen the seasons come and go, Birds flying and fireflies. He had smilingly listened to the summer hum of cicadas and the howl of biting winter winds. Through it all, he had never wavered in his optimism with his arms, perpetually upturned, offering solace and joy to all and every.
The Bass, painted a blue mottled version of her natural mottled olive by the Keeper, was an indoor ornament instead. From her perch on the wall of the Keeper’s palace, filled with smells of turpentine and linseed oil, she could peek at the welcoming Buddha when the door was open to the garden. His smile was just as enticing, in a much less hungry way, than the jitterbug plug of her demise. She felt an inevitable kinship with the Buddha through these glimpses whether it was through painting or ornamentalism or the Keeper’s company. And the adventure had not yet begun.
(to be continued)
