The sound of the storm and the sea receded, and as if in a dream, there I was in my own little bubble of light across the table again from Dr. Spinoza at the Macaroni Grill....
•••
Josh our waiter appeared. I ordered the vegetarian lasagna and a salad. Dr. Spinoza ordered the lasagna Bolognese, a salad with extra parmesan, iced tea, more bread, and for dessert, the ginger peach tort with a double dollop of vanilla ice cream. “And now,” he said while slathering butter across another slice of bread, “please tell me your story.”
That story suddenly felt ridiculous. I thought of throwing down money for lunch and running. “My mother,” I heard myself say, “died with no unfinished business and with such beauty that grief seemed irrelevant. But it was the light that...”
Josh brought our salads. I felt hot and exhausted. Dr. Spinoza dumped the extra parmesan on his bed of greens and dug in with his fork. “It was the light that...” he cued me.
“That changed me forever,” I said.
And the story of my mother’s death came pouring out:
“We brought her home from the hospital, already wasted by the cancer. Two days later, she began to deflate, like a balloon. Her breaths became shallow and less frequent. After my sisters and I said our goodbyes, my father put Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the stereo. As the Ode to Joy crescendoed, Mom twitched. There was a rattle. Then she went still and an etherial white light illuminated her body from within. I thought later I’d imagined this. But then, my father asked as if in doubt, ‘Did you see the light?’
“The day before the funeral, I had some time alone so slid a magazine of Beethoven CDs into Dad’s stereo then programmed in the “Pastoral” Symphony and sat back waiting for the stormy clatter of the winds and percussion to give way to the rainbow of strings. But just before the storm ended, the “Pastoral” clicked off and the “Moonlight Sonata” clicked on. I was annoyed and started to get up to address the malfunction when I was told by a silent and invisible force to sit down.
“I knew it was my mother because the room changed just as it always had when she walked in with her tea and sat down to talk, just as any space is changed by a life.
“What she had to say went beyond her usual blend of political rants and motherly wisdom. Speaking in sonata form, she said life for me was not to be the rainbow after the storm. Through notes trilling and flowing between the treble and bass, she told me I’d been called to a path I would find only by walking in the way lacking all resolution, a way that would find meaning only through the synthesis of anger and creativity. Losing my career merely freed me to write the book I’d been called to write. And there my mother sat in her chair, invisible and holding my weeping and lumbering soul in her arms. There was no doubt in that moment that this was my mother and this was the reading of her will.”
I paused for some response but Dr. Spinoza merely reached for another slice of bread. I wanted to rip it from his hand and fling the bread basket across the room. Here I was baring my soul, and here he was for what? A free lunch?
“I’d like to hear more about this book you’re to write,” he said.
I explained that my excommunication from the education system came eighteen months before Mom’s death and that for this entire time, I’d been trying to write a book to show what’s been missing from the last fifty years of education reform.”
“And what would that be?” Dr. Spinoza inquired.
“Since the fifties, the arts and humanities have been marginalized so that today in many schools, 30,000 years of what it means to be human has been reduced to an occasional elective.”
Dr. Spinoza raised his eyebrows in what appeared to be a momentary expression of approval.
“I was about to give up the cause but just couldn’t quit. But it’s been three years since I saw the light, and the book just keeps refusing to be written. Then, a month ago...” I stared down at my plate.
“A month ago?” Dr. Spinoza asked as he lifted a forkful of lasagna to his mouth.
“I woke up in the middle of the night from a sound sleep. And—,” I hesitated, “I know this sounds crazy—but there was a shadowy presence hovering over me. Like an Old Testament angel or something. I turned from it, too terrified to look. It communicated telepathically, telling me to quit feeling sorry for myself and get on with the book. My eyes were closed, and looking inward I saw the entire inside of my body turn into fiery orange light. When the presence was gone, I opened my eyes, and my hands were glowing.”
Dr. Spinoza had been eating steadily and with gusto but paused. “And you find all this disturbing,” he said.
“Well, yes,” I replied in a tone that drew Josh’s attention. “If someone told me this story, I’d tell them to get help. But I saw my hands. I did.”
“How do you feel about all this?” Dr. Spinoza asked.
“Kind of weirded out,” I said, “but also angry. I mean, if there is something out there, some bossy angel who wants this book written, why the hell doesn’t it just swing low in some sweet chariot and hand me the damned manuscript?”
Josh brought Dr. Spinoza’s ginger peach tort smothered in ice cream a doggy box for my lasagna.
Dr. Spinoza picked up his fork. “The way I see it,” he said, “you’ve followed these experiences so far down the mystical path that it’s become a quest from which there’s no turning back.” And then he drifted into a faraway look. “I often wished I’d gone in that direction.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “Maybe I was afraid I was choosing it instead of being chosen by it.” He scooped a goop of tort and ice cream. “Maybe I was just afraid.”
Well, wasn’t that just dandy—I was feeding the food fetish of a shrink who was now sending me off where he feared to tread.
Josh laid the check between us.
Before picking it up, I wanted something concrete. Anything.
“So you don’t think I’m crazy?” I asked.
Dr. Spinoza folded his napkin on the table.
“Have you read the Book of Jonah?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well,” he suggested, “you might take another look at it.” And with that, he glanced at his watch, and I picked up the check.
•••
It was several months after my conversation with Dr. Spinoza that the pink monkey appeared and I’d had this idea of following the sound of the sea to the sea itself. And for what?
Next: Jonah in Oceanside
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