A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

You looked out the window of the residence where you were staying. Dinner would not be served for an hour, and you saw the trees you thought were at least a mile away. Someone said the town’s burial grounds were out of town, and you took that to mean they were far out of town. To kill some time, you decided to walk there by yourself. You were curious about what it would be like to stand in the middle of nowhere and everywhere all at once. You had stared at the prairie during the previous days as the sun was setting and the evening gatherings were not yet ready to take place.

  The silence intrigued you. So, did the space. It reminded you of being at sea, especially at night as you were driven from the airport to the college, and the lights on the horizon reminded you of passing ships in the night. You had seen the beautiful seabirds, the plovers and sandpipers, that hover over the stalks of wheat, especially after a mid-afternoon thunderstorm when the air is heavy, and hot, and you can hardly draw a breath.

  When you reached the graveyard to visit the resting place of the founder of the small college, you were surprised the burial grounds had only been a two-minute walk from the dormitory. The trees had seemed much larger from far away. They were as tall as you. You heard crickets in the dry grass around the headstones. You paused for a moment at the resting place of the man who had founded the college, and you bent down and picked a piece of wild sage from the ground, held it to your nostril to inhale its incense of herb and sky, and placed it on his headstone. You felt a tremendous sense of peace as you stood there, but also a sense of loneliness, as if someone was standing beside you the whole time and followed you back to the town. You had the better part of an hour on your hands so you decided to explore the town. That is when you saw your first questioner. It was you who asked the questions then, wasn’t it?

  You’d met the man in the open collared white shirt during a Scrabble game the night before. He was a master of words. Even as you sat there with spare letters in your hand, you knew, as you looked at him, that he had something to teach you. When you saw him on the dusty side street, as devils in the hot afternoon wind danced around your ankles, you made a choice, a choice that would lead you to the moment of questions in search of a new name.

  You walked up to the man in the open-collar shirt and asked him what you had to learn in order to be given your new name.

  “You are considering this seriously?” he asked you.

  “Yes.” That is what brought you here, isn’t it?

  Are you ready for more questions now, more questions than you can possibly answer? Did you know that you have entered into a process of questions? It is not a game. It is not merely a matter of spelling something out. You will have to find answers. Perhaps another day. Go home. Think about it. Give your brain time to set the matter in order. You have a great deal to learn.

  You thought about it for many months.

  Did you notice during those months how life changed for you?

  Can you remember the particulars of those changes?

  Why have you decided that this moment, the early autumn afternoon, is the time when you will try to give your first answer?

  You might be afraid that any answers you give are insufficient. That is a good sign. If you knew all the answers, there would be no reason to ask any questions.

  You will return the following week to the office with the hard oak chair, the roll-top desk, and the leaded window. It will be raining the next time you arrive, and you balance your umbrella beside the coat stand, and sit down opposite your questioner in the hard, oak chair.

  Do you believe there is an order to the world? he will ask you.

  You will pause for a moment to consider.

  In some ways, the world is a disordered place. The world is full of bad news. You have heard stories of suffering and despair on a daily basis because that is what informs you. But there is something else that informs you. Something you want to talk about but cannot know for sure. You might feel it deep inside you, but you do not know how to give it words.

  If you answer yes, you will be asked if you believe there is a heart and a mind behind that order. Is there?

  He is not talking about a heart and mind of flesh, but of something else. You could answer yes, but you might want to qualify the answer with an element of certainty. That is fine. Uncertainty is what the questions are leading to. If you are certain, you might be taken for a fool. If you are too certain, you might be mistaken for someone who has not asked enough questions of himself. If you are uncertain — and how uncertain are you? — what creates that uncertainty?

  Your questioner will realize that you are caught between knowing and not-knowing. That is a good thing. He will ask you, if you cannot be certain, if you are able to take something on belief?

  Can you merely believe something or do you always have to know something? What is the difference?

  Are you able to believe?

  If so, what do you believe?

  You believe many things. The world has constantly changed for you, and it is hard to believe just one thing. You might remember the day when you felt very alone. You asked yourself this same question. You tell him you have been through a kind of living hell. You felt dead inside. In retrospect, you realize what you felt is different from the death inside you confronted when you stepped into the small dark box.

  There are many kinds of death. Some are good, some are bad. Irreversible death is the one where you do not ask questions of yourself. You must try to remember this. Someone may ask you this on the day of your physical death, and you must prepare yourself to make an answer.

