Short Story: "Just Another Day in the City."

Just Another Day in the City

Maybe it was the new chicken soup for the soul book (the gardener’s soul this time) that did it, or maybe Gilbert’s comment about Chapters possible closure. “That’s what I heard the other day,” he said. “Apparently it doesn’t meet Indigo’s bottom line requirements.” (Heather Reisman, owner of Indigo book stores, successfully won her bid to take over Chapters and the winds of change were beginning to blow.) Or maybe it was my seasonal PCBs (post-creative blues), I didn’t know; and I didn’t care.

That was the tragedy of it. I couldn’t bring myself to care; I just let the emotion ride, as though it were just one more cloud in the sky temporarily obscuring the light of my happy sun. But this wasn’t just any passing cloud; it was what I had paid so dearly to realize when I had to put aside my calling to be a writer to pursue the higher calling that my hero Larry Darrell in Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge had awakened in me in grade twelve.

I never thought it possible, that I could become so disheartened; maybe that’s why I sneered at the new Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul book: I was overwrought. But I didn’t see any chicken soup for the tired soul book; no, they hadn’t found the chicken yet whose soup could cure lingering life fatigue. But I knew (chuckling at the irony) that it would only be a matter of time before they sniffed out this new demographic; and then, presto—Chicken Soup for the Tired Soul!

We drove to Intercity Mall first. Cathy, who had two gift certificates left from the Christmas stocking stuffers I had given her, wanted to browse the clothing stores—Cleo’s and Braemar and Ricki’s and Northern Reflections; and, it went without saying, the shoe stores. (I never cease to marvel at women’s fascination for footwear.)

I walked down to Coles book store where I spotted the new Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul book in its self-contained promotional stand, all neatly packaged and ready to cure the ills of the spiritually deprived gardener when I heard a voice behind me, “You didn’t have to come all the way up here just to have coffee with me—”

It was Leo Kubochev. He was with Gilbert, his philosophy professor friend. “Fancy meeting you here,” I said to Leo, who hardly ever spent money on new books, or used books for that matter. He was very frugal. “So, Gilbert; how’s life treating you?”

That’s always a great opener. It puts people right into the thick of it. In medias res, as they say in creative writing classes. I’ve never been one to pussy-foot. As much as I do it to get along in life, I hate small talk. I like to get right to the meat of things.

In fact, I have a story title that I’ve been dying to use: The Meat of the Last Supper. A private glimpse into the transformative power of Christ’s secret teaching hidden in his sayings and parables; but I’m not sure I’ll ever write it now. I’ve lost heart.

“No hell,” Gilbert, a stocky, low-voiced short man, replied. His voice is so low I have to concentrate to hear what he’s saying, which can be exhausting.  But it’s not psychological, despite his shy personality (psychology as a name for shyness now, no doubt prompted by the big pharmaceuticals: Social Anxiety Disorder, or SAD for short); it’s physiological, having something to do with his larynx.

“Life crisis?” I queried, sensing his immediate discomfort.

“You could say that,” he said. Leo stood beside his short friend like a big mute statue. “Crisis might be too strong a word,” Gilbert quickly added, in his defense. “Life evaluation,” he corrected, providing philosophic clarity to his existential quandary.

Nodding my head toward the stand displaying all the new Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul books, I said: “Gilbert, you need a chicken soup for the philosopher’s soul book. That’ll cure what’s ailing you.”

He chuckled. It was such a low chuckle that it barely made a dent in the air. I laughed, more loudly than I normally would have just to compensate for his low chuckle. Leo cracked a smile. It took a lot for Leo to laugh. He was a prison guard at the city jail for five years before quitting his steady civil servant job to get a philosophy degree at LU where Gilbert taught several classes a week. Leo was so dour that one day I suggested he write his story. “It would make a great Dostoevskian novel,” I said; but Leo didn’t have it in him—

The Train Station

We had coffee again. He was standing

on the station platform waiting for his train.

I had come and gone two, three, a hundred

times since our last cup of coffee, but he was

still standing there waiting for his train. He

talked of fixing his fence again, but his mind

was torn between cedar posts or pressure

treated lumber. “If I go and cut cedar posts

they’ll be good for the rest of my life; but

that’s a lot of work, and I don’t have a truck.

On the other hand, treated lumber costs an

arm and a leg, and I can’t afford that right

now. My train pulled up and I got on.

