CHAPTER 30
A Little Corner of Joyful Plenitude
Sunday, June 10, 2018. Sitting on our shaded
front deck. Sunny, warm, with the faintest of breezes to freshen the air, birds
chirping and splashing in our bird bath in the shade of the maple tree, Penny
sipping on a glass of red wine and I gently nursing a glass of sherry, just
talking and smiling and laughing, enjoying each other like a newly retired
couple sans the fear of the dreaded
phone call that always seemed to come at the most inopportune time from one of
our tenants renting a unit in our triplex in my hometown of Nipigon in Northwestern
Ontario where Penny and I lived before moving to Georgian Bay fifteen years ago,
and Penny said, “I’m glad we didn’t go out today. This is much better.”
I had suggested we
take a drive into Meaford, browse through Factory Outlet where we often find
something to purchase, and then go out for dinner, but I was also glad we
stayed home; and I said, “Isn’t it wonderful? No more dreaded phone calls.”
We had just closed
the deal on the sale of our triplex on Tuesday,
May 15, and Penny said: “It hasn’t sunk in yet. I still keep waiting for the
dreaded phone call.”
I laughed. “It’s
like a ghost that keeps hanging around. But it’s getting fainter and fainter by
the day, like the life has been sucked out of it. Well, it can’t haunt us any
longer. Doesn’t it feel wonderful to be free of all that hassle? Don’t get me
wrong, sweetheart. If it wasn’t for our triplex, we wouldn’t have our beautiful
home here in Georgian Bay; but good God, it feels good to not be burdened with that
responsibility anymore.”
Penny smiled. Her
face looked twenty years younger. “It’s moments like this that nourish our soul,”
I said, full of love and admiration for the woman I had abandoned for my lover in
our past lifetime together in Genoa, Italy; but we found each other in this
lifetime, and I was almost but not quite free of my karmic obligation to her
for breaking her heart the way I did, and it felt good. “You know, Penny Lynn,”
I said, taking in the moment, “we’ve carved out a nice little corner of joyful
plenitude here, and it’s all been worth it. I’m glad we didn’t go out today. I
wouldn’t trade this moment for the world.”
I had gone into
Midland earlier to pick up my Sunday Star,
and I decided to drive to No Frills to
pick up some pork and beef burgers to barbecue, which was the only grocery
store that carried pork and beef burgers; but instead, I bought a package of
Sirloin burgers that were on sale, and Penny went into the house to prepare a pasta
salad to go with our burgers. “How about corn?” she asked. I had also picked up
four cobs of corn.
“Not for me,” I
said. “A burger and pasta salad will be plenty,” and I went back to my reading.
Besides the Star, I had three books
on the deck with me, reading a chapter from one and then another; my second reading
of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life; Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, The Gambler, A Disgraceful Affair, The Eternal Husband, The Double, White Nights, A
Gentle Creature, and The Dream of a
Ridiculous Man, and I had started A
Disgraceful Affair); and On Pluto,
by the retired journalist Greg O’Brien, whose biographical account of his
descent into Alzheimer’s was hard reading; but I had to read it for my
novel-in-progress Sundays with Sharon that
got interrupted when I got called to write One
Rule to Live By: Be Good, and I was reading Dostoevsky to delve deeper in
Jordan Peterson’s psyche, because the Russian novelist, whom Peterson couldn’t
stop praising, had an inordinate influence upon his thinking, even more than
Nietzsche whom he referred to so often in his talks and lectures that he
inspired me to order some of Nietzsche’s other books from Amazon; but I
couldn’t stop thinking about what I had said to Penny earlier, how we had
carved out a nice little corner of joyful plenitude for ourselves in our new
home in Georgian Bay after the past and current life history we had
together.
I’ve already written
about our past life experience as man and wife in my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives, but I haven’t published it yet, and I
honestly don’t know when I will get back to it because my muse keeps calling me
to write other books, like this new book One
Rule to Live By: Be Good that beckoned me like a siren; but as I got back into Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, I couldn’t help thinking of a spiritual musing I
had written that was inspired by Shirley MacLaine’s movie The Last Word that Penny and I had seen last summer, and I made the
connection with Jordan Peterson’s book because his 12 Rules for Life prepares one for the final journey of their life,
the journey that Shirley MacLaine was on:
Still Ahead of Her
Time
“So far I like this lifetime the best.”
—Shirley MacLaine
In Stupidity Is
Not a Gift of God,, I wrote a spiritual musing called “A Cheap Shot at
Shirley MacLaine,” because I wanted to come to the defense of her belief in
reincarnation which was ridiculed by the brilliant writer Ken Wilber whose
belief in the Buddhist perspective on reincarnation negated the “kooky”
actress/writer’s perspective, which I happened to share (we both believe in the
autonomous, individual self; Buddhism doesn’t); and upon reading a review of
MacLaine’s recent movie The Last Word
in last weekend’s National Post (Saturday,
March 11, 2017), which Penny and I went to see in Barrie this weekend, I
was strongly nudged to write another spiritual musing on Shirley MacLaine
because of my admiration for her unflagging courage, a feisty independent
thinker not afraid to speak her mind just like the role of Harriet Lauler that
she played in the comedy-drama The Last
Word.
