New Short Story: "In Her Red Shorts"

In Her Red Shorts

She was a writer. That’s how she introduced herself at my first Southlake workshop, which was appropriately titled “Imagination and Spiritual Growth.” She was guest speaker, and she talked about her life as a magazine editor to illustrate the spiritual efficacy of creative writing, which resonated well with me; but I got the surprise of my life when I introduced myself after the workshop and asked who her publisher was. “I can’t help you. You have to find your own publisher!” she snapped at me, and quickly turned to someone else.

Stunned by the demonic change in her personality, I didn’t know what to say; so I sheepishly walked away. I didn’t know what else to do. But that impression left its mark upon me, because I knew I could never trust her shadow personality.

And she was a high initiate. That’s what puzzled me. But she was also from Toronto, and the reputation of the arrogant, self-centered Toronto personality preceded her; so I should have anticipated the opposite from “Toronto the Good.”

I didn’t go out of my way to inquire about her, but over the next few years I picked up enough information at our worship services and workshops to confirm my first public encounter with the shadow personality of our spiritual community in her demonic rebuff, and I learned to not poke the beast gratuitously.

Initiations are important to our spiritual community. They’re the driving force behind everything that members strive for, because the higher one’s initiation status the more spiritually self-realized one was supposed to be; or so they believed. I was a fourth initiate when we moved to Georgian Bay, one initiation short of being a high initiate; so I wasn’t accorded the same respect that high initiates were, which reflected the shadow personality of our spiritual community because the premise of our spiritual path was that “Soul is love” and “Soul equals Soul.”

But that’s the enantiodromiac irony of all spiritual paths, and our spiritual community had begun to manifest its opposite nature, most obviously in the behavior of high initiates; and the spiritual conceit of their lofty status cast a pall upon every worship service and spiritual workshop that I attended, which made them hard to suffer. And then I received my pink slip in the mail for my fifth initiation.

I was now a Brother of the Oak and member of the exclusive club of high initiates; but I put my membership card with my initiation status in my wallet and never told anyone. Only Cathy and my initiator knew my privileged status.

I didn’t want anyone in our community to defer to me as so many members did with high initiates. I had come to see that initiation status was vital to our community when a high initiate who had moved from Toronto to the Georgian Bay Triangle made an excuse to see our membership cards at our book discussion class because he was so vexed by my easy gnosis that he had to find out my level of initiation without having to ask me, and when he saw that I was only a fourth initiate the telling smirk on his face gave away his shadow personality; which was why I refused to tell anyone that I had received my fifth initiation. I respected the principle that “Soul equals Soul,” and everyone would be treated equally.

One Saturday afternoon that same writer/editor was guest speaker at our workshop in Carlton. By this time, I had learned that she hadn’t really published anything except for two or three personal anecdotes in our spiritual community’s quarterly journal, but she did have the prestigious honor of being the editor for yet another best-selling Recipes for Life books (hers was called Recipes for the Lonely Life), and her talk that afternoon was on “Gratitude and Spiritual Survival.”

“Loving your coat,” she effused, as a fellow high initiate’s wife came into the Georgian Room of the public library in Carlton before our workshop began, yet another tell-tale sign of her status-conscious personality that easily provoked my antipathy for affectation; but I held it at bay.

Unfortunately, it didn’t get any easier the more experience I had with high initiates, and there were times when my little devil leaped out of me without permission; but I bit my tongue and suffered their vanity in silence.

Cathy however had a genius for leveling people, and three years after this writer/editor gave her talk on gratitude (she went through a long list of all the things that she was grateful for in her life—her house by the lake, which I later learned was only leased and had to be vacated when the owner sold the house which was well beyond her budget to purchase, her prestigious career as editor of a woman’s magazine, her beautiful Siamese cat that had taught her so much about love, her amazing new silver Honda Civic that she just loved for all the freedom it gave her, all of her close friends that were more than family to her; and yes, her favorite pair of red shorts that made her feel confident and beautiful), we happened to be in the  same town that Canada’s iconic humorist made famous where she had deigned to give a talk on one of her favorite subjects, “Gratitude and Spiritual Survival.”

She was fifty-three and still single, and she began by asking if anyone had heard her talk on gratitude before. To everyone's surprise, Cathy spoke up and said, “Yes. I remember how grateful you were for your red shorts,” which did not endear her to the guest speaker and set an icy tone for her favorite talk on gratitude.

Cathy had received her fifth initiation by then, which she also kept to herself; but she was getting tired of attending our spiritual functions because she found them tedious and unfulfilling and finally preferred to stay home; but I had more tolerance and continued to attend, not for the spiritual wisdom that always came unannounced, but because the enantiodromiac dynamic of our spiritual community fascinated me, like the writer/editor’s private agenda for deigning to come to the boonies and favor us with her favorite talk on “Gratitude and Spiritual Survival.”

She was collecting stories. Her editorship of the successful Recipes for the Lonely Life had inspired her to collect stories for a book of her own, which she hoped would connect with the public like her best-selling model; and after the workshop she approached each member individually (except for myself and Cathy) and asked if they had any spiritual experiences they would like to share for her book-in-progress whose working title was “Touched by the Hand of God.”

Our spiritual community was a literary gold mine, and she mined every little nugget of spiritual gold in Central and Southern Ontario; but as much as I respected her for her literary initiative it was far from creative writing, which was why she harbored such deep resentment for the creative writer in me.

And it amused me. Like the time I attended my first high initiates meeting at the public library in Southlake one Saturday afternoon several months after she gave her talk on “Gratitude and Spiritual Survival” in Leacock country where she had collected three exceptional stories for her book-in-progress—an out-of-body experience, a visitation by a deceased loved one, and a near-death experience.