Leo did finally build his fence, four years after I wrote my poem, and only because he could no longer stand the kids and dogs going through his yard; but all of that physical labor exhausted him, and he didn’t do anything else for the rest of the summer except go for his daily run, which he did with pious commitment.

“Coffee,” I suggested. Leo had told me that Gilbert wasn’t happy at LU. He was on contract from year to year, teaching one or two courses a year. Ten years later and he was tired of the financial insecurity. His love of academia kept him there, but it hardly paid the bills or gave him a life that he could call his own, and he too lived very frugally.

“Good idea. I’ll buy the coffee,” Leo said, affecting generosity.

“I’ll get us a seat over there, where I can see Cathy when she walks by,” I said when we got to the food court, then I paid the young Tim Hortons girl for my own coffee.

“Oh, okay,” Leo said, surprised but delighted. For a Saturday, the food court was sparsely peopled, so we had choice of tables. I selected one that gave me a clear view of the aisle to Coles where Cathy was to meet me, and I sat waiting for my philosopher friends.

Leo, who had graduated with an honors degree in philosophy (he wanted to do his doctorate on the Canadian philosopher George Grant, but his family situation prevented it), carried the tray with two cups of coffee and two donuts, and they sat down opposite me.

I took a sip of coffee. “So, Gilbert; what’s on the horizon for you?”

“Nothing yet,” he said. It was a good thing he sat directly across from me, it made hearing him much easier; and I did want to draw him out. “But I have to find something soon,” he added, with a hint of panic in his voice. “I’m not getting anywhere where I am.”

“And you’re not getting any younger,” I said; but I regretted saying that because it sounded like I was rubbing it in, but I wasn’t. I was merely feeling old myself.

“For sure,” he sighed, lowering his eyes in shame.

“Any prospects?” I asked, hoping to God there were.

“I’ve got a few irons in the fire,” he said, with a serious expression on his neatly trimmed but quickly greying, boyish-looking bearded face. “I can’t tell you what they are right now, but I’m looking.”

“Good,” I said, and dropped the subject because I felt his discomfort. “So what did you guys do last night, catch a movie?” I asked, knowing that Leo stayed with Gilbert when he came to the city. Leo would drive back to St. Jude rather than pay for a motel room.

He had come up the day before to check out information for his tax returns. He hadn’t filed his taxes in over ten years and was told to expect a large refund for his GST rebate; that’s why he took such a keen interest in filing his taxes.

Leo hadn’t worked for years; not while attending university, nor while caring for his aging parents. His father died five years before his mother who died last summer, and Leo no longer had his parents’ government cheques to live on; so while he looked for work which he was having difficulty finding because he was so particular, he sought ways to survive, like getting elected for the St. Jude town counsel which paid six thousand dollars a year.

“Not much,” Leo said. “After I did my errands I went for a run in the Bubble. I had a really good run too. It made my day.”

Leo’s life now centered on running. He had run Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth three times and decided that he wanted to make running his first priority. As much as he talked about getting employment, I knew he was going to coast as long as he could until he got his old age security pension, which wouldn’t be for another six years. It made for a mingy life, but he managed to survive with some modicum of dignity.

“We went to Chapters last night,” Gilbert said. “Where else is there to go in this city?”

It had been coming to a head. Ever since I finished my novel I began to feel lost, listless, and empty. Not empty of meaning and purpose, creatively exhausted. All the precious water in my well had been drawn out for my new literary effort.

I knew it would fill up again, the water table of my life being inexhaustible— “Whoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”— but waiting for it to fill up again played havoc with my daily equilibrium.

But it was different this time. I wasn’t sure if it was a literary breakthrough that I felt with my new novel, opening up a new chapter in my life, or simply the acute realization of my own inevitable mortality; and I couldn’t suffer the irony.

“He who shall lose his life shall find it,” said he; and I did take his teaching out into the marketplace and shifted my center of gravity from my ephemeral to immortal nature—the mind-boggling mystery of his secret teaching; but that didn’t change the fact that I was going to die one day, and my limited time weighed heavily upon my mind.

It wasn’t the Other Side that I feared going to, it was leaving here to get there that I had become acutely conscious of, and it preyed upon me like a specter.

The slightest body discomfort threw me into a panic. An unexpected ache or pain, a skin blemish, dizziness, a persistent cough, a cut that wouldn’t heal—not to mention all the work on my teeth as I was bringing my novel to closure; I felt such an acute sense of mortality when my dentist had to extract a tooth that he could not save that I felt sick with dread for days, and I kept the tooth out of spite to remind me of my inevitable demise.

