The Little Wife
Gordy was just
over six feet and Sophie just under five and they were married an interminably
long time. Both high initiates of an ancient spiritual path that was introduced
to the modern world as a New Age Religion of the Light and Sound of God by a soft-spoken
southern gentleman who once worked for the founder of Scientology, we met Gordy
and Sophie again eight years later in the meeting room of the Simcoe Funeral Home
in the still quaint but much larger community that Stephen Leacock made famous
with his Sunset Sketches of a Little Town,
but for reasons I could not fathom the little wife denied meeting us at the worship
service in the funeral home after our eight year hiatus, like she denied many things
that fed her repressed shadow personality and made her so insufferable that I finally
stopped going to our worship services and workshops because it was
counterintuitive.
We first met at a spiritual retreat at Villa
Loyola in Sudbury. I read my story The
Queen and Me for our workshop on dreams. “I made love with the Queen of
England,” I began my story, which shocked everyone; but I never got the warning
message from my dream and got “screwed royally” when my contract to hang
drywall and tape and paint seven new houses on a native reserve went sour on
me.
“Let me tell you
how I learned about karma,” I said to our small group in the meeting room of the
funeral home that day that she had totally blocked out of her mind but which
her husband remembered but did not insist upon because he knew her fragile mind
and did not want to push her to that place that made his life more miserable
than it already was. “You remember my story The
Queen and Me that I read at Villa Loyola?” I said, looking at the little
wife and her husband who were the only other people present besides Cathy and
myself that had attended the retreat at Villa Loyola. Gordy and Sophie laughed
because my story was so memorable; that’s why when we met for fellowship a year
or so later at Starbucks in Southlake after our worship service I could not for
the life of me fathom why Sophie would deny that we had met that day for the
first time at the funeral home in Orillia since Villa Loyal, and she continued
to deny it every time we met at one of our spiritual functions. It was like she
couldn’t help herself and had to keep lying about meeting us that day in Orillia
just to stay true to her lie. “Strange behavior
for a high initiate,” I thought to myself, and stored it in the back of my
mind.
“Karma is all
about passing the buck,” I explained to our small group that day at the funeral
home of the community that Leacock satirized with such devastating accuracy that
descendants of the people he caricaturized still harbor resentment for him. It
was our first worship service since we moved to Georgian Bay, which was another
reason Cathy and I remembered meeting Gordy and Sophie at the funeral home that
day. “Let’s say I hang drywall on a new house and don’t do a very good job,” I
continued.” I make bad cuts which makes for extra work for the drywall taper,
and the taper curses the drywall hanger for his shoddy workmanship; and then
the taper cuts corners and does a shoddy job which makes extra work for the
painter; and the painter curses the taper. The hanger passes the buck to the
taper, and the taper passes the buck to the painter, and the painter is left
holding the bag because the job stops with him. But what if YOU are the drywall
hanger, the taper, and the painter? All you did was pass the buck on to
yourself. That’s karma in a nutshell. We inherit our own deficiencies, and we
do so from life to life to life.”
My contract cost
me forty thousand dollars because of all the deficiencies that my hangers,
tapers, and painters made because I was the contractor and responsible for the entire
job; but it was a lesson I never forgot, and everyone in our group of worshippers
loved how I had illustrated the spiritual law of accountability.
But still, the
little wife denied being at the Simcoe Funeral Home that day and insisted on
her version of the truth as obsessively as she wiped the table and two chairs
with a wet-nap from her purse before taking out two sandwiches and placing them
on the table for her and her husband at Starbucks after our service in
Southlake one Sunday the previous month. Her husband returned with a large take-out
coffee and a small empty paper cup and poured half of his coffee into the cup
for his little wife, and they saw me smiling at what had obviously become a private
ritual; but he justified their thrifty habit: “A large coffee is cheaper than
two small coffees.”
“And the
sandwiches?” I asked, just to be mischievous.
“Oh, we don’t like
the bread here. We get our bread from the bakery. It’s got five grains, and
it’s a lot better for your health,” the little wife justified; but over time I
came to see that it had to do less with their health and more with their frugality.
And then one day we saw a sign on the door to Starbucks where we gathered after
our spiritual functions: NO
OUTSIDE FOOD ALLOWED ON PREMISES.
