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?
——
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