And sitting across the table from me, my two philosopher friends (I also studied philosophy at LU, but I dropped out in my third year for reasons my friends would never have understood but which was the central theme of my new novel), both caught up in the immediacy of life, the nitty-gritty of daily survival, one hunting down information to get his fair share of government tax rebates, and the other wondering what kind of job he could get that would afford him the professional dignity that he felt he deserved; I wanted to scream.

I couldn’t, and didn’t; but I felt the scream inside me like Edward Munch’s painting: an unbearable anxiety that howled in silent terror. Was that the cause of all my dread? Was I responsible for the way I felt? Why take it out on my philosopher friends? They were innocent. They had their own problems to deal with. And so I chatted until I spotted Cathy walking towards Coles book store. “Over here,” I waved to her.

And there was the change that I saw in Cathy that played upon me too, a spurt in her growth that flowered her womanhood in a way that made me feel like a drying weed; but it was not in me to deny her as her ex-husband had done for years, and I praised her in her accomplishments: her dedication to weight-watchers, which brought her down to her goal weight, her piano lessons (her ex wouldn’t allow a piano in the house), the two computer courses that she took and her initiative to get us online and into the currents of modern life—all poignant reminders that I was standing still; and again, I wanted to scream.

“You’re as much fun as doing laundry,” she said to me the other day, and laughed.

“Come on, sweetheart; give me a break. I’ve got the PCBs. I always wallow after I finish a new book. I’m spent. I don’t have any energy left for fun. I’m in a state of stasis—”

“You’re in a state, alright,” she said, and laughed some more.

I couldn’t help myself and laughed with her. That was another aspect of her growth that I admired—her awakened sense of humor, her spontaneous joy; it was like she was finally coming onto her own, and if I didn’t love her so much for the complete woman she was becoming I would have felt threatened; but I wasn’t.

“I see you found something,” I said. She was holding a plastic bag.

I couldn’t tell which store it was from, but I was happy for her because I knew it always put her in a good mood whenever she found something to buy, which is why I enjoy giving her gift certificates for Christmas; she makes strategic purchases throughout the year by patiently waiting for certain items, usually clothing, to go on sale.

“Yes, I did,” she said, with a beaming smile; but she wouldn’t tell me what. “Hi Leo,” she added. “And you must be Leo’s friend?”

I introduced Gilbert. “I need a cup of coffee. Would you look after this, please?” she said, handing me the bag. It felt heavy; and when she walked to Tim Hortons I opened it and saw a box inside. It contained a green marble pestle and mortar set that she had her eye on and promised to purchase. I smiled, thinking for sure it would have been a pair of shoes; but she surprised me yet again, “for those born of the spirit are unpredictable.”

When Cathy returned she sat beside me and across from Leo, and they began talking about computers. We had just purchased a new computer and were going to get it hooked up to the Internet sometime during the week, and Cathy wanted to know from Leo if he was happy with the service he was getting from the LU Internet provider; but he wasn’t.

“That’s what I’ve been hearing at the hospital,” Cathy said. “Everyone is saying how difficult it is to get online.”

“I tried twenty times the other night to get on and I couldn’t. I didn’t get on until two in the morning,” Leo said.

“You stayed up that late just to get online,” Cathy asked.

“Yeah. I’ve got no job to go to in the morning,” Leo replied, with a guilty smile.

“Right. I forgot, you live the good life Leo,” Cathy said, and laughed.

“Well, I wouldn’t call it the good life. I’m just living my life—”

“The frugal existentialist,” I cut in, with a snicker.

“I thought he was just unemployed,” Gilbert added, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Come on now, don’t pick on me. I’m looking for work. I can’t help it if no-one wants to hire me,” Leo responded, half-joking half-serious.

He opened the door, and I wanted to step in; but I chose not to. It was his life, and I had no right to judge him. But his cloying frugality did get to me at times.

“Where would you like to go for lunch?” I asked Cathy.

“Not here. How about the Valhalla?”

Leo smiled approval. I had treated him for lunch there several times since I had purchased my new Valhalla Inn Executive Club Card which entitled me to discounts on meals, plus a few other little perks. “You can use your new card,” he said, and turning to Gilbert he added, with vicarious pride, “He gets fifty percent off all his meals there. Plus, he can get a free room and free buffet for two. Good stuff, eh?”