  You had just left a bad job. Your former employer had been abusive to you. She had kicked you under the desk. She had said things such as: “You are not man enough to do this job.” You had been demeaned and ridiculed in front of your fellow employees. She had constantly threatened to fire you. You were “worthless,” she said in front of everyone.

  One night you lashed out at her. You argued. You told her you weren’t going to take it anymore. The snow was falling as you picked up your rolodex and walked into the night. The sidewalks were filling up with snow. The office buildings were empty, and the windows were darkened. The streetlamps lit up the sky with a yellow glow and every flake that fell was not white but the colour of fear. You had struggled to find a solution to a problem that could not be solved. Your boss had bared her lower teeth at you in anger because you could not solve the problem. Her anger reminded you of the ferocity of winter.

  You had a dream one night. You thought, at first, it was a nightmare. You were in Hell — or were you merely back in your office? There was a mathematical equation written on a dark, grey stone wall. You were told that everything depended on whether you could solve the problem. You would have perished in that dream. Dreams can kill a person. That is when something spoke to you in the dream.

  What was it the voice said? Can you remember? Yes, you can. You know what the voice said. The voice said: “Do not attempt to answer the question. The question is Hell. The process of solving the question is Purgatory.” That is when you woke. Your heart was pounding. Your wife was asleep beside you. You felt as if you were alone and abandoned in a dark place. Is that the same place you will find in yourself when you enter that small dark box? Think of this when you are in there, when you are alone with yourself and seeking the answers to the questions the voice will ask you.

  Hell is the question. Purgatory is the process of finding the solution. What is the answer to the question on the wall? Figure it out. It isn’t hard. You know the answer. It will come to you. It will be the first breath of wind in your sails as you embark on your journey. The answer contains the destination of the voyage you will undertake when you have a new name. You did not solve the problem. You refused. The question was just a decoy. You knew the answer. You accepted the answer because it was the only possible solution.

  When did the solution come to you? Was it one night when you were still working late into the next day? A light in an office of a building directly opposi
te yours was burning late. It was two a.m. You were bent over a column of figures that would not add up. Your computer froze as if it had touched the pattern of frost on the window. The fluorescent light above your head was buzzing and you hadn’t heard it until that moment when you felt so alone. You screamed to yourself, calling out a name that you thought might come to your assistance. The light buzzed as if it was blotting out every sound. You looked across the way. A woman was working at her desk. You stared at her as if to say: “You, too?” When she noticed you staring at her, she shut her blinds.

  You were alone. You felt as if you had been reduced to nothing.

  But there was something, there, wasn’t there? It was the same presence you felt when you walked out to the graveyard outside that prairie town and realized that death, that end you had always felt was so far away, so remote, was closer than you could have imagined. You wanted something inside you to live forever, something that had always been a part of you even though you couldn’t name it. You wanted something of what you were, and are, and will be, to remain always.

  You tried to explain this to the man seated opposite you in the office while the autumn rain fell outside the window and the bright leaves of the maple tree spiralled to the ground. He nodded. Does he understand what you are saying, or are you merely babbling? He will tell you that you were in a bad situation, but that there is good in the world if you are prepared to open yourself to it.

  Are you willing to admit that good is stronger than evil?

  Do you love others as much as you love yourself? he will ask. Do you love others more than you love yourself?

  You went home after the final shouting match with your boss. The snow fell and your life came apart. You knew that if you went back to work the next day you would be fired, that you would be reduced to nothing from who you were. You knew that others around you would also be fired — your secretary, your assistants, and your associates. Their lives, not just yours, depended on you finding the answer to the question that had been written on the wall of Hell.

  You knew that everything you had accomplished, everything you had fought for and tried to do, everything that you thought was good, would lie in ruins around your feet if you went back into the hell of your office. If you went back, their lives would be ruined. If you stayed away, they might have a chance to redeem themselves, to be transferred to do something else. Their lives would not come apart.

  You went home. Your wife and child were waiting for you. They were smiling. They were glad you had gotten out of a bad situation.

  Did you know where you would go from there?

  Did you know that an entire journey might unfold if you asked yourself what you really believed?

  So, what do you really believe?

  What are the things you hold most dear?

  The man in the chair asks you more questions. That is his job.

  Are you ready to explain what you carry with you, what you keep close to your heart, what you know?

  Are you aware that all those things that are intangible cannot be taken from you?

  Are you aware that your true value has no weight, no commercial worth, and no marketable exchange?

