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The Same Woman (Sara)

Every few years Andrew meets the same woman and always recognizes her, though she never recognizes him as anyone she knew before.

They met for the first time in elementary school in 1955 when her name was Alice. The second time their paths crossed was in the summer before they started high school. 1962. He was thirteen and so was she. In fact, she is always his age.

∆

Thirteen-year-old Andrew is a handsome lad with hard-to-tame brown hair and olive skin. Five-foot-seven and growing fast, the beginnings of a beard and mustache have recently emerged on his chin and upper lip, prompting him to shave every few days. He is an avid basketball player and has a weekend and summer job involving hard work with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow. Thus he is agile and muscular and very strong for his age.

A few weeks before high school begins, Andrew is given the marvelous gift of being allowed to go with his best friend Jeremy and Jeremy’s parents and younger sister to a little house on the north shore of Lake Tahoe that Jeremy’s family rents for two weeks every summer.

The little house is just a block from a white sand beach. Renters of the little house may avail themselves of two rowboats tethered to the pier at the south end of the beach. Hiking, fishing, swimming, rowing, and goofing around are on the holiday agenda, though ogling girls is at the top of Jeremy and Andrew’s vacation to-do list.

Goofing around on the beach is what Jeremy and Andrew are doing on their second day at the lake, the afternoon warm and windless, perfect for throwing the Frisbee and diving into the lake in pursuit of the enticing disk.

As Andrew emerges from the lake after a spectacular dive and catch, he sees two comely young women, a blonde and a brunette, arriving on the beach, and he is struck by the uncanny resemblance of the brunette to the Alice he knew and loved from age six until he was almost ten. That’s when Alice and her family moved from California to Canada and he never heard from her again.

The young women spread big beach towels on the sand twenty feet away from Jeremy and Andrew’s towels and remove their sarongs to reveal their lovely young bodies clad in bikinis. Now they lather on sun block, don sunglasses, and lie down for a bout of tanning, though both of them are already deeply tanned.

Jeremy and Andrew plant themselves on their towels, gaze longingly at the sunbathing maidens, and Jeremy quietly opines, “Are we in heaven or what?”

“I think I know one of them,” says Andrew, touching his heart in homage to the first girl he ever loved.

“The blonde or the brunette?” asks Jeremy, frowning at Andrew. “And how come I don’t know her?”

“Alice Rivera,” says Andrew, on the verge of tears. “She left at the end of Fourth Grade and you came in Fifth. I told you about her. Didn’t I?”

“I don’t think so,” says Jeremy, shaking his head. “Are you sure it’s her? Wasn’t she only like nine the last time you saw her?”

“We were almost ten,” says Andrew, feeling again how much he loved Alice. “And she was way ahead of the curve, if you know what I mean.”

“Judging by the curves she’s got now,” says Jeremy, grinning, “I do know what you mean. So you’re telling me this gorgeous babe is only thirteen?”

“If she’s Alice, yeah,” says Andrew, nodding.

“Well…” says Jeremy, his eyes widening expectantly, “introduce yourself.”

“No,” says Andrew, looking away from the young women. “I’m too shy.”

However, twenty minutes later in the midst of a splendid game of Frisbee, Jeremy flings the disk a bit higher than Andrew can leap and the swirling disk alights in the sand mere inches from the two young women who have been sitting up for some time now watching Andrew and Jeremy play.

The young woman who Andrew thinks is Alice picks up the Frisbee and smiles enticingly as Andrew comes near.

“Sorry about that,” he says, blushing.

“The old errant Frisbee gambit,” she says, her cheeks dimpling exactly as Alice’s always did.

Seeing those dimples, Andrew blurts, “Alice? Alice Rivera? I’m Andrew. Remember me? Andrew Ross.”

The young woman arches her eyebrow. “Followed by the old name-guessing ruse. But for future reference, Andrew, never add a last name to the first name guess. Because then when she replies, ‘I’m not Alice, I’m Sara,’ you can slap your forehead and say, ‘Oh of course. Sara. I meant Sara.’”

“But I didn’t mean Sara,” says Andrew, gazing in wonder at her. “I mean Alice. Everything about you is Alice. Your face, your eyes, the way you speak.” He takes a deep breath. “Little Hills Elementary. Redwood City. You moved to Canada four years ago and I wrote to you a bunch of times but you never wrote back.”

“He’s very cute,” says the blonde, “but I think he’s a little crazy.”

“I don’t mind a little crazy,” says the brunette, locking eyes with Andrew. “I’m Sara. This is Dominique. I’ve never been to Redwood City or Canada, but we can still be friends if you want. How long are you here for?”

“Twelve more days,” he says breathlessly. “You?”

“About the same,” she says, dimpling again. “And then we go back to Reno and start our first year of high school.”

“So…” He clears his throat.

“Maybe we can hang out,” she says, beating him to the punch as Alice always did. “What’s your friend’s name?”

“Jeremy,” says Andrew, beckoning to Jeremy who is standing in the shallows a hundred feet away. “He’s great. You’ll love him.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” says Dominique, taking the Frisbee from Sara, rising gracefully, and flinging the disc straight as an arrow to Jeremy who catches it with both hands and tumbles backwards into the lake.

∆

The next day, after a morning hike with Jeremy’s parents and sister, Andrew and Jeremy return to the beach where Sara and Dominique await them with a picnic of sandwiches and potato chips and soda pop and chocolate chip cookies.

They are all wonderfully comfortable with each other, and Andrew continues to marvel at how much Sara reminds him of Alice, her facial expressions, her gestures, the timbre of her voice, the way she listens so intently to what others are saying, and how she moves and runs and laughs.

In the late afternoon, they take the rowboats out on the lake, Dominique and Jeremy in one boat, Sara and Andrew in the other, and after a time their boats go in different directions.

“So tell me about this Alice you were in love with,” says Sara, sitting in the prow and facing Andrew as he rows.

“She was…” He smiles as he remembers Alice. “She was beautiful and super smart and very funny and the fastest runner in our class until Fourth Grade when a couple guys could finally beat her. And she was very sure of herself. Self-confident. Just like you.”

“Except she was an idiot not to write you back,” says Sara, pouting in the same adorable way Alice pouted. “I would have. I think you’re great.”

“Thanks.” He blushes. “I think you are, too.”

“You want to make out?” she says softly.

“You mean…”

“Kiss,” she says, nodding.

“Okay,” he says, ceasing to row. “I never have, but… I’d like to.”

“Never have?” she says, moving to sit beside him. “You seem so sophisticated.”

“Well, um, I read a lot,” he says, clearing his throat. “But I’ve never had a girlfriend, so…”

“You’ll have lots,” she says, kissing him tenderly.

“Wow,” he whispers. “That was amazing.”

“Again please,” she says, kissing him again.

After a few more minutes of incredibly pleasurable communion with each other, they jump in the lake and swim in a big circle around the boat before finding each other to kiss some more.

Sitting side-by-side in the rowboat, each manning an oar as they row back to shore, Sara says, “I wish you lived in Reno. Then we could go together and who knows what might happen.”

“I wish I lived there, too,” he says, nodding in agreement. “I’d give anything to live near you.”

“You seem older than thirteen,” she says, finding him ideal in every way.

“So do you,” he says, madly in love with her. “If I hadn’t thought you were Alice, I would have thought you were sixteen.”

∆

Two nights later, Sara and Dominique come for supper with Jeremy and Andrew and Jeremy’s parents and sister. Sara and Dominique tell Jeremy’s inquiring mother what they already told Jeremy and Andrew, that their mothers are blackjack dealers in a big casino in Reno and every summer take a quasi-vacation by coming to Lake Tahoe with their daughters for a month of dealing blackjack four nights a week at a casino on the north shore. Sara’s father is a fitness trainer in Florida and she rarely sees him. Dominique’s father is a pit boss in a Reno casino. Dominique has an older brother; Sara is an only child.

“And what do you girls aspire to be?” asks Jeremy’s mother, who expects both her children to get at least PhDs.