“How much did the card cost?” Gilbert asked.

“Two hundred smackers. So, Cathy—?”

“I’m ready,” she said. “But we should go to Computer Renaissance first. We should get that out of the way.”

I had put it off long enough. I had had a good year in my contracting business, so I pulled in my horns and bought a new four-thousand-dollar system—an AMD Duron 700MHZ with everything that would supply my writing needs, a 17 inch Envision monitor, scanner, two printers, a Lexmark laser for myself, and an Epson color printer for Cathy`s computer, and several programs; but they forgot to include the operating disks and manual for my computer, and we had to pick them up before five…

“No lemon vinaigrette,” I said, as we perused the menu at Timbers Restaurant at the Valhalla Inn. “Just to make sure.”

“I know,” Cathy said. “I’ll stick with the low fat Italian, if they have it.”

The first dinner we had when I used my new card at Timbers—grilled chicken with pasta in Alfredo sauce and salad with lemon vinaigrette—gave Cathy an allergic reaction. She broke into a full body rash that evening, and I had to take her to Emergency at St. Jude’s Hospital where she worked as payroll and benefits officer. It took two weeks for her rash to disappear, so we weren’t going to take any chances.

I ordered the Italian sausage melt “smothered in sautéed mushrooms, onions, and peppers,” and a salad with raspberry vinaigrette; and Cathy ordered the vegetarian pizza with a salad and Italian dressing. They didn’t have any low fat dressings, but according to the Chronicle-Journal they had been selected as one of the restaurants in the city that met the healthy food requirements, and they proudly boasted the EAT SMART sticker on the door that I happened to spot as we entered Timbers.

I don’t know if it was the wallowing mood I was in—I tell Cathy it’s just a phase that I’m going through when I get like that; I don’t want to use the word mood. It connotes a whole range of personality dysfunctions that bothers me, and I feel I’m much too centered to be overwhelmed by moods, but Cathy just laughs at me—

“Oh sure,” she says, “you don’t have moods. You have phases.” I laugh, she laughs, and we move on to other things; but I began to see irony everywhere, and it was ironic that they should have no-fat salad dressing and yet be one of the healthiest places in the city to eat. And their whole Executive Club card thing—the irony of the discounts they offered had a way of taking the goodness out of our meals at Timbers.

“I don’t like their new menu,” Cathy said, after we gave the waitress our order. “You don’t really get what you pay for here anymore, do you?”

“They’ve doctored their menu. With my card I get our meals at half price, but if you compare it with most restaurants you’ll see that that’s the price they should normally be. We’re not getting any special deal at half price. It’s just another sales ploy to get us to eat here. I regret buying the card now.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s not what it used to be. They’ve doctored the menu this time to create the impression that we’re getting a real bang for our dollar, and I don’t like it when a business compromises its integrity just to win more customers. I hate being taken for a fool, Cathy. I just hate it—”

“Keep your voice down. I do too. It’s like the Safeway card. That’s just another gimmick to get you to buy there. My sister found out. She started shopping at A & P and she can see the difference in prices now. I told her that, but she liked Safeway. Now she likes the savings she gets at A&P,” Cathy said, and laughed.

“That’s life, sweetheart. There are those that pretend to be, and those that are; and crossing the great divide is what the journey through life is all about. I’m going to forfeit my card next year. I refuse to be an executive member of the fool’s club!”

Cathy broke out, as did I; and the two couples sitting at the adjacent table turned to look at us, but I didn’t care. I had gotten it out of my system, and it felt good to feel myself shifting out from under the dark cloud of my PCBs.

We ate our meal, taking the three remaining pieces of pizza with us; but when we got home that night we didn’t eat the pizza. It tasted horrible cold, so we threw it out.

“Does that surprise you?” Cathy said.

          “Not at all,” I said, with an ironic snicker.

“You can drop me off at Chapters,” I said to Cathy, who wanted to go to Walmart after our groceries at the Superstore, and at Chapters I picked up my Saturday National Post. Glancing at the Review and Book section, a headline jumped out at me: “Did atheist philosopher see God when he ‘died’?”

Normally, I would browse the magazine stands and then the book aisles before sitting down to read my paper; but the article grabbed my attention; so I found a comfortable chair and read the whole article, smiling at the irony of my serendipitous discovery.

