Monthly Archives: May 2010

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Echoes

Written by Contributor Martha Gale

Le wiped the counter as the last lunch customer left. He turned the radio from easy listening to the Vietnamese station and walked from table to table, straightening the baskets that held soy sauce, fish sauce, toothpicks and salt and pepper. That’s when he noticed the man sitting at the back of the restaurant. He’d come in early, ordered the lunch special and a pot of green tea. He looked familiar, but Le still found it hard to recognize customers. They all looked so alike.

“More tea, sir?”

The man pushed the pot across the table without looking up.

Le took the pot behind the counter and began to prepare fresh tea. While waiting for the water to boil, he took a good look at the man. He was big—like most American men. Clumsy in their bigness, they never seemed to know exactly where their limbs were. His skin was pale, chalky even, showing the blue shadows of veins underneath. He slumped over the table, the teacup in front of him. And those big, knotty hands. The man seemed intent on studying them, staring at his palms as if to read between their lines.

Strange, Le thought as he poured water over the leaves, he’d asked for green tea specifically. Americans usually ordered coffee with their meal. Le was good at making coffee: even before learning English he’d had to learn to flip burgers and make the watery coffee Americans liked. He was glad to be working now in a real Vietnamese restaurant. It had only been open a month, and business was good. By summer, Le figured, he’d have saved enough to propose to his girlfriend.

“Yow!” Le shrieked as the pot slid off the damp counter and landed with a crash on the floor, splattering hot water and tea leaves. He looked guiltily toward the kitchen door, but the cook must have been having his afternoon smoke on the back stoop. Then he heard a chair fall on the floor. Le looked over the counter and saw the man huddled under the table, his chair on its side in the aisle.

Le rushed over to the table and leaned over. “Alright, sir?”

The man looked up at him, his pale eyes showing too much white. With something between a grunt and a growl, he crouched against the wall, shielding his head with his arms.

“Sir?” Le wondered if he should get the cook. He’d been in this country longer and understood the sometimes bizarre behavior of the natives. But Le didn’t want the cook to see the mess on the floor.

The radio played a soft melody, a young woman singing a love song. Slowly the man got out from under the table, picked up the chair, and sat down, wiping his face with a napkin. His skin was bright red now, glistening with sweat.

“I’m very sorry, I dropped the teapot. I can make more,” Le started back behind the counter, relieved that whatever had just happened seemed to be over.

“No, don’t bother.” The man stood up and put on his leather jacket. He pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and placed it under the teacup. He headed for the door but stopped by the cash register. Looking directly at Le for the first time since coming into the restaurant, he asked, “Do you have kids?”

“Me? Oh, no. ” Le blushed slightly as he thought of his girlfriend, “I hope to some day.”

The man gazed down at Le, but his eyes seemed to focus on something far away. He nodded, “I hope so, too.”

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Empty Time

Here we are in Gällivare, awaiting the train from Narvik, Norway, just over the northwestern corner of Sweden. We need to get from Gällivare to Luleå by train, thence to Piteå by bus where we will stay at a traveler’s hostel for the night so we can, on Sunday, visit Eva’s son Max, a junior physician, who has a summer job in this remote lumber and paper mill town on Sweden’s northeast coast.

The sign showing scheduled departure and arrival times for trains through Gällivare tells us the 3:26 PM train is delayed because of problems on “the Norwegian side,” thus allowing us Swedes to absolve the railroad people on the Sweden side.

The pleasantly clear female voice from the overhead speakers informs us that we cannot reasonably expect the 3:26 P.M. train until arton, null, null, or 18.00 (6:00 PM).

I have finished reading the two books I brought for the overnight train trip from Stockholm to Saltoluokta Mountain Station where we stayed five days. Gällivare is the point of transition between train and bus, both ways.

I now have nothing to read except Swedish newspapers, but I am illiterate in Svenska. Eva has her daily Sudoku number puzzle, but this exercise in mental torture is not for me.

