The King George and Ben’s Compassion

By far and bar none, Benjamin Patrick Murphy is the most naturally compassionate soul I have ever met.  As parents, we try to teach sharing.  Share this and share that and most people (children are people) are resistant.  It doesn't taste right to relinquish half of my rights to this delicious chocolate chip cookie when my desire is to eat it all.

Many people think only of themselves; this too is natural, but base.   We are sentient beings and can access higher order thinking powers and a clause in the owner’s manual is the responsibility to use these higher order powers to get up off the couch.   The greatest goal of Buddhism is compassion (Dali Llama, 1996).  I did not have to teach Bem compassion or about the byproduct of compassion:  sharing.   He taught me.

Ben is a natural sharer and I haven’t seen that much.  If we were watching a movie and he went to get a cookie he always wandered back with as extra one that he would wordlessly pass to me.  I was awestruck his natural acts of selflessness. 

He taught me a lesson about myself and sharing on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the early fall, when the leaves are turning and an innocuous sun hovers on the horizon. August days that are cool in the morning and warm by mid day.  There is no chance of being cold and little chance of sweating.  On this particular afternoon Ben and I shared a moment I will never forget.

Ben and I mounted the squareboy Volvo 240 to the supermarket.  On the surface, the task seems mundane, but every trip in the car was an adventure in part because of the temperament of the car but more importantly for infinite opportunities to learn.  I am curious by nature.  I feast on learning and don’t wipe my mouth after; I let it drip down across my chin.  Everyday.

The market was less than a two minute drive from the house.  A left at the top of the street and then down the winding hill passing the site that used to house The Red Lion Inn, but now is just an odd shaped plot of grass with a few arborvitaes and a blue Historic marker.

The Red Lion was a stage coach stop (read:  bar, tavern, taproom with a soup and a sandwich lunch special) on the way from the capital of Philadelphia to the next stop on the line: Trenton, which is then followed by New York.  This route, unlucky number 13, was the main route of transit during colonial times.  The Red Lion Inn was established in the 1680’s.

Its glory days had passed some years ago.  Glory days past is easy when you are considering a functioning Restaurant/Bar/Inn over the course of three centuries.  The Red Lion sat next to a fork in the creek that separates the city of Philadelphia from the village of Andalusia.  The creek is called Poquessing after the Indians that used to walk the thin deer paths that still follow alongside the shallow, narrow, shady, pebbling waterway.

Poquesing used to inhabit this area but like most native tribes they have slipped into non-existence.  The people who have thrived in the area are the same folk who built the Red Lion Inn and the King George Inn and the Yardley Inn.  All of these former stage coach watering holes have opened their doors for the past 300 years to refreshments of alcohol, fresh water for the horses and a room for the night with a “female company” option.

The King George sits on a bank in a gentle curve of the Delaware River, 10 miles north of the Red Lion, off of Route 13.  It doubled as a coach/ferry stop between Bristol Borough and Burlington New Jersey.  The King George is a massive four story affair painted white.  The construction has been haphazard from creative owners and fierce fires over the centuries to include add-on porches and kitchens, new dining rooms for catering large events and sun decks overlooking the slowly passing river.

The maze of the King George starts in the basement where most of the original beams are still intact and doing their jobs as they have been for the past 300 years.  The main beams run 35’ long and are 16” square. They are rough hewn oak that bear the scars of ax sweat and muscle.  The beams are yielded from tress cut down in the late 1600’s, “original growth” trees that probably seeded at the end of the 15^th century, five hundred years ago.  The beams carry the weight of the King George and don’t complain much.

The electrical logistics of the King George are an impossible maze of wires:  thin dusty snakes in white gone brown, red black green yellow and blue all draped atop random square nails or pinned with rusted staples.  The only electrician who works on the King George has been passing envelopes to Bristol Borough Fire Safety Inspectors since Ford was in office. 

His nickname is the Termite because he had to get in to all the small spaces where wires must be pushed and pulled and cut and mended.  Termite is old now and doesn’t crawl anymore.  He is an electrician who still wears the required boots and khakis; he just doesn’t even bend down to pick up a screwdriver if it falls.  He has younger lads to do the work.  He is the master.

The dark shuffle board length worn wooden lacquered bar of the King George was originally designed for a passenger ship, but when that ship met the end of its days they took the hand carved wooden columns and smoky mirrors and the brass footrests out of the ship and put them into the King George.

There are about 20 single rooms of different sizes and with the bathrooms at the end of the halls on the second third and fourth floors of the Inn.  The snobbery of an expensive restaurant coexists with the baseness of the flop house upstairs.  Downstairs dilettantes dine on 35$ a plate ala carte with live piano and view the river sipping wine, while the upstairs  houses welfare recipients living in the margins of society.

Mentally ill alcoholics live with black toothed meth heads and recent prison released Aryan Brothers who sport teardrop tattoos under the right eye. The white trash shuddering whiskey breathe jobless are the folk who can only pay on a weekly basis for their bed.

