“You have snatched the pebble, Grasshopper…”

“…it is time for you to leave the temple.”

The Missus seemed delighted to be the one to break the news to me this morning. It’s a funny thing about people, but we secretly like to be the bearers of bad news. I’m the same way.

But this was a rough one. Not only was Kwai Chang Caine dead, but apparently by his own hand.

She’s too young to have grown up on “Kung Fu,” but I’m exactly the right age. It was one of the few shows I could watch with my Dad, because he liked the chop-socky fisticuffs and I was having my mind exploded by the version of eastern philosophy it served up every week.

Remember, this was back before The Google and the interwebs and cell phones and all that shit. If you lived in the great American Southwest in the mid-70s, unless you went to Herculean efforts to seek other shit out, you were in a cultural backwater. And I only went to Herculean efforts to seek out weed at the time.

So I was completely unprepared for this network TV show that expanded my mental and spiritual horizons every week. And the character teaching me these lessons had instant cred because he could kick the ass of anybody. He just didn’t want to, which made him doubly cool to me. It would be like if my parents could have kicked my ass, but instead chose to talk to me... You know, a fantasy world, but grounded in just enough Wild West ‘reality’ to make it relatable.

And the guy at the center of all this coolness was arguably the coolest thing about the show. And not just the hippie drag of the long hair and unshod feet. There was a stillness at the center of David Carradine’s performance that did more to sell the Zen-ish pacifism the show preached than all the ass-kicking in the world. When he wasn’t kicking ass, which if you watch the shows now you realize was about 90% of the time, he was being humble and helpful and wise.

I remember going to school the day after an airing of “Kung Fu” feeling somehow ennobled, elevated above my plebian peers in that Godawful arid hellhole of a corner of the world. I was usually chewing over a line or two of dialogue that I thought was especially insightful. I can’t say for sure, but I probably whipped some of them out from time to time to impress the few loser friends I did have.

And David Carradine has been cool ever since then, no matter what kind of wretched swill he was involved in (his post-“Kung Fu” acting career was relatively undistinguished, “Bound For Glory” and the “Kill Bill” films notwithstanding). No matter what stupid shit his character was saying, or what awful things he was doing, I’d watch the images flash before me and start thinking again about “Kung Fu,” and the impact it had on the way I looked at my life.

While I sit here this morning, pondering the news of his death at 72, all I can hope is that it turns out he was facing some kind of incurable ailment or chronic illness and decided, Kwai Chang Caine-like, to pick the moment and circumstances of his own passing. I could totally live with that, after all this fucking sadness passes. It is what Kwai Chang would do, except he’d probably wander out into the desert and sit under a shady tree instead of hang himself in a Bangkok hotel room, but to each his own.

Whatever the dirt turns out to be in the long run, my world is a sadder, lesser place today. Not because I’ll be missing out on all the schlocky B-movies he would have made had he lived, but because another one of the rare good parts of my childhood is gone.

It’ll be hard to watch “Kung Fu” again anytime soon, but as soon as my son is old enough to appreciate the philosophical aspects of the show, I look forward to introducing it to him. I’ll enjoy the awkwardly-staged, slow-motion slug-fests while hopefully he’ll be soaking up all the mind-blowing, watered-down eastern wisdom that I am far too lazy a parent to introduce him to any other way.

The picture below illustrates how I feel today about the passing of David Carradine. It was on the wall at my son’s daycare, among about 20 or 30 fairly dissimilar pencil-on-paper efforts. I knew it was his work the moment I walked in the door, all the way across the room. He’s not even four yet and already he’s passing through his Black Period.

He is definitely gonna need him a little “Kung Fu” in his future.