I arrived at the library early, and the moment I came through the door she dashed over so quickly that I misinterpreted her enthusiasm for an eager welcome and embraced her with a warm hug as was the custom in our spiritual community, but all the warmth of our embrace instantly evaporated when she said to me, “You do know that this is a meeting for high initiates only?”

The look on her face was not one of love, and she asked to see my membership card. I took it out of my wallet and handed it to her. She checked out my initiation status and her mouth dropped, and I don’t think I ever experienced such a change in a person’s personality as quickly as I did watching her adjust her attitude towards me throughout our two-hour discussion because she was now compelled to accord me the same level of respect as her fellow members of the Oak.

It was painful watching her face express the alchemical transformation of her animus for me, and I’m sure that would have made a great story for her book-in-progress “Touched by the Hand of God” had she only been aware of it; but that was just another painful stage of the healing experience that she longed for.

As coincidence would have it (there are no coincidences, of course; there is only the omniscient guiding principle of life that touches us when we need a helping hand), I happened to watch a movie on television that put her workshop on spiritual healing that I attended two years later into perspective and inspired a stratospheric level of respect and admiration for the writer/editor whom I had almost forgotten about because I hadn’t seen her since the day she checked my initiation status, a movie called Hemingway and Gellhorn that was based upon the relationship of my high school hero and literary mentor and his third wife Martha Gellhorn.

Our friend from Toronto who was up to her cottage for the weekend and our neighbor and his new young Filipino wife were having dinner with us that evening, but when I spotted the movie that was about to play on TV I made my apologies and set up a tray while Cathy and our guests enjoyed dinner at the table; I simply had to watch Hemingway’s stormy life with the woman that called him a pathological liar and the most self-centered and cruelest man she knew.

Hemingway fascinated me from the day I met him in high school; not just his writing, whose laconic style I tried to emulate but had to abandon because it wasn’t right for me (Joyce, perhaps Updike; definitely Hesse suited me more), but the man himself whose irrepressible longing to become the best writer of his generation and manly lust for life tore such a nasty hole in his soul that his fourth wife Mary had to have him committed to the Mayo Clinic where he was treated with ECT for depression and paranoia shortly before taking his own life with his favorite shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. A. E. Hotchner’s memoir Papa Hemingway, which recounted the last days of his tragic life, brought tears to my eyes.

I honestly did not want to, but the more I learned about Ernest “Papa” Hemingway over the years the more I grew to hate him; but that never diminished my love for his writing. That’s why I had to watch Hemingway and Gellhorn; I had to find out why he was the way he was. All the biographies that I had read never solved the riddle of his life, and neither did his private letters. The closest I came to understanding my high school hero and literary mentor was his canonical story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and his consummate novel The Old Man and the Sea that garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature, the former a revelation of his compromised soul and the latter the enduring power of his indomitable spirit; both reflecting with artistic genius the mystifying enantiodromiac nature of man.

Clive Owen played Ernest Hemingway and Nicole Kidman played his third wife Martha Gellhorn in the movie, and something about their portrayal of the couple’s tempestuous relationship awakened me to a whole new perspective on Hemingway’s paradoxical personality. It was like watching the riddle of his enantiodromiac life play itself out before my eyes, and in one scene when my high school hero and literary mentor shocked me with his malicious cruelty to his reporter wife when he commandeered her assignment for Collier’s to cover the war in Europe, I shouted, “You bastard! That’s why you became a great writer!”  

Cathy and our dinner guests turned to look at me, and I had to explain my epiphany: “Hemingway had to be a prick to become the great writer that he became. His monstrous ego fed his creative spirit. That’s what made him a great writer!”

Something clicked, and the mystifying Jungian principle of enantiodromia finally made sense to me; and that was the understanding that I brought with me into the workshop on spiritual healing that the writer/editor gave that day in Southlake.

“All healing comes from Holy Spirit, however it comes to us,” she began her talk on spiritual healing that instantly grabbed my attention because I had come to that same conclusion long ago; but I was curious to see how she was going to apply her liberating revelation to the existential drudgery of daily life.

“I’ve suffered from depression most of my life,” she continued, with a nervous lump in her throat; and then she gave a long list of physical ailments that she attributed to her depression. But then she chanced—and she didn’t use the word chance; she attributed her good fortune to the Inner Master’s guidance—upon a hypnotherapist who brought her back to a past lifetime that was the root cause of her self-loathing and depression which led to her realization that awakened me to whole new horizons of understanding: “The reason for a long illness is because the mind is not allowing the memories of the past to surface and be understood,” just as Hemingway repressed his guilt and shame to his unresolved shadow personality

It didn’t help that her British mother did not hug her as a child or tell her that she loved her, but ironically she was now the primary caregiver for her mother who was dying of cancer; and to cure her depression was simple enough: her therapist told her that she had to forgive herself for her past life and learn to love herself for who she was, which she began to do with a new cognitive healing modality that she was serendipitously guided to. But what made her workshop on spiritual healing one to remember was the afternoon sun that broke through the window and lit up her flaming golden hair and glistened off the gold chain of her reading glasses which transformed the vulnerable unmarried writer/editor who overcompensated for her self-loathing by creating an aggressive personality just to survive in the predatory world of her profession into a woman who in my mind’s eye now stood before us tall and proud and confident in her favorite red shorts, and I couldn’t wait for her talk to end so I could give her a thank-you hug for her honesty and unbreakable spirit; which I did with a silent apology, and though I knew we would never be friends the love that I felt for her  changed the dynamic of our non-relationship; and I knew that one day I would honor her life in a story that I was sure to write on the dark shadow underside of our New Age spiritual community.

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