The article, written by William Cash, was on the famous British Philosopher Sir Alfred Ayer’s near-death experience (he was clinically dead for four minutes) in which he went to the Other Side and got the surprise of his life—

“I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions,” he confessed to Doctor Jeremy George. But later, his intellectual reputation on the line (he was no less renowned an atheist than Lord Bertrand Russell), he failed to mention this in his article for the Sunday Telegraph “What I Saw When I Died.” His NDE, he wrote, did nothing to weaken his belief that there is no God; and, he concluded, with intractable atheistic pride, “there is no life after death.”

I hadn’t got around to it yet, but I had an idea filed away in my story-idea notebook about an atheist who had an NDE that forced him to rethink his life. I had a model for my fictional atheist, a friend whom I had engaged several times on the subject of his unbelief in God and the after-life, and I was looking forward to writing it; but now I had the real thing in Professor Alfred Ayer, and I couldn’t stop chuckling to myself at the irony.

I couldn’t stay seated. I had to get up and walk around to work off the inrush of all that anxious energy. I walked over to Starbucks, and there, to further compound the ironic coincidence of Professor Ayer’s NDE and my story idea, I spotted my very real, non-fictional atheist friend Boris Petrochenko sitting with Leo and Gilbert. Chuckling to myself at the incredible synchronicity, I waked over to join them.

“Oh, you’re here,” Leo said when he spotted me. “I knew you’d be here, but I thought we missed you. Where’s Cathy, shopping?”

“She’s at Wally world. Are you guys going to be here for a while?”

“I’ve got all day,” Boris, whose wife had recently passed away, said.

“I’ll get a coffee,” I said, and walked over and got the coffee of the day and returned to the table and sat down between Boris and Gilbert.

Boris, Leo, and I had many meals together at the Hoito Restaurant; but Boris and I didn’t know Gilbert that well. He was Leo’s friend. One thing led to another, and before long we were talking about how devastating it would be if we lost Chapters book store. It was a great place to meet and pass the time of day, as they were doing.

“I’ll bet reading in this city has gone up by twenty percent since Chapters came to town,” I said. “But it’s more than that. It’s a cultural thing.”

“I agree,” said Gilbert.

“And we need all the culture we can get in this city,” Leo added. “I don’t buy many books; I admit that, but that’s only because I can’t afford it right now. But Chapters adds to the intellectual life of the city. They have book readings here. People come and play chess and discuss things. I agree, it does add to our cultural life.”

“How would you define culture?” I asked, just to see where it would go.

“Class,” Boris offered, without thought.

“Culture is class?” I said, to draw him out.

“Yes. I would say so. If a person’s got culture, he’s got class.”

“Are you saying that one is more refined?” I asked.

“I would think so,” Boris replied, nodding his head in agreement.

“Me too,” Gilbert said. “Culture is refinement. That’s why I’d like to see more plays in the city. And that’s why I think we should support our symphony orchestra.”

“So you’re saying that culture is a question of aesthetics, of appreciating the finer things in life?” I said, to keep the conversation going.

“Yes,” Boris said.

“Personally, I think culture can be divided into four categories,” I responded, kicking our conversation up a notch. “There’s material culture, emotional culture, intellectual culture, and spiritual culture; and the most refined of all cultures for me is spiritual culture.” I let that hang for a moment or two before adding, “So I would agree with you in principle, culture is a question of class; but there is class, and there is class.”

“I think I know what you’re getting at,” Gilbert said, with a pensive frown.

“How can you have material culture,” Leo asked, genuinely puzzled.

“You can’t have culture without quality. That would be my quotient. Something akin to Pirsig’s philosophy in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The more quality we have in life, the more cultured we will be in that aspect of life. For example, let’s take the food we eat, the clothes we wear, or even the cars we drive—all material things, right? Well, in all of these things there’s a scale of quality. Good, better, and best. And the higher up the scale we are, the more excellence we will have. Take wine. We have a scale for determining the quality of a wine. Let that be my metaphor for all things material and we have a sense of what the culture of material life would be,” I said, and took a drink of my coffee.

“But there’s an intellectual component to that,” Gilbert responded.  His voice was too low for me to hear, so I had to ask him to repeat it; which he did, more loudly.

“I agree,” I responded. “But we can’t strictly separate the four categories of culture, because we are all physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual beings—”

“I don’t agree on the last one,” Boris jumped in. “I think there’s only three categories of culture.”

“Oh, right,” I said, and laughed.

“Why right?” Gilbert asked, puzzled by my laughter.

