Sister Mary John Marshall and Maylie Scott (Kushin Seisho)

 

Sister Mary John Marshall and

Maylie Scott (Kushin Seisho)

I met Maylie Scott at the Center for AIDS Services, where she came twice a week under the guise of leading a writing group. I say "guise" not to ascribe any hidden motivation as if she were trying to convert the people she worked with to some Buddhist straight and narrow or any other hidden aim, but she was doing much more than teaching a creative writing course. She was a talented Zen teacher who had also been trained as a social worker. She was masterful. Our clients at the Center were drug addicts, some in recovery, some actively using; male, female and transexual sex workers; 50 or 60 gay men, pretty evenly split between middle-class white men and African American ghetto smart street kids. The glue that held the community together was that everyone was dealing with a disease that in the mid-90s, was still a death sentence. They had a lot of their plates. In Maylie’s group, they opened up and began to talk about themselves to a very sympathetic ear without a shred of judgment. 

Maylie was a divorced single mom with three adult kids. Her big California brown shingled house on Ashby Avenue was part of the divorce settlement with her ex-husband, a Canadian English professor at UC. After her kids moved out, there were several empty rooms. Her mother had just moved from a Manhattan apartment where she’d lived since divorcing Maylie’s father. It had been many years of living alone. Mary was close to 90. She could still take care of herself and was mentally very alert, but obviously, living alone in a New York apartment was not a good situation.

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Maylie was one of Mel Weitzman’s senior students. She was looking to form a loosely knit community, not organized around a practice schedule. She asked if I would consider moving in; she also invited me to join her and her mother for dinner so that I could meet her and her mother could give me her seal of approval.

Mary was bright and curious to meet a potential new housemate. I’m sure that she wanted me to feel entirely at home as well as understand the level of manners expected. When we sat down to dinner, there was a silver napkin ring at my place. It was engraved in a lovely antique script with the initials LBC. In thanking her, I asked who LBC was. Oh, she said, Lawrence Baine Crandon. I said how lovely my grandfather was Lawrence, and one couple among my parents' friends in Nichols, where we grew up, was Phil and Phyllis Crandon. Maylie was serving, but put down the spoon and looked at me with an impish grin, “We call him Uncle Phil, but he is really my mother’s first cousin. He is quite a character, don’t you think?”  I tried not to act as surprised as I was. I said that all the kids loved to go to visit Randy, their son, where we snuck down into the basement, where Phil had a very elaborate and expensive HO2 model train collection with tracks that wound around almost every available space. 

This was the beginning of three very important years in my life. I finally began to allow myself to heal from the hidden personal costs of my work at Maitri Hospice, and I really began working with the koans which enriched my Zen practice. All the while Maylie with her steady practice was just there. She was lovely and so kind.