Happy Birthday Ganesh! How I Survived a Near-Fatal Car Crash and Became a "HinJew."
Happy Birthday Ganesh! How I Survived a Near-Fatal Car Crash and Became a "HinJew."
Featuring the music of TriBeCaStan, with the Master of Carnatic Mandolin, U. Rajesh
Today (August 31) millions of people worldwide will celebrate Ganesh’s Appearance Day. I won’t go into the story of how and why Shiva’s son wound up with the head of an elephant, you can find that elsewhere online or in a book. But since I was a teenager I have often felt the presence of Ganesh in my life and tried not to bug him too often with my feeble requests to bail me out of traffic jams, delayed flights and a variety of life’s inconveniences. Over the years I have written stories, poems and songs in his honor - “Majestic Ganesh” — (see link below, with my old world beat ensemble TriBeCaStan, performing the song with the master of Carnatic mandolin, U. Rajesh, along with a wonderful spinning dancer).
I’ve also written music for Kroncha, a brutal rodent the size of a mountain before Ganesha made him a pint-sized humble servant, who regularly delivered glasses of milk, and sweet rice balls. (Hear TriBeCaStan’s “Kroncha” below.)
Here is the story of how I first became aware of the glorious Hindu demi-god Ganesha.
By June 1973 I had turned eighteen, gotten my driver’s license and graduated from high school. Making my great escape to Minneapolis, to attend art school I jammed my books, records, clothes, pots and pans and guitar into a new Chevy Vega station wagon my dad had just bought me. It was a long haul and I was going it alone.
Backing down the driveway, I felt like I’d just been sprung from prison. My parents, who had been married for twenty-six years had been battling it out in a long, bitter and very public divorce case which I was happy to no longer be stuck in the middle of.
Rejoicing in my new-found freedom, I headed west on Route 80, doing seventy with the windows down, blasting T. Rex’ The Slider. I rolled past the crumbling factories of William Carlos Williams’ Patterson and over the Delaware Water Gap into Pennsylvania.
My plan was to make it to Oberlin College, outside of Cleveland, to stay with my pal Andy’s older brother Stephen, a third-year psychology major. Stephen lived in the Oberlin dorm, the first co-ed dormitory in America, which became world famous thanks to an article in Life magazine. Life claimed it was a breeding ground for promiscuity, drug abuse and revolution - just my kind of place!
Stephen was happy to see me even though I felt like a zombie after the ten-hour drive. We went up his dorm room to relax. A minute later his roommate Peter, a music major who played oboe and harpsichord plunked down on the sofa and lit a big joint. Then a pretty, blonde girl named Pauline appeared wearing a “Free Angela!” sweatshirt. She gave Peter a kiss and took a long toke on the joint and presto! It was everything Life magazine claimed.
Having just returned from his “spiritual quest” to India, Stephen’s dorm room was filled with bronze statues and bright batiks of Shiva and Ganesh, Kali and Krishna playing musical instruments, juggling swords and skulls and dancing with lots of arms, legs and heads everywhere. He showed us snapshots of skinny men meditating and cows wandering through city streets. There was incense burning as we sat cross-legged in the lotus position while Stephen recounted the highlights of his journey. He’d cut his hair short and had grown a long frizzy beard that made him resemble a radical rabbi more than a Hindu holy man.
With all the exotic stuff, nice girls and good weed, I wound up staying at Oberlin for a couple more days. The morning I left; Stephen pinned a poster of the elephant-headed god Ganesh to the ceiling of my car. “Ganesh removes all obstacles. He’s a scholar and an excellent dancer too. He’ll protect you on your trip,” he assured me.
The world was a bit of a blur as I pulled out on the Ohio Turnpike that morning and headed west across the flat farmland. It was like driving through an Edward Hopper painting, except that it smelled like pig shit all the way to Toledo.
Just outside of Howe, Indiana (home of the Howe Military Academy) I lost control of the Vega as I crossed the Fawn River Bridge. I had been buzzing along, doing about seventy-five on a hot August afternoon when the car suddenly blew a gasket (I later found out the Vega was famous for this problem). Smoke poured out from under the hood and I couldn’t see a thing. The engine clanged and banged. The car bucked and lurched and then suddenly lost all power. The steering wheel locked up. It was frozen in my hands as I was headed for a cement embankment. That’s when I realized, “This is it! Holy shit! I’m gonna die!”
Everything seemed to move in slow motion. It felt like an eternity before I crashed. Then bam! I was thrown to the floor of the car as it ricocheted off one wall, skidded across two lanes and smashed into the other side, before finally coming to a stop in the median.
The last thing I saw as I was thrown to the floor of the car was a black Cadillac from Alabama with a bumper sticker that read “Pray the Rosary Every Day.” The first thing I saw when I came to, was that poster of Ganesh that Stephen had given me. It had fallen down and covered me like a protective shroud.
Crawling from the wreckage, I just stood there in shock, looking at the car. It had torn apart like tissue paper. The tailgate was lying on the ground a couple of hundred yards down the road. Most of the tires had gone their separate ways, leaving the car flat on its belly in the grass. Glass was everywhere. The passenger side door was caved in and the hood was crumpled up like a beer can.
That’s when I noticed all of my things - my records, books and clothes were strewn across the highway. As speeding cars swerved to avoid me, I wandered in a daze, out onto the blacktop to grab whatever I could, as the rest of my records and clothes floated downstream below the Fawn River Bridge.
Miraculously my guitar, a Martin D-18 was still in one piece (thanks to those weird gray fiberglass cases they used to make). All I could think was, “My dad is gonna kill me! He bought me this car and now I’ve totaled it!”
So, I set all my things down in a nice, neat pile beside the car and stood there, waiting for the police and the tow truck to arrive, scrutinizing the poster of the great enigmatic elephant god, realizing Ganesh had just saved my life. And that dear reader is the moment when I became a HinJew!
Hair raising tale. Hinju? Jews don't worship elephants, idols or graven images of them. The Jewish God is One !