“I might be a psychologist,” says Dominique, smiling warmly at Jeremy’s mother. “But I’m really into music, too, so maybe I’ll get a job with a record company or manage a band or something like that.”

“I want to be an actress,” says Sara, nodding assuredly. “I’ll try for Yale, but I’ll probably go to Nevada State. I sing, too.”

“How wonderful,” says Jeremy’s father, an electrical engineer. “When I was thirteen all I wanted to be was fourteen. Beyond that, I knew nothing. I think it’s great you know the direction you want to go.”

“Subject to change,” says Sara, winking at Andrew. “My mother wanted to be an actress, too. It’s a long shot, but why not dream?”

∆

Three days after Dominique and Sara come for supper, Dominique and her mother have to go home to Reno to take care of Dominique’s grandmother who fell and broke her hip. Jeremy is devastated because he and Dominique were planning to lose their virginity together and now that won’t happen.

Andrew and Sara have no such plans, though their bouts of kissing and caressing sometimes verge on sex. But they both feel too young and too unsure and too afraid. In almost every way they seem to be of the same mind, and this is something Andrew has never experienced with anyone before.

∆

On a beautiful evening, five days before their idyll must end, Sara and Andrew sit side-by-side at the end of the pier. They are dressed warmly for the cold that descends upon the lake every night as summer gives way to fall. Jeremy is with his parents and sister in the little house, making fudge and playing Monopoly.

“The problem, dear Andrew,” says Sara, with a credible British accent, “is that you’ve set the bar so dreadfully high, I despair of ever meeting someone as fine as you again in this one brief life I am given.

“Well I’m going to be an actor, too,” says Andrew, his British accent atrocious. “You never know. We just might meet again at Yale or Nevada State.”

“But truly, Andrew,” says Sara, dropping the British accent. “I can’t imagine ever meeting anyone I like as much as you. We just… we just go together so well in so many ways.”

“Want to count them?” he asks, putting his arm around her.

“No, I’ll get too sad,” she says, sighing. “If only we were twenty-five. That’s when I want to get married. But that’s twelve years from now. Who knows where we’ll be twelve years from now?”

“We’ll both know because we’ll write to each other and call each other and visit each other during the summers and…”

“No, we won’t,” she says shaking her head.

“Why not?”

“Because we’re thirteen. We’ll try to stay in touch, but after a few letters saying how much we miss each other, we’ll get all tangled up in high school and… meet other people.”

“No,” says Andrew, defiantly. “I’m gonna write to you every week for the rest of my life whether you write me back or not. Every Sunday. I won’t let myself eat until I’ve written you a letter and put a stamp on it and mailed it.”

“You’re so sweet,” she says, kissing him. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he says, crying. “I’ve never known anyone as wonderful as you.”

∆

Sara comes for supper on Andrew and Jeremy’s last night at the lake, and during supper Jeremy’s mother asks Sara if she’ll be coming to the lake again next summer.

“Probably not,” she says, shaking her head. “I have to get a job and there’s a summer Drama program I want to get into if I can. But if I don’t get in, maybe I’ll be back. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“Well just so you know,” says Jeremy’s father, “we’ll be coming back here for the same two weeks next year and hope to drag Andrew along with us.”

∆

Andrew escorts Sara home after supper, both of them crying as they hold hands and walk along under the starry sky.

“I never got to meet your mother,” says Andrew, sniffling back his tears.

“She would love you,” says Sara, giving his hand a squeeze. “I will try to write to you, Andrew. I will. But I might be too sad.”

“I know we’re gonna see each other again,” he says, his heart about to burst. “I know we will.”

“I hope so,” she says as they arrive at her house. “But no matter what happens, I’ll never forget you.”

∆

Andrew writes to Sara every Sunday for seventeen Sundays, and Sara writes to him a few times, too. But when ten of his letters to her go unanswered, he skips a Sunday and then another, and when he tries to write to her again, he cannot coax a single word from his pen.

But he does see her again. Four years later. Her name is Laura when they meet at seventeen, and he knows her the minute he sees her, though she will claim she’s never seen him before.

fin

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The Same Woman (Alice)

You know those movies like Groundhog Day wherein a character keeps waking up and reliving the same day over and over until he learns whatever the universe wants him to learn? Well that doesn’t happen to Andrew. What happens to Andrew is that every few years he meets the same woman, and though he always recognizes her and is glad to see her again, she never recognizes him as someone she’s met before because though she is the same woman, she always has a different identity than the one she had when Andrew last knew her.

This has been going on since Andrew was a little boy. And now Andrew is seventy-seven. The last time he met the woman was four years ago and he’s beginning to think he may not meet her again before he dies.

If this seems impossible to you, imagine how it seems to Andrew who never would have believed such a thing was possible if it hadn’t happened to him over and over again.

Does the woman age? Yes. She is the same age as Andrew. Does her place of origin change? So it seems. Does her appearance change each time they meet? Not really. The way she wears her hair changes, though she is always a brunette, and her clothing changes, her style choices change, but her face and body and personality do not change except in the ways faces and bodies and personalities change as we age.

∆

Andrew first met her when he was six and starting First Grade halfway through the school year at Little Hills Elementary School in Redwood City. He was an old hand at starting school without knowing any of the other kids, having gone to two kindergartens in Texas and another First Grade in San Mateo.

One of the things he learned from his time in those three other schools was that there was no need for him to try to make friends because he and his future friends would effortlessly find each other in the course of going to school together.

At Morning Recess on Andrew’s first day at Little Hills, three girls approached him as he waited in line for a turn on the swings. One of those girls was the person he would meet again and again throughout his life. Her name was Alice, and Andrew had already decided she was one of the four cutest girls in his class.

Alice was flanked by Lynn, the tallest girl in their class, and Gina, another of the girls Andrew felt was among the four cutest. Lynn had glossy blonde hair that reached her shoulders. Alice and Gina both had brown hair cut an inch or so below their ears. They were all wearing skirts and blouses and tennis shoes and Andrew thought they were marvelous.

“Hi Andrew,” said Gina, smiling at Andrew. “We’re in Mrs. Bushnell’s class with you.”

“I know,” he said, blushing. “I saw you.”

“We want to know if you’re like the other boys,” said Gina, her smile changing to a frown.

“What do you mean?” asked Andrew, hoping they didn’t want to see his penis. At his three previous schools there were girls and boys who wanted to see his penis, and Andrew had not been cooperative in this regard. He much preferred girls and boys who left his genitals out of the social equation.

“Would you let girls run in races with boys?” asked Lynn, who had by far the deepest voice of any of the kids in their class.

“Why not?” said Andrew, sensing a possible tricky situation developing.

Another thing he’d learned at those three other schools was to avoid tricky situations whenever possible because they often ended badly for someone who might be him.

“Because,” said Alice, jutting out her chin and pouting at the same time, a combination Andrew found adorable, “the other boys won’t let us race them because I’m fastest and Gina is faster than all of them except Biff.”

“I don’t know anyone here,” said Andrew, who was by then next in line for a turn on the swings. “Except my sisters. They’re older than me. One is in Third Grade and one is in Fifth.”

“So you think girls should be able to race with boys,” said Gina, stating this as a fact rather than a question.

“Okay,” said Andrew, hurrying to claim the just-vacated swing.

And he thought no more about girls racing with boys until Lunch Recess when he was in line to play Four Square and two boys who were in the Second Grade confronted him.

The bigger of the two boys was a few inches taller than Andrew and twenty pounds heavier.

“Hey turd face,” said this bigger boy, “why did you say the girls could race with us?”

“I never did,” said Andrew, shaking his head.

“Yes, you did,” said the boy, giving Andrew a shove.

Andrew took a deep breath and replied, “I said girls should be able to race with boys, not could. This is my first day here and I don’t know all the rules. Please leave me alone.”

“Maybe I don’t want to, turd face,” said the boy, shoving Andrew again.

Now another thing Andrew learned at his previous three schools was that when someone bullied you and you didn’t fight back, the bullying continued until you did fight back. And to be effective, the fighting back had to be more than merely exchanging a shove for a shove. To stop the bullying, fighting back had to transcend the initial assault.