I have already taken a 20-minute walk around town and passed by almost all the stores and boutiques.

I have watched the others waiting inside and outside the station’s waiting room. I feel I have known them for a lifetime.

The waiting room is hot and muggy. It smells of stale humans and their detritus. The temporarily stranded passengers are moving, sitting, aimlessly moving again, dull-looking specks in slow Brownian motion.Despite the pesky mosquitoes I sit outside the train station, sheltered from the scattered rain showers by the overhanging roof. The sun on its shallowly slanting path glares at me through pauses in the gray and white clouds on the vast horizon. We are well above the Arctic Circle here.

The nearby low hills covering one-third of the view to my left are plain and uninteresting. The shifting mountains of cumulus clouds above the remainder of the horizon are too distant to dwell upon. They are there for the occasional glance when I need to rest my eyes from this writing.

I move to the unsheltered side of the station to avoid the relentless sun and sit on a damp bench facing the “Grand Hotel Lapland,” an unremarkable edifice of four stories. The area outside this part of the train station serves as a bus terminal for connections to northern regions.

Eva comes to me from the waiting room and tells me the train has been delayed yet another hour. We notice a bus leaving the area showing the  legend “Luleå-Kiruna.” We check the posted bus schedules outside the train station only to learn this was the last bus to Luleå today. We, and the others, had not thought to check the bus schedules as alternatives to the late train. The train company is silent on such matter

So we wait until at least 6:53 PM for the 3:28 PM train. It is now 4:53 PM, providing two hours, at least, to do… what?

I remain in writing mode, waiting for the next random impulse to translate itself through my fingers and this pen.

perhaps I will find
while waiting hours for the train
my buddha nature

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Regarding Belief, in the Realm of the Religious or Spiritual

I do not disbelieve in anything. To believe in anything is to shut out all the things that are not within the belief system. I have a notion that Jesus, the Buddha, and others, had glimpses of “The Great Everything” as I like to say. These two may have dwelt in that infinitude in some manner not available to most of us and saw the greatness of this “everything.” In any case, all these words and ideas and structures are man-made in his attempt to understand the mystery of it all.  Man is part of the everything and cannot stand outside of it, and outside of himself, to see it. It will always remain a mystery. I accept this mystery, and delight in whatever little glimpses of it I may occasionally have, typically while hiking alone.

I am not concerned about conversion by others who have approached me with this in mind because there is nothing to convert from. I live, mostly, in an open system with no philosophical boundaries. I have practical boundaries, however, for purposes of living with honor—within my own values—and effectively in the practical world.

It is one’s choice to be in a closed (defined) system or an open (evolving) one. There is no one system better than another, objectively (that is, from the standpoint of a disinterested observer, whoever she may be, and if she may be). Some people do not choose either way and merely drift, unconsciously—and who is to say this is not a Way, also? (G.I. Gurdjieff fought against this Way).

I think it fruitless, however, to try to apply rational thought and processes to a subject which is primarily of a non-rational (not irrational) nature. Belief and feeling are neither measurable nor manageable as things. Therefore, there is no disputing another’s beliefs.

Which brings to mind the question of the proper use of the verb ‘to believe’ and its derivatives: when is it acceptable for a scientist to use the verb ‘believe?’

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Careful

Leonard Thistlethwaite had carefully dressed in his dark suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, and dark gray wool overcoat for his regular Saturday morning walk. He opened the door of his ground floor apartment and extruded his head and shoulders slowly so as not to shock too much of his skin at once from the cool, early spring air. He swiveled his head right and left a few times to be certain there were no dangers lurking, although he had never yet encountered one in the 32 years he had lived in this quiet suburban neighborhood.

“Can’t be too careful,” he ritually thought to himself.

After this exercise was accomplished to his satisfaction, Leonard allowed the rest of his body to emerge from the doorway, slowly and deliberately. He always felt graceful doing this, as if in a slow ballet. Leonard loved the ballet, but it was getting so expensive to travel to the city, not to speak of the horrendous rise in the price of tickets, that he had long ago contented himself with childhood memories of attending the ballet with his family, and by viewing old video cassettes.