The inn is still an inn and has always seen the likes of horse thieves and murderers.  Recently released convicts have called the King George home for 300 years.  I worked there for a summer or two as a waiter.  It was a good job and easy enough and I loved the architecture and being associated with a building that had that much history.

The ghost of Christmases past still lurked in the energy of the finely decorated rooms with rich wallpaper, marble fireplaces and miles of wood molding.  The moldings had been painted over and over and over to arrive at a glossy thick finish that even termites couldn't consume.

The rooms had names at the King George, like the Lincoln Room and the Madison Room where those dead presidents had enjoyed the fare of the George when the fireplaces used wood instead of those new fangled gas numbers that now produce the perfect flames.  Private rooms are sectioned off with thick carpet, dark drapes and dollies collecting dust on Georgian sideboards.  Nothing was square in the King George; everything had an angle to it.

I was working upstairs on the porch, a 50 year old enclosed addition to an addition to the original structure.  Wide eyed windows that beg for shade leer out upon the river.  The floors are slanted and creaky and everything feels exposed.  The windows are drafty and the candles attempt to resist the wind but only prove to paint the light in shadowy uneven drafts on the edge of turbulence.

It was on around midnight and the diners had long since left.  I needed to walk downstairs and the crooked creaky staircase at the far end of the porch offered the quickest exit, except you had to pass near the Lady Ghost who inhabits the Madison Room which sits next to the stairway entrance. I was a waiter leaving work in Johnny Cash black from head to foot under a long worn weathered double breasted Russian Spy Coat with back air vent and careless belt.  There was room for a shotgun that I never carried in that coat. I was a tough guy until about halfway into the silent darkness of the room.  After three steps in the room I felt weighty presence, at five paces I was uncomfortable and seven paces I felt the adrenaline of a potential fight; a quick rush as the body takes the blood from the extremities preparing for loss of limb.  That back of the brain instinct that developed through millions of years of waiters losing arms and legs to lady Ghosts.

I walked but 20 feet into the room and in the course of those seconds, without the appearance of a soul, I could no longer continue.   I about-faced on a dime while saying aloud, “OK, I’m going the other way. Good Night.”  It was a moment without thought.  It was Buddha.

I have had three Zen moments in my life and that experience at the King George was one. Have you ever had moments that are pure instinctive action without thought?   It is a mind out of body control that needs no time to think, like Bruce Lee at a salad bar. 

My other two moments:   I was eleven, I dove, and momentarily failed to catch the wiffle ball that sailed past my outstretched hands.  The ball then sharply ricochet off the top of the green vinyl chain link fence and hit my open palm.  My fingers snapped shut.  That happened the summer of my eleventh year.  Buddha. 

The second moment of pure consciousness occurred at night, with my nephew, one block from the Pacific Ocean, on our way to my apartment in Jaco Beach, Costa Rica.  He found a brown object the size of an apple and he asked me what I thought it was.  He handed it to me.  In one thoughtless, fluid motion, I smelled it, raised my arm above my head and smashed it on the pavement.  It broke into several pieces and I picked up the largest piece and said, “It’s a seed.”  We walked on.  He was stunned.  He is still stunned years later.

How many years had the Lady Ghost left her energy in the Madison Room?  I returned to   the service kitchen, went down the back stairs and took the long way to the parking lot, leaving behind the heavy energy of trapped spirits, on the second floor of a 300 year old inn.

Ben and I drifted down the winding hill past the empty lot that used to house the Red Lion Inn.  The Red Lion burnt to the ground in 1993.  It had served it’s 300 plus years well, and the owners played with Jewish lightening and made Red Lion a memory.  The owners lost in the end, the ground is considered historic and cannot be built upon.

In the supermarket we felt the energy of the modern day hunter gathering rush.  Any trip out of the house meant that we would think of gifts and treats for those left behind.  We always brought Mama a gift:  chocolate bar or donut, ice cream or pirrollines, fresh strawberries and Kit Kats.

On this day we bought a Kit Kat and we were supposed to save on stick for Ian.  Since Ian didn’t come and I really wanted that Kit Kat satisfaction I somehow rationalized my guilt and ate it.

Ben was in the backseat behind the drivers.  He had his arms folded and a stern look.  He crinkled his fleshy brow and squinted his eyes.  He curled his lips and for all of his sweetness it was an effort for him to express his disappointment.  He looked so cute strapped in to his car seat, legs dangling and clothes scrunched from the belts.

“Papa, that was for Ian.  You ate Ian’s chocolate. No, papa.”

My son, the compassionate Buddha, chastised me.  I didn't feel so bad and I still don’t feel bad.  Ian wanted to stay home and we went out and hunted and gathered.  There were plenty of more treats in the bags and Ian wouldn't miss a thing.

Ben felt for his brother.  Ben felt for his father and Ben felt for the consciousness of justice.  He was three and half years old and he was better than me, older than me.  He can teach me and he taught me on that sunny afternoon to adhere to the plan and to share, no matter if nobody is watching.  I drove home with the feeling that I was chauffeur to the prince, guard of the Dali Llama, and caretaker of a spirit more fine than mine.