So before the boy knew what was happening, Andrew curled his right hand into a fist and slugged the boy really hard in the center of the forehead. And before the bully’s pal could react to Andrew slugging the bully, Andrew punched him equally hard in the forehead, too.

Both boys were staggered by the blows and yowling in pain when two teachers intervened. Mrs. Dalrymple, a large Second Grade teacher with curly red hair, took charge of Chad, the boy who had initiated the conflict, and Chad’s cohort Biff, while Miss Nakamoto, a petite First Grade Teacher with long black hair, escorted Andrew away from the scene.

And following close behind Andrew and Miss Nakamoto were Alice and Gina and Lynn, Alice declaring loudly, “We saw the whole thing, Miss Nakamoto. Chad and Biff started it because Andrew said girls could race with boys and they know I’m the fastest and they hate losing to me.”

Which is how Andrew became friends with Alice and was not so secretly in love with her for the next three years until she and her family moved to Canada and he never saw her again, except he did, only the next time she was thirteen and named Sara.

But before we get to Sara, we will end the Alice chapter of Andrew’s life by saying that at Lunch Recess on the last day of Fourth Grade, Alice approached Andrew and said she wanted to speak to him in private.

They walked across the playground to the big oak tree and Alice stood very close to him and said, “I’m really gonna miss you, Andrew. Every time I think about not living here anymore, I think about you and how much I like you.” Then she frowned and pouted at the same time, a combination Andrew found adorable. “I think I want to marry you. Would you like to marry me?”

“Yes,” said Andrew, without the slightest hesitation. “We’ll send each other letters and talk on the phone and visit each other during summer vacation and get married when we’re eighteen.”

“Okay, good,” said Alice, sighing with relief. “I’ll give you my new address in Canada.”

“And I’ll give you mine,” said Andrew, brimming with happiness.

Andrew wrote to Alice three times that summer after Fourth Grade. But she never wrote back. He was heartbroken until the beginning of Fifth Grade when he fell madly in love with Sharon Goldfarb who toyed with his affections for half the school year before going steady with, you guessed it, Chad.

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Diego Kelly Gets A Glimpse

Think of this as a fable or a fairy tale, but whatever you do, don’t think this could possibly be true.

Diego Kelly is sixty-four. He has an older sister Luisa and a younger brother Juan. Their mother Maria was a hairdresser, their father Jerome a forklift operator. Diego and his siblings were born in Gilroy, California and called Gilroy home until their parents divorced when Luisa was twenty-five, Diego twenty-three, and Juan twenty. After the divorce, their mother moved to Fort Bragg, California while their father stayed in Gilroy.

Diego learned to play the guitar when he was six. From then on, until four months ago, writing songs was the central focus of his life. He dropped out of college after two years and moved to Los Angeles where he pursued a music career until he was thirty-three and discovered that several of his songs had been recorded by other recording artists claiming to have written his songs. Four of those stolen songs became huge hits, and when Diego’s many attempts to prove he’d been ripped off came to naught, he had a nervous breakdown.

Thereafter he lived with his mother in Fort Bragg until she died when Diego was forty-seven. She left him her little house and that’s where he lives today with his brown mutt Zero, his orange tabby Twyla, and his black tabby Magdalena. He makes his minimal living as a counterperson in a coffee house and until four months ago he had never in his life stopped playing his guitar and writing songs.

Important things to know about Diego are that he is kind and generous and friendly and fully recovered from his nervous breakdown, though he still sometimes feels mighty sad about having his songs and a successful career as a musician stolen from him.

So…

On a cold October evening after a long day behind the coffee house counter, Diego is in the kitchen of his commodious little house making quesadillas and guacamole and drinking a beer when someone knocks on his front door. Thinking the knocker must be Stella, a lovely woman he’s been courting for six months now without much success, Diego calls, “Come in” and the door opens admitting a most unusual person who is not Stella.

We will use the pronoun she when referring to the unusual person, though she is not obviously male or female. She is tall and strikingly beautiful, entirely bald, the dome of her skull perfectly round, her sparkling blue eyes enormous. She is wearing a gray tunic giving no hint of breasts, and black jeans giving little hint of hips, yet her facial features and the graceful way she moves makes Diego think she is a woman.

“Hello,” says Diego, hoping his visitor isn’t crazy. “May I help you?”

“Diego Kelly?” says the unusual person, her voice deep and giving no hint of gender.

“Yes?” says Diego, using the gentle tone of voice he uses when dealing with unhinged customers he occasionally encounters in the coffee house. “Who are you?”

The unusual person blinks three times and says, “Zah.”

At which moment Diego’s dog Zero enters from the backyard through his dog door, looks at Zah, and quite uncharacteristically does not bark or growl.

Zah smiles at Zero and says, “Dog.”

“You got that right,” says Diego, smiling curiously at his unusual visitor. “Here’s the situation, Zah. I’m in the middle of making supper and expecting a friend to arrive any minute, so…”

“No one will arrive,” says Zah, gazing intently at Diego. “Your time is suspended.”

“Okay,” says Diego, now convinced his visitor is a bit off kilter. “What can I do for you, Zah?”

She gestures to Diego’s sofa. “Join me on your cushion and I will explain.”

Diego takes a moment to assess Zah, and feeling no threat from her says, “Would you care for a beer?”

Zah blinks three times. “No thank you. Join me on your cushion and I will explain.”

Diego carries his beer to the sofa and sits down.

Zah crosses the room and sits next to Diego.

Diego waits for Zah to speak.

“You have not played your guitar in four of your moon cycles,” says Zah, gazing at the fire crackling in Diego’s fireplace. “You were writing a new song and stopped playing.”

Diego freezes. No one in the world knows he stopped playing the guitar four months ago, and no one in the world knows he stopped writing a new song.

“How do you know that?” he asks with a tremble in his voice.

“All is known,” says Zah, nodding. “Every sound is heard. Why did you stop writing your song?”

“Well…” says Diego, remembering the precise moment he put down his guitar and gave up on that oh so beautiful song. “I didn’t see the point in writing yet another song no one will hear. Or another song only a few people will hear because I force them to listen to me. I’m done with that. I’ve written hundreds of good songs. All for nothing. Why write another?”

“Your new song will be a vital thread,” says Zah, her voice full of urgency. “Your one hundred and sixty-seven songs are each vital threads. You are heard throughout the universe. Please resume writing your songs.”

Diego laughs. “Oh I get it now. I’m dreaming. A lucid dream. I love these. Excuse me while I make love with Stella and she won’t care I’m a pauper.”

Zah blinks three times. “You are not dreaming. Your song is a vital thread. Please resume writing your song. I will give you…” She blinks three more times. “What do you want, Diego Kelly? Tell me what you want and I will give it to you and you will resume writing your song.”

Diego places a hand on his heart and says sincerely, “All I ever wanted was for people to hear my music and… love me.”

“Your music is heard throughout the universe,” says Zah, nodding. “Your music provides vital threads in the Zantar Dimension, the Gorzoi Complex, the Zintaphor Range, and the Rezmigal Vortex. Without your vital threads the Borzon Cascade cannot…” She blinks. “Function.”

“Oh gimme a break,” says Diego, hot with anger. “I’m heard throughout the universe but not here on earth?” He glares at Zah. “I don’t know who you are or how you knew I gave up on that song, but I’m done writing songs nobody hears. Now get out of my house.”

Zah rises. “I will go now. You cannot be replaced, but if you will not resume writing your songs we will find other ways to continue. Know this, Diego Kelly. Universe created you to write songs to be vital threads. That is why you are here now in your body. Goodbye.”

And Zah disappears.

“Wow,” says Diego, getting up from his sofa and returning to the kitchen. “Doesn’t get much weirder than that.”

Now Stella arrives and gives Diego an unexpectedly long and loving hug followed by a tender kiss.

“To what do I owe…” begins Diego.