“Boris doesn’t believe in God and the soul and an afterlife. So for you, there’s no spiritual component to culture. Something like Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game?”

“I’ve never read it,” Boris said. “But I’m not sure I would agree with you. What’s the intellectual component of a good piece of music, for example? You can’t break Mozart down intellectually, can you?”

“I agree. But what’s to say there isn’t a spiritual component to music? Mozart always maintained that his music came from the heavens.”

“I don’t believe that,” Boris said.

I felt mischievous. “I know of an ancient spiritual tradition that believes that the two eternal principles of life are the Light and Sound. These two principles are the essence of the Divine Creator in this ancient teaching, and the higher one’s consciousness is raised the more pure the Light and the more glorious the Sound. From this perspective, Mozart’s music comes from higher levels of consciousness which he called heaven.”

“That’s just theory,” Boris said. “What proof do you have that there are higher levels of consciousness?”

“As with most things, Boris; the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

“What do you mean by that?” Gilbert asked, with a hint of provocation in his voice.

“You have to experience the spiritual to believe in the spiritual,” I replied.

“But there’s no such thing,” Boris quickly countered.

“Here,” I said, handing Boris the paper I had resting on my lap. “Read this article.”

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“About a famous atheist philosopher who had a near-death experience and experienced life on the Other Side. He said he saw the white light and a Divine Being.”

“So what? They’ve shown that near-death experiences can be simulated in a lab. Some professor at Laurentian in Sudbury has proven that, so don’t tell me there’s life on the Other Side. It all happens up here, in the brain.”

“We’ve had this conversation before, Boris,” I said, smiling at his stubborn incredulity. I was familiar with Dr. Michael Persinger`s research at Laurentian University, and it didn`t hold much water for me; “so there’s no point flogging it, is there?”

“No, there isn`t. There is no God, and that’s all there is to it,” Boris said, with a smile on his thickly bearded face. He looked like a little Jewish rabbi minus his black hat.

“Boris, what you need is a good NDE just like Sir Alfred Ayre here. That’ll force a paradigm shift in your thinking,” I said, with a snicker.

“I doubt it. When I die I won’t find anything on the Other Side because there isn’t anything on the Other Side. This is all we have, and when we die that’s it. Nada.”

“You’re in for a big surprise,” I said.

“No, I think you are,” he said.

“If what you say is true, which I know it’s not, then I wouldn’t be around to be surprised, would I?” I said, and chuckled.

Leo and Gilbert laughed too, but Boris quickly said: “How do you know there is a God? How do you know there is life on the Other Side? How do you know that? You don’t. You just believe that; and belief is not knowing, is it?”

“Knowing starts with belief. Experience is the ultimate litmus test, Boris; and if one consciously experiences the Other Side then he knows, doesn’t he?”

“What do you mean?” Gilbert asked, again with a pensive frown.

“If a person can leave his body and go to the Other Side and experience life there and then come back and tells us about it, that would be proof; wouldn’t it?”

“Only for him,” Boris said. “It wouldn’t be proof for me, would it? It’s all subjective. Belief in God and life on the Other Side—that’s all subjective.”

“Just because it’s subjective doesn’t mean it can’t be objective. You get to the outer through the inner, Boris; that’s the heart of all spiritual paths. And art, I might add. Writers, especially poets, get to the truth of life, or the ‘what is’ of the human condition, to quote the American poet Adrienne Rich, by transforming experience with imagination into a deeper perception of the experience. That’s how they get to the truth of life. Just ask any writer. They all seek the universal truths of life through their own subjective experience.”

“Prove it,” Boris challenged.

I wanted to tell him that there are none so blind as those that refuse to see, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it; my friend had a right to his own beliefs. But it puzzled me. That’s why one day at the Hoito over liver and onions and another round of the same subject I said to him: “Boris, may I have your permission to check out some of your past lives?”

He gave me a funny look, which I expected; but after a moment’s thought, he agreed. “Go ahead,” he said, with an amused but frightened look on his face. “This is the only life I’ve got, so I don’t see what you’re going to find.”

I didn’t know if I could, but I wanted to see if I could go to the plane where the Akashic records were kept to prove something about atheism that had intrigued me for years, but I needed Boris’s permission. I had come to believe that there were two kinds of atheists in the world: those that had had a bad life experience that forced them into a state of God denial, and those that were so centered in their ego personality that they could not see beyond their physical mortality; and, to my surprise, I did check out his past lives with a special technique I had just discovered, and I found one lifetime that confirmed my suspicion.