But that didn’t
curtail their mingy habit. After one of our services at the Carlton public
library she took out their five-grain bread sandwiches in Tim Hortons after obsessively
wiping the table and chairs as her husband returned with a large coffee and empty
cup which provoked the little devil in me again, and I told them a little
anecdote a la Mullah Nasruddin to make my point on impropriety—
“I was having coffee with a couple of friends one day
in my hometown up north,” I began my cheeky story, with an ironic twinkle in my
eye. “I knew the owner of the restaurant.
He was Greek. He and his wife ran the restaurant. He was a housepainter before
he got into the restaurant business, and he and his wife invested their money on
old homes in the city which they renovated and then rented. He came over to our
table and asked if he could borrow my equipment for texturing ceilings; my
compressor, hopper, and texture gun. He needed to dress up a house he had just
bought. I looked at him and said, “Nick, I don’t come into your restaurant with
a big T-bone steak and ask if I can borrow your kitchen to cook my steak, do I?
Your kitchen is for your business, and my equipment is for my business. If you
want my equipment to dress your house up with textured ceilings, hire me. I
have to pay for my T-bone steak here, don’t I?”
Nonetheless, Gordy
and Sophie justified their gauche behavior by saying it wasn’t the same. They
were being careful with their money because they still had seven more years to pay
on their mortgage, and they also needed to save up for new windows and a new front
door for their thirty-year-old house.
“I’ll bet the
owner here still has a mortgage,” I replied, with a snicker; but this only
aggrieved the little wife more, and over time her animus for me became so
unsettling that she cringed whenever I showed up at our weekly service.
And their thirty-seven
year old bachelor son with pony-tailed hair and unkempt beard and beady eyes also
cringed like his mother in my presence, which puzzled me until I learned that
he was living in a condominium that his parents had remortgaged their house to
buy for him and who had been living off the system for years after his meltdown
when he worked for the government in the Arctic region of Canada and was
diagnosed with bipolar disorder and never worked another day since (on the
books, that is); but he was only running away from crazy until his family karma
caught up to him, and he knew that I knew that he wasn’t true.
That’s why he lost
it with me when we sang HU at one of our worship services in one of the meeting
rooms in the Carlton Library. I was working on a new book of short stories and took
notes as thoughts came to me while we sang the love song to God, but the click
of my pen irritated him and he lashed out at me with a vitriolic anger that by far
exceeded the scope of minor irritation.
His outburst
shocked everyone, but it wasn’t the click of my pen that got to him as we sang
the ancient name of God to raise our consciousness and reconcile our inner and
outer self; it was my own family karma that I had resolved when I stopped running
away from crazy, which made me too true for him and his shadow-afflicted little
mother. I mirrored what they refused to see about their own inauthenticity, but
I apologized for my note-taking while singing HU and left the room because the
air had become too toxic for me to stay.
It was only a
matter of time then, but I refused to see that I had outgrown the path of my spiritual
community. I continued to attend our services, but the more I attended the more
out of place I felt, and I couldn’t keep my tongue in check.
The little wife had
a nasty habit of putting her husband down at our spiritual functions, little
digs that belittled him in front of everyone, often making him look stupid
because of his dyslexia which he covered up as best he could; and he refused to
defend himself, which only diminished him more with every little dig that
extended to his whole family, especially his younger brother from Nova Scotia whom
his little wife refused to let him visit. This happened so often that I began
to feel contempt for Gordy; and then I learned why he was so meek and pitiable.
Gordy had an
intimate affair for three years with his widowed neighbor and finally built up
the courage to leave his wife for his lover, but Sophie had such a frightening meltdown
when he told her that he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her, and he was paying
for it ever since. All she had to do was throw a neurotic little tantrum to
keep him in his place, and he took the abuse like a dumb martyr and penitent
fool; but I could no longer suffer his public humiliation.
“Look, Sophie,” I said
to her after one particular vicious little dig at her hapless husband that
insinuated his infidelity to publicly shame him; “you can say whatever you want
to your husband at home, but not here. This is not the place to vent your venomous
spleen.”
Our spiritual
community was used to her nasty little barbs to her wretched husband, but on
behalf of men everywhere I had to say my piece, which only added to her animus
for me that fed the collective shadow of our community; and ours was supposed
to be an enlightened spiritual path of love.
“Love is who we are”
was the credo of our spiritual path, and the little wife’s inveterate refrain
at all of our services and workshops; but the irony was too much for me to bear,
and I knew that one day I would have to walk away.
***
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