“You’re just the greatest,” says Stella, kissing him again. “Why I didn’t kiss you four months ago, I’ll never know.”

fin

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Second Friendship Gate

So a couple months ago, Dexter Jones built a friendship gate in his back fence connecting his yard to his neighbors’ yard. Those neighbors happen to be siblings: Godfrey and Melody. And now Godfrey is one of Dexter’s best friends and Melody is Dexter’s girlfriend, though she and Dexter have yet to physically touch each other because of the dang virus going around, but they’re enjoying the suspense, if you know what I mean.

One late afternoon Dexter is weeding the broccoli patch in his burgeoning vegetable garden when someone asks, “Are those broccolis?”

Looking up and around, Dexter espies a little boy peering over the solid wood fence between Dexter’s yard and the neighboring yard to the south. The little boy is standing on something enabling him to look over the seven-feet-high fence, but Dexter can’t see what the boy is standing on.

“Yep these are broccoli plants,” says Dexter, gesturing to the big plants sporting numerous heads of broccoli. “Who are you?”

“Larry,” says the boy, frowning. “I thought broccoli grew on a tree.”

“Nope,” says Dexter, smiling. “More like a little bush. How old are you?”

“Five, but I’ll be six in three weeks,” says Larry, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “How come you put a gate in your other fence?”

“I’m good friends with Godfrey and Melody who live back there, so we made a gate for easy visiting.” Dexter sighs happily as he thinks of Melody and how he’ll be seeing her soon for an evening visit on her patio. “Hey what are you standing on, Larry?”

“I nailed some boards to the fence,” says Larry, matter-of-factly. “Kind of like a ladder and I climb up them.”

“Why did you do that?” asks Dexter, impressed by the little boy’s inventiveness.

“To look at things,” says Larry, nodding. “I made one on each fence so I can see other things besides our yard. I like your yard the best now that you have a vegetable garden. Your beans are growing really fast and you get lots of bees and butterflies. The yard behind us is just blackberry bushes and the yard on the other side is full of junk.”

“Do you have a garden?” asks Dexter, feeling a pang of sympathy for Larry and all the children confined to their little spaces because of the dang virus.

“No, we just have a patio and a lawn,” says Larry, shaking his head. “I wish we had a vegetable garden, but my mom says she doesn’t know how to grow vegetables so we can’t have one.”

“I can help you put in a vegetable garden,” says Dexter, smiling at Larry.

“Wait a minute,” says Larry, disappearing.

“Uh oh,” says Dexter, laughing. “Now what have I done?”

What he’s done is get Larry to go get his mother who comes out into her backyard with a little ladder and stands on the third rung up so she can see over the fence into Dexter’s yard. Her name is Harriet. She’s thirty, divorced, single, works at Safeway, and would love to replace her little patch of lawn with a vegetable garden, but she knows nothing about gardening.

Dexter and Harriet chat for twenty minutes, decide they like each other, and a couple days later Dexter and Godfrey knock out seven planks in the fence between Dexter’s yard and Larry and Harriet’s yard, and they build a second friendship gate.

And just a few weeks after they build that gate, this being the height of summer, Larry harvests his first radish from his new vegetable garden and calls Dexter on the phone to make sure it’s a good time to come visit.

Dexter steps out of the shower, having just gotten home from work, answers his phone, and tells Larry to come over in ten minutes.

Larry watches the clock on the kitchen stove until ten minutes have gone by and then he rushes out into his backyard and goes through the friendship gate into Dexter’s backyard to show him the radish.

“Wow,” says Dexter, admiring the radish from several feet away. “What a beauty.”

“I know,” says Larry, gazing in wonder at the beautiful red radish. “I think maybe I have a green thumb.”

“No maybe about it,” says Dexter, imagining giving Larry a hug. “You’ve definitely got the knack, kiddo.”

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Dexter and Melody Go Out

the next night

On a warm afternoon in May, Dexter Jones, forty-six, gets home at five from his job of delivering packages for UPS in Springfield, Oregon, undresses in his garage, drops his uniform into the washing machine, enters his kitchen naked as a jay bird, washes his hands with great thoroughness, feeds his hungry cats Frank and Ethel, and takes a hot shower during which he washes his longish brown hair.

Now he puts on his favorite tie-dyed T-shirt featuring lots of blue and green blobs, captures his hair in a stubby ponytail, slips into comfy old blue jeans, and saunters into his kitchen to make some guacamole to have with chips and lemonade for his first official date with Melody.

Melody lives in the house directly behind Dexter’s house, their backyards connected with a friendship gate Dexter and Melody’s brother Godfrey built a few weeks ago. Melody is sixty, trim and pretty with short brown hair. A high school Home Economics teacher, Melody does an hour of yoga and takes a brisk two-mile walk every morning before she conducts her online classes for five hours, and then she takes another brisk walk when she’s done with her teaching.

Neither Melody nor Dexter has been in a relationship in several years and they were both pleasantly surprised when they found themselves desiring to maybe get into one with each other. How to create a new relationship in the midst of a deadly epidemic is a mystery to both of them, but their desire to explore the possibility trumps their reluctance, and tonight is the beginning of their experiment in dating during a pandemic.

Dexter sets up a little table on the edge of his vegetable garden about ten feet from the friendship gate and covers the table top with a green paisley tablecloth upon which he arrays two bowls of guacamole, two bowls of chips, and two glasses of lemonade. Now he places a lawn chair on either side of the table and sits down to await Melody.

While he waits, Dexter closes his eyes and thinks back over his life, recalling several other first dates. And as he watches his memories, he notices that in every previous first encounter he was so anxious about wanting the woman to like him, he never allowed himself to be who he really was. Instead, he tried to say and do things he thought the woman would like. Thus he was never genuine with these women in the beginning, never the true Dexter, so no wonder the women were all confused a few dates along when he could no longer keep up the façade and they found out he was not the person he’d been pretending to be.

“But no more,” says Dexter, sighing in relief. “From now on I speak from my heart and tell the unvarnished truth.”

“Sounds good to me,” says Melody, standing in the friendship gateway.

Dexter opens his eyes and gazes in wonder at the lovely woman in a reddish short-sleeved summer dress, barefoot, with a red rose in her short brown hair, a plate of almond-butter cookies in one hand, a small glass decanter of red wine in the other.

“Wow,” he says, mesmerized. “You are so beautiful.”

She steps through the gateway and sets the wine and cookies on the table.

“Don’t hold back, Dexter,” she says quietly. “Say what you feel and I will, too.”

He gets up from his chair. “I’ll go get a couple wine glasses. Be right back.”

Melody moves her chair a little closer to Dexter’s chair, about seven-feet away, sits down, and exhales profoundly. “Just be yourself, Mel. You’ve got nothing to prove. If he likes you, he likes you. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Better to find out sooner than later.”

Dexter returns with two small and delicate crystal wine glasses and sets them on the table next to the decanter of wine. “Got those in Venice. The one time I went to Europe. Nine years ago. Never used them until now.”

“They’re exquisite,” says Melody, her eyes filling with tears. “I never did get to Europe. Always wanted to, but never made it.”

“You might go some day,” says Dexter, his eyes filling with tears, too. “We might go together.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Melody, smiling through her tears. “The only thing that matters is being here with you right now. Everything else is a memory or an idea. This is what’s real. And I want to tell you, need to tell you, that ever since you called two days ago and asked if I’d like to meet you here today, just the two of us, I’ve been happier than I’ve been in years and years. Just knowing you wanted to be my special friend is a great gift, Dexter. No matter what happens.”

“You have the most appealing voice I’ve ever heard,” says Dexter, feeling deeply happy. “You want to pour the wine or should I?”

“I’ll pour,” she says, removing the crystal stopper and pouring the wine into the delicate glasses. “I almost never drink alcohol, but I thought it would be fun to toast our new…” She half-frowns and half-smiles. “What are we calling this? Friendship or…”

“I like relationship,” says Dexter, reddening. “Everything it conjures up.”

“You mean sex?” she says, arching an eyebrow and raising her glass.

“Among other things,” says Dexter, raising his glass, too.

“Like what other things?”

“Like sharing time. Holding each other. Laughing together. Watching the cats goofing around. Gardening. Going on walks. Making food together. Telling each other things we don’t tell anybody else.”

