If anyone tells you his or her earliest memory, you will know that person’s basic emotion and repetitive pattern in life.
David Taylor-Schott (Schott is pronounced shot) is no exception. He says, “I remember I am tied to a leash. I am walking in step with the pram my mother is pushing with my two younger siblings (fraternal twins) in it.”
It rained earlier, and his mother, a minister’s wife at the Presbyterian Church, is taking them out into the sunshine. David is two and a half years old. David is the oldest and has to walk in step. Although they are out for a walk together, he is separate.
Separation is the basic repetitive wound in David’s life.
Yet to begin with, till he was 13, David had felt his life was perfect: He had his family, the regard of his father and parishioners, and star status at school.
But when he was sent away to Mount Hermon School for Boys, a prep school in Northfield, Mass., David thought, “They are getting rid of me because I have been a bad boy.”
This feeling refused to be dislodged, and that is when he started walking on the wild side.
He tried to burn down a dorm, played hooky and went off-campus, and brought back noisy townies. And worse things followed.
“In the middle of an April night, I went to the school farm, loaded a wheelbarrow with manure, made a crude wooden cross and planted it in the manure, slit the throat of a chicken and crucified it, trundled the load up to the school chapel, and reconstructed my monument of disrespect on ‘senior rock,’ which occupied hallowed ground at the chapel’s entrance,” he says.
Back home in Cleveland, he continued to act out, and only his admirable father’s position as a well-known pastor kept the law at arm’s length. As a cure, he was sent to a psychotherapist. After one meeting, the doctor opined, “There is nothing wrong with the lad. Just give him a bit of money and let him move to California.”
The good doctor was moving there himself and thus started the next phase of David’s life.
In Santa Barbara, David met his first wife, Susan. He says of her, “For Susan, simply to sit in the garden with a flower (any flower), a vine-ripened tomato (any variety) made the day complete.”
After Susan was diagnosed with cancer, he was helped by studying under the guidance of Pema Chodron, then the abbess at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He particularly appreciated her book “When Things Fall Apart.” In fact he was reading the book with his beloved wife, mother of four, when she passed on.
A good while later, he met Beth Schott at a Buddhist meditation group. A graduate of Carlton College in art history, she is a young woman with beauty and brains.
“She taught me the greatest lesson of my life,” says David. “She taught me to love myself.
“Before I met Beth, I was unfocused and careless with my time and money. It’s taken a long time—I am now more thoughtful and more aware of my effect on others. I am more the person I was meant to be.”
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