Russ Reina

1-2-3-4-5-6...

...and on until I catch myself and stop counting. It is a compulsion that I have, and it only surfaces when I'm swallowing liquids. I count the gulps. It only lasts a few beats, but, for some odd reason which perhaps I'll discover here, I do nothing to fight the compulsion. When I do catch myself and stop, it is most often with a chuckle, as in, "It's amazing how this habit got rooted so deeply in me."

Luckily, I know how it took root. It was (seemingly) indelibly imprinted on me around the time I was six years old. That was an even tougher year than the ones preceding it. From the time I was about four and a half until six, I found it almost impossible to keep food down, and promptly vomited after each meal. When I was finally weaned from this behavior, it was done by filling a book with columns of little sticky stars; one for each meal, and, at first, another for each hour I was able to keep my meal down. So many stars in a row and I'd get a toy. It was then that I began counting the number of swallows that I kept down. Apparently, the compulsive counting of food swallows has faded away over 45 years, but this is not so with liquids.

Not mine, personally, though such trauma-related ambulance calls certainly took their toll on me. In my career of twelve years as a paramedic, through three states, I had handled perhaps one each year. 1979 was a whole lot different. Not only had I handled five that year, but each and every one of the people involved not only lived long enough to make it to the hospital, but went on living for at least a month each. I can't deny a certain amount of pride in the fact that by the time this call came about, I was damn good at "saving" them, yet, I carried a huge nagging question in my heart of "What have I done?" Knowing damn well at the time that there was no chance of their survival, it was still my duty to do everything I could to keep them alive. The result was producing a series of what we called in the trade, "bookends."

I was just out of Paramedic school, working in Daytona Beach, Florida and was getting ready to transport my latest patient to a local funeral home. At that time (1974) my role as medic often involved transporting the dead body of the patient I had just "lost" to their final switching station before burial. For me, it was bad enough to fail, let alone have to face the embarrassment of having to say to the funeral director, "Yup, here's some more business for you. Did this one myself!"

About a month and a half earlier, after a ten-year involvement in various Twelve-Step programs based on Alcoholics Anonymous, I had come to an unusual realization. For the first time in my life, I found myself expressing a desire to have a Teacher that would help facilitate my spiritual path. I was never one to follow anyone in my life. I knew that "following" wasn't what it all was about. I had no idea what such a Teacher would look like. I simply longed to be able to sit at the feet of someone of flesh and blood for a change who could perhaps model what a well-rounded relationship with Spirit was, perhaps just talk to me about such things...who knew? The gist of it was that I was tired of having my spirituality so deep inside me that it had no form.

"Didn't you know how bad things were up there? Don't you even care that the cops were using tear gas, nerve gas, and rubber bullets?" she exclaimed.

"Um, bad?" was the best response I could muster.

The truth of the matter was, I really hadn't paid much attention that 40,000 or more people had converged on a distant city to disrupt a meeting of businessmen who were hell-bent on exploiting the world. I simply didn't care. That's what people do: the Big-Wigs scheme to use others for their own gain, and the youth, influenced by those who claim to be in the know, gather en-masse and get the crap beat out of them.