“Here’s to all that,” she says, gently clinking his glass with hers. “Though I think we’ll have to wait a while before we hold each other. Until we’re ready to take the chance.”

“To all the possibilities,” he says, clinking her glass with his. “Whatever they turn out to be.”

They drink the wine and gaze at each other for a long time without speaking.

“You’re wonderful,” says Melody, the first to speak. “I’ve never wanted to kiss anybody as much as I want to kiss you.”

“I feel the same way,” says Dexter, grinning. “But in lieu of a kiss, try my guacamole.”

Melody dips one of her chips into her bowl of guacamole, and at the taste of the good green goo her eyes grow wide with delight.

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Friendship Gate

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When Dexter and his neighbor Godfrey finish building the gate connecting their backyards, they decide to hold a celebration. Dexter invites one of his best friends, Luis, who is fifty-three, and Godfrey invites his sister Melody who just turned sixty. Dexter is forty-six, Godfrey fifty-seven. Because of the dang virus going around, four is the maximum number of people allowed for outdoor gatherings of an hour or less, and participants are asked to sit or stand at least six feet apart for however long the gathering lasts.

As it happens, Luis caught the virus, or the virus caught Luis, four months ago and he is now fully recovered. Even so, there are now multiple strains of the virus, so he is taking the same precautions as those who have not yet been infected with any of the variations on the dang bug.

Dexter is an Anglo Saxon UPS delivery person. Luis is a Chinese software designer. Melody and Godfrey are the children of Ashkenazi Jews, Melody a high school Home Economics teacher, Godfrey a spiritual counselor at the nearby Presbyterian.

The day sunny and mild, they sit in lawn chairs in a circle on Godfrey and Melody’s patio adjacent to their beautiful old farmhouse, their chairs eight feet apart. They sip lemonade and talk about life in the era of the dang virus and what they think and hope is going to happen sooner or later.

“This has to be the end of unregulated capitalism,” says Luis, a cheerful fellow with black hair and black-framed glasses. “And unless we start putting most of our resources into saving the environment and creating a comprehensive global medical system dedicated to eradicating this and other dangerous viruses, things will only get worse.”

“Capitalism used to be regulated,” says Melody, lean and pretty with short brown hair. “And medical care was excellent and inexpensive. But the super selfish guys got in after Jimmy Carter and they’ve been wrecking things ever since.”

“I think this is the start of a swift decline of civilization,” says Godfrey, tall and angular with short black hair. “Greed and selfishness and cruelty always beget decay and death. I don’t think we’ll see much positive change in our lifetimes.”

“Maybe so, maybe not,” says Luis, smiling at each of his three companions. “In any case, we need to counter the negativity and despair by becoming activist messengers of positivity and hope. Or so I believe.”

“Right on, Luis,” says Dexter, a robust fellow with brown hair caught in a stubby ponytail. “And now that the virus is better understood and proper protocols are in place, I think we should get together like this more often and encourage other people to meet like this, too. And maybe from these outdoor quartets good ideas for new and better ways of living on earth will emerge.”

“Four is my favorite number,” says Melody, smiling shyly at Dexter. “How’s your new vegetable garden doing?”

“Pretty well,” he says, seriously smitten with her. “Lots of babies coming up, the tomatoes taking hold. And so far anyway I’m keeping ahead of the slugs and snails and sow bugs.” He blushes. “Four is my favorite number, too.”

“How’s the package delivery business?” asks Godfrey, who counsels people via telephone these days, though when the warmer weather takes hold he intends to see people outside on the church terrace.

“The package delivery business is busier than ever,” says Dexter, gazing admiringly at the friendship gate in the fence that used to keep him apart from his wonderful neighbors. “Everybody’s buying everything online now. Everything. We’re adding drivers all the time.”

“I feel so sad for the young people and the little kids,” says Melody, shrugging. “All their natural instincts thwarted.”

“Trust in the resiliency of youth,” says Luis, pointing a triumphant finger to the sky. “Trust in the inherent goodness of people.”

Dexter looks at Melody and has a vision of being in a really good relationship with her, and she looks at Dexter and imagines the same thing.

And their hearts are filled with hope.

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Dexter Digs Up His Lawn

sally's cactus blooms

Dexter was so looking forward to a lusty week at Happy Valley Retreat Center, but the love-in got cancelled because of the dang virus that’s going around, and going around is a humongous understatement.

So in the aftermath of that tragic cancellation, and having heard a voice while watching a cloud, a voice that might have been Dexter’s imagination but might have been the voice of the universe, AKA God, Dexter decides to follow the advice of the voice and dig up his scraggly lawn and put in a vegetable garden and plant some fruit trees.

Who is Dexter? Why should we care about him? Those are two good questions. I would even say they are essential questions. Many novels and stories and movies, especially movies, go wrong because we never get to know the main characters as people rather than archetypes, and we aren’t given good reasons to care about those characters.

Dexter is forty-six, a Caucasian American male born and raised and living in Springfield, Oregon, a UPS delivery person for thirteen years now after four years as an auto mechanic at Super Fast n’ Cheap Oil Change. Before being an oil changer he was co-owner with his mother Doris of an online 1960s memorabilia company called Quicksilver Memory Service, which Doris still has though her sales in the last twenty years haven’t amounted to much.

In the next three paragraphs I’ll try to answer the question about why you should care about Dexter. If what I tell you doesn’t ring your bell, I suggest you stop reading and do something else with your precious time. Doesn’t ring my bell, by the way, is one of Dexter’s favorite expressions, learned from his mother who uses it several times a day.

Dexter is a kind and thoughtful person who is genuinely interested in other people. He is fascinated by history and neurobiology and reads voraciously about both. He learned next to nothing in high school and did not attend college, yet his two best friends are highly educated and consider Dexter a wonderfully original thinker. One of those best friends is a middle-aged Chinese man named Luis, a microbiology software designer, and the other best friend is a forty-year-old Danish woman named Greta, a researcher for an online encyclopedia.

Painfully shy around women he finds attractive, Dexter finds most women attractive. He would love to be in a relationship, but his several attempts all ended unpleasantly, not because Dexter is a jerk, but because he grew up without any sort of model for how one goes about having a relationship, except with one’s mother.

Dexter is a sweetheart who is afraid of seeming too sweet. He loves classical music, something he got from his mother’s father who was a classical music clarinet player. He also likes music that swings, something he got from being human. He has two cats he dotes on, Frank and Ethel, and he would love to have a dog but doesn’t feel he has the time and energy after ten hours of delivering packages to give a dog the attention and exercise he or she would require. He also has a large aquarium, home to seven neon tetras. His favorite television show is the British game show 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, his favorite ethnic cuisine is Thai, and if none of that makes you care about Dexter, read no further.

However, if you are still reading, Dexter’s parents split up when Dexter was five, and though they legally had joint custody of Dexter, he spent most of his childhood with his mother Doris in her Airstream trailer in the Riverside Mobile Home Park where she still lives today.

A spry seventy-six, Doris starts every day with several cups of black coffee and reading Tarot cards for an hour or so. Thus it has been since Dexter was born. A retired bookkeeper, Doris owns three other Airstream trailers and the lots they sit on in Riverside Mobile Home Park. The rent she derives from those three mobile homes is sufficient to support her minimalist lifestyle and leave her a little extra each month to contribute to the local food bank.

She is not terribly afraid of catching the dang virus going around, but she is a little afraid, so for the time being she visits with Dexter on the phone and not in-person. She has groceries delivered to her doorstep every few days and walks her toy poodle Cream around the mobile home park for a half-hour every late morning and again in the early evening. She believes 1972 was the apex of human culture, and the décor in her Airstream, the music she listens to, the movies she watches, and the books she reads reflect that belief.

Doris raised Dexter to believe the 1960s and 70s were the golden age of humanity and he continues to believe this. He thinks of himself as a latter-day hippie. He has two extraordinary tie-dyed T-shirts, drives a faded red 1977 Volkswagen van, wears his longish brown hair in a stubby ponytail, and digs Van Morrison, though his go-to music is anything by Mendelssohn.

