On Meeting a Woman On the Way to Somewhere Else

A Stairway to Heaven?

Photo by Reuben Hustler on Unsplash

I was on my way to cover a murder scene, walking to my car on a cold, bright February afternoon in the city of Kingston, NY. I figured it would take about an hour to drive a few miles to the scene, knock on a few doors, ask a few obvious questions, get some obvious answers and bang out a story. A murder folo is never a reporter’s welcome assignment.

Just ahead of me, a tiny old woman was limping along the sidewalk, lugging a two-drawer steel filing cabinet against her hip. The cabinet was almost as tall as she was. She took a step or two, then set the thing down against a narrow sidewalk’s wall of shovelled-up snow.  

I stood in my tracks, looking for an escape.

She was a street person, obviously. She’d just copped the cabinet from someone’s trash pile. I didn’t care what she was up to. All I knew was she was slowing me down. 

There was no escape.

I walked up next to her. Matched her speed. Looked down at her and saw she wasn’t an old woman at all. She was maybe 20 years younger than I was. 

Without thinking, I asked her if she needed help, half hoping she’d shoo me away.       

She stopped in her tracks, looked up at me, rested the filing cabinet on the sidewalk and thanked me. With a smile. Hoo boy, I thought. Now what? Where was she bound? And how long would it take to get her there?

As if she’d read my mind, she nodded and pointed up the street and said, “Not far. Up there.”

I opened the cabinet’s top drawer, gripped its edge and began trudging in front of her.

She stopped following me, causing me to pause.

“I Teebeetan.”

I nodded, as if I knew what she was saying. As if I cared. 

Then I got it: She was Tibetan.

“You know Dalai Lama?” she asked.

I laughed. Sure, doesn’t everybody? Just to be polite, I said I’d seen him once, during a ballyhooed visit to nearby Woodstock. Me and a thousand other people.

She nodded, smiled, seemed suitably impressed. On we slogged. We didn’t say another word to each other until she pointed to a house about 50 yards up the street.

“Not far. Up There.” she said.

When we got to the front door, she gave me the bad news:

“Second floor,” she said, pointing skyward. Smiling.

She skipped ahead of me. The door at the top of a long set of stairs opened directly into her apartment. I looked up at her standing on the landing, smiling.down at me as I yanked the cursed cabinet step by step up the winding stairwell.  

Finally reaching the top stair, I caught a glimpse of a photo hanging on the wall just behind her. I looked more closely at the photo as I entered the hallway.  It was a picture of her, in a radiant silk costume, standing next to the Dalai Lama.

I won’t say I experienced some sort of transcendent moment then. But I will say this: Something told me the murder scene could wait.

The woman told me her name, which I promptly forgot. The front room where I stood was heavily decorated in primary colors. Portraits of the Buddha and other deities hung on the wall. There was a small altar off to the right. To the left, a small pile of CDs splayed out on a table.

She offered me tea. I declined. I wanted answers, not tea. Who was she? What was with the Dalai Lama? She began to answer, then spun on her heel, left the room and returned, clutching what looked like a photo album in her hands.

“You know Peter Gabriel?”

Again, with the absurd questions.

She opened the album and stabbed a photo with her finger. There she was again, in a resplenet dress, standing next to . . .

“Peter Gabriel,” she said in her halting English. “He hep me.” She pointed to the stack of CDs. “He hep me with my music.” I peered more closely at the stack of CDs. They all had her photo on their covers. I could see Gabriel’s Real World Records label on their sides.

While I stood there, too stunned to say anything, she flipped through the photo album, pointing at each new photo and identifying Natalie Merchant. Annie Lennox. Michael Stipe. At one photo, she hesitated and pointed impatiently to another photo of a guy in sunglasses, forgetting the man’s name.

“Irish band?” she ventured.

Bono.

“Yes,” she said, delighted at my obvious expertise. “Bono.”

I stayed a bit in the living room then made my reluctant apologies. I had to leave. The neighbors were awaiting their questions. 

Her name was—and is—Yungchen Lhamo. She’s a world-renowned Tibetan singer-songwriter living in exile in the US. She fled her country by walking roughly 1,800 miles to India. Even the Himalayas couldn’t stop her. Her extraordinary voice can be found on her CDs and in collaboration on various albums with the above-noted celebrities. She tours regularly, using her performances to benefit women’s and Tibetan causes and charities.

A man who knows her better than I said she’s a bodhisattva, which the Buddhist magazine Tricycle describes as “an ordinary person who takes up a course in his or her life that moves in the direction of buddha.”

But that description doesn’t do Yungchen justice. She’s no ordinary person. I believe she’s moving in the direction of the buddha, which, if I finally understood her correctly, is located “Not far. Up there.”

Pointing skyward.

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