Sit still like a railroad crossing signal

Now that I'm unemployed -- here it is the end of the week, and I haven't heard back about that other job at the company, so I am assuming that job is not going to happen -- I have more time to do all those things I've been meaning to do. Fix the car, exercise, and work on my novel, for example. And, of course, to watch TV.

You know how there are certain things from your childhood that you remember incompletely? A vivid but partial memory of a song, a movie, a TV show, or maybe a place you visited. You saw it once and you remember some things clearly, but the context and especially the title are gone. I have a bunch of orphaned memories like this. Yesterday, through the magic of daytime cable TV, I cleared one of them up. I was dialing around on cable when I hit upon a movie called Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968) -- an unremarkable light comedy about a bunch of nuns and their schoolgirl charges. The sequel to the 1966 hit "The Trouble with Angels," WAGTF is about several nuns taking a couple dozen hyperactive teenage girls across the country to a some religious conference in California. (In the 1960s most of the people in the U.S. still lived east of the Mississippi and thought of California as a strange, distant land, usually reached only by a long road trip. And you could still make a movie about nuns running a Catholic boarding school.) This is the kind of movie I used to go see as a little kid in Edwardsville, Ill., where we'd go see whatever was playing in the town's one movie theater.

Two scenes from this movie, the title and premise of which I otherwise forgot completely for decades, stuck in my mind my whole life. In one, Stella Stevens, who plays the young Vatican II-hip nun, faces down a not-very-menacing gang of bikers. And in the other, the bus nearly gets stuck on a railroad grade crossing as a train approaches.

The latter scene, for some reason, was particularly memorable for me. In this scene, the estrogen-laden bus approaches a rural grade crossing at night. All is completely quiet and peaceful. The driver -- the stereotyped batty, slightly masculine nun -- stops and looks both ways. Nothing's coming, so they start across. As they're right in the middle of the tracks, the warning signals suddenly start clanging and flashing, and the started driver jams on the brakes and the bus stalls out. Then we have the overly drawn-out scene where all the girls and nuns, except for the driver, evacuate the bus before the onrushing train reaches them, and the driver manages to get the bus started at the last moment, of course, and makes it across.

It was the beginning of the scene that stuck in my mind -- the utter quiet except for the bus gently stopping and then starting again, and then the startled reaction as the signals began blaring. And for more than thirty years I remembered that, whenever I drove across a railroad track, but forgot the whole rest of the movie.

So that was yesterday. This morning I was having a typically bad time sitting zazen, with a painful back and wandering attention and the usual drowsiness. Then just before the end, I remembered that scene from the movie: the peaceful rural grade crossing at night, a silent warning signal in the foreground of the frame. And -- it sounds funny --suddenly I realized the pacefulness and alertness of that signal, standing straight and tall, just watching and waiting for the moment it has to fulfill its purpose and warn of an approaching train. Then all my drowsiness left me and I sat straight and tall and attentively, just like that signal. I suddenly was able to do what I haven't been able to do well for a couple of weeks, focus on my breath.

For three breaths. Then the bell rang.