One worry here for Leonard was that VHS cassettes were obsolescent; he foresaw a terrifying decision: whether to buy a DVD player. He almost froze with fear when he considered this. Leonard was an intelligent man and followed the progress of technology in the periodical room of the public library. He was aware of the rapid advances in all technologies. He hesitated to put out a considerable amount of money in a machine that might not last long enough for the investment to pay off which, in Leonard’s mind, certainly approached the length of a human generation. But viewing the ballet was an integral part of his life and there were many performances on DVD he had not yet seen.

“Well,” he said to himself, “it’s a beautiful day and I don’t have to decide for a while, I hope.”

Making this welcome observation, for the weather was not always as predicted by the TV weather reporter, he widened his view of the day to note that the tall trees guarding his street were beginning to renew their leaves. This encouraged him to add, “it is such a beautiful morning, I might even allow myself an extra treat,” although he couldn’t think of what this might be—and it certainly wouldn’t cost any money.

Saturday was Leonard’s sacred day for self-indulgence and he did not want to spoil it with worries about the future. “Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” he remarked to himself as he did every Saturday upon his three-block journey to “Aunt Jerry’s Splendid Home-style Cooking and Café.”

This was the only day he did not cook his own breakfast; it was the only meal in any week he did not prepare for himself.

After locking and bolting his front door, Leonard began walking at a moderate pace and began the usual process of evaluating the state of the neighborhood. He often had nightmares that his neighbors would start neglecting their houses and apartments, or that they would sell out to lower-class people who would let things slide. “A man’s home is his greatest asset,” as he inevitably reminded himself on these weekly walks, “and it would be sinful if my property’s value was to diminish because of the carelessness of my neighbors.”

This thought had come and gone before, but there was nothing he could see today to exacerbate this nagging worry.

As he now approached Aunt Jerry’s, situated on the corner of the next block, he began the final ritual of his weekly jaunt before crossing this last street. He removed a coin purse from his front pocket to count his money. He certainly didn’t want to be embarrassed by inadvertently ordering more food than he had money for, including a modest tip. Leonard had gone through this process many times and had never had any unexpected results. He always knew exactly how much money he had on his person. He saved his coins from change during prior week’s transactions just for this Saturday breakfast, and he never carried an amount of money greater than he intended to spend for that day, or for this occasion.

He stood on the corner opposite the café and slowly counted the coins in his large coin purse, holding it high and close to his chest and eyes. He  counted automatically, without much conscious thought. He could count accurately in his dreams, and often did. But as he got the bottom of the purse, he suddenly became alert. The count was five cents off!

Leonard’s heart began to flutter a bit, but he told himself to calm down and count again with more attention. He did, and there was no mistaking it—there was nickel missing.

Leonard’s mind began to reel. He was becoming overdue to arrive at his regular time, and punctuality was something he prided himself on, but he needed to resolve the problem of the missing nickel before he sat at his regular table in the café.

After making uncoordinated movements both toward the various pockets and spaces in his clothing and toward the street he was about to cross, Leonard made an executive decision to cross the street now, feeling reasonably certain the missing nickel would appear somewhere on his person before he ordered his meal.

Leonard replaced the coin purse into his pants pocket and, with his head slightly askew in contemplation over the possible location of the missing nickel, he stepped off the curb. He was struck immediately dead by a white Honda SUV driven by Wendell “Stubby” Rinderknecht, a red-faced real estate agent who, at the moment of impact, was shouting at a cell phone he held outside the open driver’s window, at arm’s length in his left hand.

The officials at the accident scene were meticulous in collecting evidence for the coroner’s inquest. As he examined the deceased, Vern Reynolds did not see any significance in finding a nickel in the deep left cuff of the victim’s old-fashion suit pants, but he dutifully recorded this fact

“Too bad this old fellow wasn’t more careful,” thought Vern.