Harriet/MacLaine (the role was written for Shirley) is
a feisty eight-one-year-old retired very successful advertising executive whose
failed attempt at suicide led her to re-examine her life, which by happy
coincidence was sparked by the obit pages of the newspaper that she was using
to sop up the wine she had spilled onto her dining room table in her second
attempt at suicide as she was about to wash down another handful of Clonazepam
before she accidentally tipped over her glass of wine.
In her attempt at suicide, the ER doctor questions
whether taking a handful of Clonazepam with a bottle of red wine was really an
accident, and Harriet, true to her brazen, take-no-prisoners personality,
snapped back, “Yes, I was sleepy and I was thirsty.” But as she read the
obituaries in the newspaper she was using to sop up the wine she had spilled,
she got a shocking glimpse into how she might be remembered when she died,
which snapped her back into executive control mode; and taking charge of her
life like she was accustomed to, she marched over to The Bristol Gazette office building and demanded the publisher to
have their obit staff writer work out her obituary by interviewing the 100 people
on the list she had drawn up because she wanted to see what they would have to
say about her when she died.
Anne, the young obit writer (played by Amanda
Seyfried), accepted her assignment with strong reservations (after meeting
Harriet, Anne said, “She puts the bitch in obituary”); and she interviewed
everyone on the list that she could get hold of and wrote up a draft of
Harriet’s obituary, but it proved unsatisfactory to the feisty Harriet Lauler.
Harriet didn’t want to be remembered that way, so she
embarked upon what proved to be the last adventure of her life—refashioning her
image so she would be remembered for who she really was and not the person
everyone took her to be, assigning Anne to rewrite her obituary in the process,
and the result is an entertaining comedy-drama that called for several Kleenex
tissues…
I’ve read most of Shirley MacLaine’s books and seen
many of her movies, and true to my conviction that a writer does not choose the
books they write nor does an actor choose the roles they play, rather they
choose the writer and the actor, I can’t help but marvel at Shirley MacLaine’s
inordinately successful career as an actor/writer, because I believe she chose
her current lifetime to expand the paradigm of social consciousness with her
“kooky” view of the world that she realized while looking for herself.
“The truth is that no matter where I went, I was
always looking for myself. The journey into myself as I evaluated my beliefs
and values, whether living at home or in far-flung corners of the world, has
been the most important journey of all. That journey is what led to my search
to understand the true meaning of spirituality. I was learning that I was truly
creating everything. I was learning to understand the character I had created
as myself in the theater of life,” said Shirley MacLaine in her
tell-it-as-I-have-lived-it memoir I’m
Over All That and Other Confessions.
Driven by the imperative of her essential nature to
realize what C. G. Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self,” at the age
of eighty-two she may not have realized her goal to her satisfaction, but
Shirley MacLaine is still true to her calling to find herself; which was why I
had to see The Last Word, because the
title of her latest movie (she was one of the executive producers) spoke to
what I believe to be her most sagacious view on life and which Harriet/MacLaine
passed on to the young staff writer who wrote up Harriet’s new obituary which
we get to hear at her funeral because Harriet Lauler does die of congenital
heart failure, thus bringing The Last
Word to a sad but satisfying closure.
The essence of Harriet/MacLaine’s wisdom that she
passed on to the young obit writer who kept a notebook of personal essays in
her dream of becoming a real writer one day and who by the end of the movie is
completely won over by the feisty octogenarian who challenged Anne’s life
premise, was for her to be true to herself, something that sounds like an shopworn
cliché but which holds as much truth
today as it did when Polonius uttered those famous words of advice to his son
Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“This above all to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night
the day, /Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
That sums up Shirley MacLaine, a woman who risked her
professional reputation for her belief in reincarnation and UFOs which labelled
her “kooky” but which only confirmed that she was decades ahead of her time;
and in her role as the uncompromising Harriet Lauler, I think Shirley MacLaine
gets the last word, confirming my belief that the movie The Last Word chose her to play the role of Harriet Lauler and not
her the role, and I honestly think I can hear Shirley MacLaine laughing.
———
There’s not much about Jordan Peterson that bothers me,
I too think he’s “a deeply, deeply good man” with a mission to fulfill; but his
casual dismissal of the New Age movement does rankle me a little. Not enough to
taint my impression of the hierophant who was called by life to answer the angry
question of my poem, but enough for me to comment.
Despite some of the obvious flaky elements of the New
Age movement, which Oprah claimed Shirley MacLaine helped launch by being so
open about her beliefs (but which she refused to take credit for), the New Age movement
helped to open the way in the western world for our final journey through life that
Jordan Peterson has intuited but never entertained in his talks and lectures
because it would damage his credibility as a professor of psychology and
clinical therapist, if he has even taken his thought-process that far, which I don’t
think he dares to for propriety’s sake; he has
been called, but he’s yet to make the choice.
I don’t doubt that the good professor has skirted
around the edges of the New Age movement, because he’s such a deep and
passionate thinker he would have had to look into it for professional reasons;
but not until one is ready will one be called to step out of their recurring
cycle of karma and reincarnation, as Shirley MacLaine was and revealed to the
world in such books as Out on a Limb
and The Camino, which is why I admire
and respect her for being so public about her quest for her true self; and
that’s what I find so ironic about professor Peterson, because I know he’s ready to step out of the
mesoteric circle of life and into the final stage of evolution. He’s got one
foot in and one foot out, and that’s what’s excited all the interest in his hierophantic
message to our crazy world…
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