It was his lifetime during the Spanish Inquisition. Boris belonged to a secret sect of Christians that the Inquisition was trying to stamp out, and they made him witness the brutal torture of his wife and children to get him to recant the secret teaching that threatened the doctrinal foundations of the Church, and when he was forced to witness the death of his wife and innocent children his mind snapped and he turned on God by denying the very existence of God, and that past-life memory was the root cause of his atheism. But I couldn’t tell him that, despite the fact that he had an inexplicable fascination for Spain. He studied the Spanish language at LU when he retired from the civil service, and he had just come back from Spain where he and his professor and two other students had spent six weeks doing the Santiago de Compostela Camino, the famous Christian pilgrimage that Shirley MacLaine had written about in The Camino; but the irony made me choke.

“I can’t prove it, Boris,” I said, feeling like a cat that had to pull in its claws.

“I didn’t think so,” he replied, with a haughty snigger.

I smiled at his hollow victory. “Boris, one day you may have an experience like Sir Alfred Ayer did, but I can only hope that unlike him you`ll have the balls to admit it when it happens,” I said, and folded the paper and placed it back on my lap.

“There won’t be anything to admit,” Boris said, and just as I was about to reply Cathy walked up to our table and said, “May I join you, or are you guys into something real heavy?”

“As heavy as it gets,” Leo, who was quiet throughout the whole conversation, said. “We were just talking about God and life after death. Are you sure you want to join us?”

“Not really,” Cathy said. “I’m going to browse for a while. I’m looking for a book I think is called Internet for Dummies.”

“They’ve got it,” Leo quickly offered. “It’s over there, in the computer section. I read it last month. It’s really good. I think you’ll like it.”

“Good. You guys can carry on, then. We’re not in any hurry, are we?”

“Not at all,” I replied.

Cathy smiled. “So, Boris; we’re going to have to get you down for dinner so you can tell us all about your trip to Spain. Did you complete the Camino?”

“Yes,” Boris said, with a proud smile.

“Then you’ll have to tell us all about it. How about next weekend. Which day would be better for you?”

“Either one,” Boris said.

“Sunday then,” Cathy said. Turning to Leo, she smiled and added, “You’re invited too, Leo. You look like you’re ready for a good home-cooked meal.”

We stopped at A&P to pick up a few more groceries (I usually pick up a French baguette if there are any left, and Cathy her cheese buns), and then we stopped at Tim Hortons for a take-out coffee and headed home; but I couldn’t get the conversation at Chapters out of my mind. Boris’s question kept coming back to me. “How do you know there is a God?” Like the thirty birds in the Sufi poet’s allegory Conference of the Birds, one has to look into the Face of God to know for sure; but the irony would be too great for Boris to suffer, because what the thirty birds saw when they looked into the Face of God was their own image.

“My Father and I are one,” said he, who had become one with Divine Spirit; but the only way to do that was to live the spiritual life, as he taught. That was the “meat of the last supper” that I wanted to write about; but how was I to tell Boris that?

I couldn’t, and didn’t. I turned to Cathy, and said, “Life’s just a big joke some days.”

“What brought that on?” she asked.

“The conversation we had at Chapters.”

Cathy waited, but I didn’t amplify. “Well, are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?” I asked.

“Why life is a big joke some days.”

“What can I say? The ironies piled up on me today, and I feel worse now than when we went up this morning—”

“Oh no! “Does that mean I have to suffer your PCBs for another week?”

 “I don’t know, sweetheart. “But if I have to suffer any more ironies like I did today, I may never find my way out of the PCBs.”

“Well sohhhhhht it out,” Cathy replied, feigning an English accent like Mrs. Slocomb in the British Comedy Are You Being Served? that we both loved to watch.

“Alright, I’ll sort it out,” I said, with a chuckle.

“Good. How?” she asked, in her own voice.

“I’m going to take up running again. A good run always salvaged my day.”

“Until the brown envelops start coming in,” Cathy said, and laughed again.

The brown envelops would be rejections, and that’s when I would go into phase two of my post-creative blues. I laughed too. “You sure take liberties now, don’t you?”

“Why not? I’m a free agent now,” Cathy, whose ex never ran out of rules for her to live by, replied with a happy smile on her lovable face; and we drove back home to St. Jude (the town named after the patron saint of hopeless causes, the final irony of my day), recalling and laughing at some of the funniest episodes of Are You Being Served?

——