So here is Dexter on a cool Saturday morning in May, digging up the scraggly lawn in the little backyard of his blue two-bedroom tract home he has owned for fifteen years. Built in the late 1970s, the house is sturdy and unpretentious with a small front yard filled with rose bushes. The somewhat larger backyard is enclosed by a seven-feet-high wood fence that gives no view of the yards on either side of Dexter’s yard, or of the yard behind his yard.

Dexter barely knows his neighbors on either side of him and he knows nothing about the person or people who live in the house with the yard in back of his.

Sporting a bit of a paunch but otherwise in excellent shape from delivering packages five-days-a-week for the last thirteen years, Dexter is very much enjoying digging up the scraggly lawn, which is so scraggly there is little lawn to remove. As he turns the soil with his big shovel, the lawn remnants disappear. His plan is to dig up the whole lawn, get twenty bags of manure, dig that in, and plant some stuff.

He gets lost in a fantasy of going to the nursery to get manure and meeting an intriguing woman who is also buying manure and they fall in love. And just as he and this fantasy woman are about to make love, a voice says, “Gonna plant some veggies? If so, you picked a primo spot.”

Dexter looks up and around, wondering where the voice came from. This is not the same voice that might have been Dexter’s imagination or might have been the voice of God telling him to dig up his lawn. This voice came from nearby and is male and a little gravelly.

“Hello?” says Dexter. “Where are you?”

“Back here,” says the man, chuckling. “Looking at you through a knothole. Thought you’d like to know your soon-to-be-gone lawn used to be part of the commune vegetable garden back in the day. Sixties and Seventies. Before my old man sold the land to the developers. He kept three lots and the big old farmhouse and when he died he left them to me.”

Dexter leaves his shovel stuck in the ground and walks toward his back fence. The man sticks his finger through the knothole and waggles Hello.

“I’m Dexter,” says Dexter, waggling a finger at the knothole. “Who are you?”

“Godfrey Moonstone,” says the man. “My old man was Ira Levinson and my mom was Shirley Goldstein, but they legally changed their last names to Moonstone. They were hippies until I was twenty and then virtually overnight, or so it seemed, they turned into Republicans. I think of myself as a latter-day hippy.” He sighs. “But who knows what we are anymore. Things are pretty confusing now, don’t you think? With the virus and everything?”

“I’m kind of a latter-day hippy, too,” says Dexter, stopping a few feet from the back fence. “You been infected?”

“Not yet,” says Godfrey. “You?”

“Not as far as I know,” says Dexter, shaking his head. “You want a beer?”

“Love one,” says Godfrey, sweetly. “However, I’m a reformed alcoholic. Seventeen years sober.”

“Good on you, Godfrey,” says Dexter, smiling appreciatively. “Lemonade?”

“Perfecto,” says Godfrey. “How shall…”

“I’ll hand your bottle over the fence,” says Dexter.

“Cool,” says Godfrey. “I’ll get a ladder.”

“I’ll get one, too,” says Dexter.

So they stand a few rungs up on their stepladders and look at each other over the fence and drink lemonade together.

Godfrey is a tall angular man in his early fifties with olive skin and short black hair. He lives with his sister Melody who teaches online Home Economics for the currently closed high schools in Springfield and nearby Eugene. Godfrey is a spiritual counselor at the neighborhood Presbyterian, and he, too, is fascinated by history and neurobiology and reads voraciously about both.

In fact, Dexter and Godfrey have such a deep and meaningful time talking to each other over their back fence, they decide to knock out some planks and build a friendship gate.

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honing: necessary delusion

loungeact-front

If you ever come to the little town of Carmeline Creek on the far northern coast of California and do more than stop for gas, you will almost surely find your way to Mona’s, the only café/bakery in town. And if you happen to spend the night in one of the town’s several inns or at the charming Carmeline Creek Hotel, you will undoubtedly hear about honing. And should you be in town on the evening of a honing happening, we urge you to attend. Admission is free and you may leave at any time during the event. No one will mind.

What, you may ask, is honing?

In physical terms, honing is the ground floor of a stately old brick and wood building three doors down from Mona’s, most of that ground floor a large high-ceilinged room. Some honing happenings employ stages of various sizes constructed somewhere in the large room, while at other honing events a stage does not figure into the production. Lighting is an event-by-event adventure.

In terms of personnel, honing is a collective of seven principals—four women and three men—and an ever-growing number of associates. The principals are Elisha Montoya, 53, Paul Windsor, 60, Ephraim Spinoza, 73, Tivona Descartes, 69, Terence Duval, 47, Adaugo Duval, 41, and Florence Duval, 75. Paul Windsor is the only American-born member of the collective. Elisha was born in Ireland, Ephraim in Spain, Tivona in Morocco, Adaugo in Nigeria, Terence and Florence in England.

Philosophically speaking, the honing folks are ever reformulating their philosophical guidelines. The one guideline that has not changed since the collective came into being two years ago is: we meet at least once a week for supper with the intention of catching up with each other.

∆

On this warm summer night, honing is packed—fifty-six comfortable folding chairs arrayed in front of a small stage softly lit by three spotlights suspended from the high ceiling—two armchairs arrayed on the stage a few feet apart and facing the audience. Thirty-one locals and twenty-five out-of-town visitors are sitting in the folding chairs, ten locals and eight out-of-towners standing.

At 7:23, Elisha Montoya, a graceful woman with shoulder-length reddish brown hair, steps up onto the stage to polite applause. Wearing a pale blue dress and red sandals, Elisha gazes around at the many people looking at her and says, “Though this may evolve into something reminiscent of a play, we begin with Terence and Ephraim discussing necessary delusions, or as Ephraim prefers to say: the necessity of delusion.”

“Here we are,” says Ephraim Spinoza, stepping up onto the stage as Elisha steps down.

An imposing fellow with a mop of curly gray hair, Ephraim ponders the two armchairs for a moment and chooses the slightly larger one stage left.

Terence Duval, tall and broad-shouldered with short black hair, steps up onto the stage, settles into the armchair stage right, looks out at the audience and says, “A few weeks ago we had a spirited discussion about what motivates an artist to continue working on his or her creations when there is little or no support for that work from the greater world.”

“Or,” says Ephraim, “what empowers the artist to persist in creating a work of art that may take months or years to complete with no promise of any sort of external reward?”

“Paul suggested, and I agreed,” says Terence, nodding, “that most artists come to believe that the song or story or painting or play she is creating is important and valuable, not only to the artist, but to those who might hear the song or read the story or see the painting or watch the play. Without this belief, the artist will not continue?”

“I wonder if this belief embodies the difference between an artist and an artisan,” says Ephraim, pursing his lips. “Surely the potter doesn’t need to believe each bowl she makes is valuable and important. The process is important, surely, but not each individual artifact.”

“I think we digress too soon,” says Terence, his arching of an eyebrow eliciting laughter from the audience. “Let us finish elucidating our main thesis first.”

“Ah yes,” says Ephraim, nodding in agreement. “The necessary illusion.”

“Delusion,” says Terence, laughing.

“What’s the difference?” asks Ephraim, shrugging. “Illusion. Delusion. In either case, the artist is depending on an imagined truth to engender hope.”

“I don’t think so,” says Terence, shaking his head. “I think once we have poured hours of intention into a creation, that creation becomes our energetic equal, with a will and intention distinct from our own. And with even more work, the creation becomes our energetic master, which is when we come to fully believe our creation is endowed with special power. This is what I mean by the necessary delusion, a psychic momentum that enables the artist to keep going for however long it takes to finish the work.”

“Yet so many creations are never finished,” says Ephraim, sighing. “Is this because the delusion collapses?”

Terence gazes solemnly at Ephraim—the lights fading into darkness that reigns for a few minutes before the lights grow strong again.

Ephraim and Terence have been replaced by Tivona and Adaugo—Tivona sitting in the armchair stage left, Adaugo sitting in the armchair stage right. Tivona is wearing a brown suit, white shirt, and purple bowtie, and she has a glossy red rose in her short black hair. Adaugo is wearing a billowy white blouse and a long brown skirt, the many braids of her black hair strung with blue wooden beads.

Adaugo: I disagree with everything Terence and Ephraim said. When I make a song, I don’t think the song is more important or more valuable than anything else. A song wants to be born, that’s all. So it comes to me and says, “Hey you. Sing me. Sing me over and over again. Find my parts and put them together in different ways until you know how they go together. And then I will be born and I can live in the world.” I don’t think this is a delusion. I think this is how songs come into being.

Tivona: I agree with you. But I think if we are enmeshed in the egoistic notion that what we do is important to anyone but us, we require a belief system that supports the idea of a hierarchy of value. And it is from the womb of that hierarchic belief system that the idea of necessary delusions is born.

Adaugo: Oh I want everyone to be free from feeling that anyone is more important than anyone else.

fin

∆

Speaking of songs being born, my brand new album of songs Lounge Act In Heaven has just been released into the wild wild world and you can buy copies of the actual CD with neato artwork for just five dollars from my web site. Or you can download and stream the album from iTunes, CD Baby, Amazon, qobuz, YouTube, or any of your favorite music sites.

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honing: the quorum

quorom shining sea

On a cold rainy morning two days before New Year’s Eve, Elisha Montoya, a beautiful woman with reddish brown hair, stands behind the counter of Mona’s, the one and only bakery/café in Carmeline Creek—the café doing a brisk business.

Elisha is the manager of Mona’s and works here five days a week from six-thirty in the morning until two in the afternoon. Her husband, Paul Windsor, seven years older than Elisha, is sitting at his customary window table having breakfast with two of the newest residents of Carmeline Creek, Tivona Descartes, sixty-seven, and her husband Ephraim Spinoza, seventy-one, arrived from Zurich, Switzerland barely a month ago.

The four of them—Ephraim, Tivona, Paul, and Elisha—have become fast friends and are on the lookout for three other people to fulfill the imperative of a dream Ephraim and Tivona had while living in Zurich, a dream they interpreted as a directive to leave Switzerland and settle in Carmeline Creek.

In that life-changing dream Ephraim said to Tivona, “Our first visitor will be one of the seven,” and Tivona replied, “And you and I are two of the seven.” And Ephraim said, “Leaving four to find.”

As it happened, Paul was the first visitor to Tivona and Ephraim’s new digs in Carmeline Creek, and three weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Tivona identified Elisha as the fourth.

And since becoming the fourth member of Ephraim and Tivona’s dream collective, Elisha has been on high alert for the fifth, though how she will recognize the fifth is a mystery to her.

“I’ll have a large oatmeal cookie, a baguette, a bran muffin, and a large cup of coffee,” says Ira Weinstein, an owlish man with black-framed glasses, his order never varying in the seven years Elisha has been serving him. “To go.”

Elisha hands Ira his bag of goodies and says, “If you had said ‘For here’ I would have anointed you the fifth.”

“The fifth what?” asks Ira, handing her the never-varying twenty-dollar bill.

“The fifth of seven,” says Elisha, handing him four dollars in change, all of which Ira puts in the tip jar as per usual.

“Seven what?” he asks, frowning quizzically.

“People,” she says, nodding. “But you never say ‘for here’ because you only come here on your way to work. And who knows where you go on weekends.”

“You’re being kind of weird this morning,” says Ira, grinning at Elisha. “And actually… I like not being sure what someone means. Doesn’t happen to me very often. Not being sure.”

“Oh it happens to me all the time,” says Elisha, laughing. “But there’s a wonderful sort of freedom in not being sure.”

“I’m late,” says Ira, giggling, “but this has been fun.”

Elisha watches Ira go out into the rain, and a brief interlude of nothing much happening precedes three people entering the café together—a man and two women, the words swashbuckling, exotic, and regal popping into Elisha’s head.

The man is tall and broad-shouldered with olive skin and longish black hair, clean-shaven with an impressive jaw, his heavy blue coat beaded with raindrops. Forty-two guesses Elisha. Fearless.

The older of the two women is nearly as tall as the man, her skin alabaster, her silvery gray hair cut in a boyish bob, her coat gray. Seventy-two guesses Elisha. Mother of the man. Fearless, too.

The younger woman is African and very pregnant, her black hair in many braids strung with yellow wooden beads, her coat magenta. Thirty-seven guesses Elisha. The man’s wife. Goddess of hope and happiness.

“Welcome to Mona’s,” says Elisha, nodding graciously to the trio. “How may I help you this morning?”

“We are famished,” says the younger woman, her particular British accent suggesting her first language is Swahili. “Dreaming of eggs and sausage and hash browns.”

“Eggs and sausage we have,” says Elisha, smiling into the woman’s huge brown eyes. “Baby potatoes, not hash browns.”

“We are saved,” says the man, his accent purely British, his arms stretched heavenward. “We’ll have piles of eggs and sausage and toast and gallons of coffee and orange juice. And then we’ll wait a bit and have lunch. What a beautiful place you have. Smells divine.”

“Just two breakfasts,” says the older woman, her accent British, too. “No eggs and such for me. Just one of these gigantic pumpkin muffins, please, and endless coffee.”

Elisha taps the keys of the cash register and says, “That will be forty-two dollars. Please find a table and we’ll find you when your food is ready. Help yourselves to coffee.”

The table the trio finds just happens to be adjacent to the table where Paul and Ephraim and Tivona are nibbling scones and drinking strong black tea and discussing the exigencies of fate. Thus when Elisha serves the goddess of hope and happiness and her two companions their breakfast and asks, “What brings you to Carmeline Creek?” and the man smiles magnanimously and says, “We’ve come to complete the quorum,” Paul and Ephraim and Tivona freeze mid-nibbling.

“Which quorum might that be?” asks Elisha, arching an eyebrow and making eye contact with Paul.

“We never know,” says the older woman, sipping her coffee. “It’s something my husband used to say whenever we arrived anywhere new and were queried as you have queried us, and my dear son carries on the tradition. This coffee is divine, by the way, which I take as yet another good omen.”

Ephraim and Tivona and Paul hold their breaths, listening intently.

“We are pilgrims,” says the younger woman, holding her coffee mug with both hands as if it is a precious chalice. “Seeking a new world. With clean air and fertile soil and friendly neighbors and a good school for the child we’re about to bring into the world.”

“Forgive me for barging in,” says Paul, barging in, “but Carmeline Creek is blessed with excellent schools. Public, yes, but they might as well be Waldorf Montessori.”

“Please barge in,” says the man, turning to Paul and extending a hand. “I’m Terence Duval. This is my wife Adaugo and my mother Florence.”

“Paul Windsor,” says Paul, gripping Terence’s hand. “This is Ephraim Spinoza and his wife Tivona Descartes, and you’ve met my wife Elisha. Welcome to Carmeline Creek.”

“We were drawn here as if by a powerful magnet,” says Florence, looking from Ephraim to Tivona to Paul. “On our way to Canada, we thought.”

“But when we drove across the bridge,” says Adaugo, her eyes sparkling, “coming from the south, and we saw the river meeting the sea, the little town nestled on the headlands, we felt we were coming home.”

∆

At high noon on New Year’s Day, the seven gather on the beach at the mouth of Carmeline Creek, the sun playing peek-a-boo with ragged gray clouds.

They face the shining sea, standing shoulder to shoulder, no one speaking—the ocean roaring eloquent.

Now Adaugo begins to sing a lovely wordless song, and in the next moment Tivona begins to sing, too, harmonizing with Adaugo as they invent the melody together. Now Ephraim joins in, now Elisha, now Terence, now Florence, now Paul.

They sing for a long time and continue to sing as they traverse the beach and climb the stairs and walk through town to Ephraim and Tivona’s place called honing—a splendid feast awaiting them.

Fin

News Flash!

My brand new album of songs Lounge Act In Heaven is here at last and you can buy copies of the CD with all the marvelous artwork for just five dollars from my web site. Think Solstice/Xmas/Hanukkah gifts. Or you can download and stream the album from Apple Music, CD Baby, Amazon, qobuz, YouTube, or any of your favorite music sites. I’m very happy to be sharing this collection of twelve new songs and hope you’ll take a listen.

 

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honing: the fourth

beach dance

On Christmas day in Carmeline Creek, a small town on the far north coast of California, Elisha Montoya, fifty-one, and her husband Paul Windsor, fifty-eight, make their annual walk around the town giving gifts to their friends: sturdy hot pads Elisha crocheted, jars of home-made apple sauce, and copies of Paul’s new holiday short story Naughty and Nice.

This year’s walk is especially poignant for them because this is the first Christmas since they married seven years ago that Elisha’s children Conor and Alexandra are not with them, both living in Ireland now—Conor twenty-two, Alexandra nineteen.

Elisha, who is half-Irish and half-Spanish, misses her children more than she ever imagined she would, and Paul misses them, too, though his missing them is conflated with his concern for how deeply sad Elisha is about her kids living on the other side of the world; and he blames himself a little for their leaving because he knows they were emboldened to go by their mother having a loving husband.

∆

The last stop on their Christmas ramble is the home of Ephraim Spinoza and Tivona Descartes, very recent transplants from Switzerland.

“Come in, come in,” says Tivona, greeting Elisha and Paul on the front porch of the stately old brick and wood building she and Ephraim took possession of just three weeks ago. “Get warm by the fire.”

Tivona is sixty-seven, Moroccan, raised in France, her black hair cut short, her figure girlish, her eyes brilliantly blue. She leads Elisha and Paul through the empty downstairs space—a single large room with a very high ceiling—and up a long flight of stairs to a two-bedroom apartment where a fire is blazing in the living room hearth and Ephraim is in the kitchen cooking—Bill Evans playing on the stereo.

“Here you are,” says Ephraim, seventy-one, Spanish, with an impressive mop of gray curly hair. “I’ll open the wine.”

“Looks like you’ve lived here forever,” says Paul, gazing around the cheerful room.

“We found everything at the secondhand store,” says Tivona, taking their coats. “Now the only question is what to do with the big empty space downstairs.”

“Why do anything with it?” asks Elisha, joining Paul by the fire. “It’s lovely empty.”

“Did Paul tell you about our dream?” asks Tivona, hanging up their coats in the hall closet.

“Your quest for a magnificent seven?” says Elisha, arching an eyebrow. “He did.”

“We have not yet appended magnificent to the seven,” says Ephraim, laughing. “Or any adjective for that matter.”

“I think you are the fourth,” says Tivona, gazing at Elisha. “I love the way you think and speak.”

“I thought she was the fourth the first time we met her at Mona’s,” says Ephraim, nodding in agreement. “I was only waiting for you to think so, too.”

“Which only leaves three more to find,” says Tivona, going to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine.

“I smell garam masala and garlic and tomatos and onions,” says Elisha, standing beside Ephraim at the stove.

“A lentil stew,” says Ephraim, stirring the mélange in a large iron pot. “Inspired by the stew you served at Mona’s a few days ago. Was that your recipe?”

“My mother’s,” says Elisha, lifting the lid from a pot of jasmine rice. “Forgive me. My café habit. I’m terrible.”

“You are a great cook,” says Ephraim, speaking Spanish to her. “You may lift our lids whenever you desire.”

“Gracias,” says Elisha, Ephraim’s Spanish bringing tears to her eyes. “I don’t often hear Spanish as my mother spoke it.”

“The mother tongue,” says Ephraim, offering Elisha a taste of the stew. “They say there is nothing more profound to our senses than our mother’s voice.”

∆

During supper, in answer to Elisha’s question about where and when Tivona and Ephraim met, Tivona says, “Paris. I was thirty-seven, so… thirty years ago. I was a lecturer in Archaeology at the Sorbonne, Ephraim was a professor there in Spanish Literature. We met at a party given by a mutual friend. And we fell in love at first sight, only he had a wife and I had a husband, so…”

“So,” says Ephraim, taking up the tale, “we were in love but would not pursue each other because neither of us was inclined to adultery. We did occasionally have lunch together in a café near the university, but spoke only of academic things and never revealed our feelings for each other, at least not in words.”

“And then seven months after we first met,” says Tivona, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight, “I came home one evening and my husband Jerome told me he had fallen in love with someone else and wanted a divorce. I was quite surprised because I had no inkling he was having an affair. Fortunately we had no children and I was ready for a change, so I agreed, and then I asked him who he had fallen in love with and he said Margot Espinosa, Ephraim’s wife.”

“Yes,” says Ephraim, swirling his wine. “Margot was confessing to me at the very moment Jerome was telling Tivona.”

“So then how long was it before you got together?” asks Paul, who was married twice before he married Elisha, both marriages ending when he learned his wives were having affairs.

“A year,” says Ephraim, gazing fondly at Tivona. “Our lunch dates became more personal and less academic, but we both wanted to be completely free from our previous mates before we embarked on a relationship. We didn’t discuss this, but we knew this was what we both wanted.”

“Then finally we did get together,” says Tivona, her eyes full of tears, “and eleven months later our daughter Simone was born. Our only child. She lives in San Francisco now, which made our decision to move here much easier.”

“What does Simone do?” asks Paul, loving the romance of their story.

“She is a film editor,” says Ephraim, smiling as he thinks of their daughter.

“And a fine musician,” says Tivona, proudly. “She plays the guitar and sings.”

   ∆

“So you are one and two, Paul is three, and I am the fourth of the seven people your dream told you to find,” says Elisha, sitting with Paul on a small sofa facing the fire and enjoying after-supper tea. “What happens when you find the seventh?”

“We don’t know,” says Ephraim, sitting in a grand old armchair. “Maybe the mystery of what to do with the room downstairs will be solved when we find the seventh or the seventh find us, but maybe not. Meanwhile, we are trusting the dream and living the days as they come.”

“What if I said I don’t want to be one of your seven?” asks Elisha, speaking to Tivona who is sitting on a big pillow near the fire.

“I don’t think it matters,” says Tivona, shaking her head. “In the dream Ephraim says, ‘Our first visitor will be one of the seven,’ and I say, ‘And you and I are two of the seven.’ And he says, ‘Leaving four to find.’ But nothing is said about any of the seven belonging to us or belonging to a collective or that any of the seven is required to do anything or even acknowledge they are one of the seven. I think it must be more about recognizing them and their recognizing us.”

“For that matter, we don’t even know if the seven are all people.” Ephraim shrugs. “They might be the four of us and a dog and a cat and a beautiful parrot, like the parrot in our dream. So perhaps the purpose of finding the seven is a way to focus our awareness as we settle into our new lives here.”

“I feel the seven are people,” says Paul, sounding quite certain. “Though I realize the dream is yours and not mine.”

“Maybe it is your dream,” says Tivona, dancing into the kitchen.

“Maybe you will find the other three,” says Ephraim, following Tivona. “And now we are going to have a special sherry we brought all the way from Zurich.”

“A Christmas tradition,” says Tivona, clapping her hands four times. “A most delicious elixir.”

“How will we recognize the fifth, sixth, and seventh?” asks Elisha, lifting Paul’s hand to her lips.

“A certain je ne sais quoi,” says Paul, shivering as Elisha kisses the back of his hand.

“A delightful aliveness,” says Ephraim, pulling the cork from a tall green bottle.

“A pleasing complexity,” says Tivona, setting four small crystal goblets on the counter. “An ineffable sparkle.”

“I feel those things about so many people,” says Elisha, laughing.

“Then it shouldn’t take you long to find them,” says Ephraim, pouring the dark red sherry.

Fin

Breaking News! My brand new album of songs Lounge Act In Heaven has just come out. You can buy copies of the CD with all the marvelous artwork for just five dollars from my web site (think Solstice/Xmas/Hanukkah gifts), or you can download and stream the album from Apple Music, CD Baby, Amazon, qobuz, YouTube, or any of your favorite music sites. I’m very excited to be sharing this collection of twelve new songs. If you give them a listen and like what you hear, please tell your music-loving friends.