  You tell the man in the chair about the silence. You sat one morning, quietly, in the house you feared you would lose because you no longer had a job and a paycheque. You only had what you carried inside you. And you asked yourself the question that is before you now. It is the question that set you on the process of finding your new name, of becoming your new self. You asked yourself: “What do I believe?” So, what do you believe?

  You will realize the importance of that first question. It always has to be: “What do you believe?” You will find it on the opening page of the book the man seated opposite gives you. The book is long. There is so much to believe. You flip through it. Is belief an unsolvable question you will ask as you turn the pages? There is too much to believe. Far too much.

  You scan the pages as you ride the subway home. You see how the book tries to explain the relationship between you and the universe. You are very small. The universe is very large. You realize just how easy it is to lose yourself in the great state of things. “You must understand,” the man seated opposite you said as you put on your coat and picked up your umbrella, “that you save yourself by losing yourself.”

  If you say, “so be it,” you are on your way. The process will be easy. You will find yourself waiting at the end of it.

  Winter was a season of questions. You struggled with every answer. The man seated opposite you each week could not stop asking you questions. It was his job. He cares about the answers. He asks you more questions every time you answer. Eventually, you reached a point where the questions become redundant. There is only so much a person can know. There are limits. If he says you are ready, then you will proceed with him to the naming place.

  You will enter the place of naming on a warm, spring afternoon. The blossoms will be opening in the garden. Lilacs. Forsythia. Hyacinths. There will be a perfume in the air. You will feel as if you have passed through death: the death of the world; the death you met within yourself in the small dark box where the voice asked you questions; the death of your old self. You will know that something has changed. You will breathe in a new way and you will not even notice it.

  Your friends will say you are crazy for having sought a new name, that naming and renaming is old-fashioned, if not dangerous, and that a person doesn’t need a name at all to live. You pay them no heed. Those who love you and support you will be there. They will have their doubts about what you are doing. They may whisper: “This is not right.” But they will stand beside you as you as you take your new name and put on a new set of clothes. They are the clothes of a traveler. You will leave the place of naming. The sun will be warm on your face. You will have a sense that you know the way now, though no one will tell you how the journey will unfold or where it will take you. You will think of this day for the rest of your life because it brings a burden of uncertainty. You really don’t know the way ahead. Take it one day at a time.

  The man who was seated opposite you all winter will ask what name you have chosen. He will ask you what you believe.

  Do you believe?

  If you say yes, not merely to what you believe but that you have decided on a new name, he will bless you and call you by that name. You will have to choose your name carefully because it is not merely a name, but a purpose you undertake, a course you determine to sail.

  If you say yes, you will find your way. Your new name is not merely who you are, but what you will become.

  As you leave the naming place and step outside into the afternoon light, your eyes will take time to adjust. After a few minutes as your sight grows used to the change, everything will take on a different appearance. You will see where the path begins.

  Elsie

  Sealtest trucks were yellow and blue. Neilson trucks were red and white, and had a soldier made of circles and triangles painted next to the company name. His favourite, however, was the Borden truck. Borden’s milk arrived in a white and yellow truck, and bore not only the name of the dairy but the image of Elsie. Elsie was a cow. Her smiling head poked through a wreath of yellow daisies with brown-eyed centres, and her silver-grey bell hung over the edge of the flowers.

  Each day the milk trucks would roll up and down the street in front of Mervin’s house. The milkmen in their blue or grey uniforms, bow ties, and peaked caps, always moved with a military precision up and down the driveways and front steps. They carried wire baskets that contained six bottles of milk, and sometimes they had small boxes of butter tucked under their arms. The Borden man always stopped on the porch and peered into Mervin’s play pen. Mervin’s mother parked him outside during the warmer months so he would grow strong in the fresh air. The Borden man always smiled, winked, and said: “Hi ya guy.” Mervin looked forward to the Borden man. Mervin also looked forward to when his father came home at night, but instead of stopping to say hello to him
, his father would brush by, face greasy with exhaustion, his clothes smelling of cigarette smoke, and say nothing. The Borden man was much nicer.

  The supposition that ran through Mervin’s mind was that each dairy had its own flavour of milk. His mother had screwed up her face when she mentioned Sealtest. “I don’t like the taste of their milk,” she had said as she shook her head.

  The glass bottles had tin-foil caps, and round cardboard stoppers beneath the foil hats that Mervin played with when his mother opened a new quart. The bottles jingled with every step the milkmen took.

  Mervin noticed that the neighbours were getting brown milk for their brood of boys who were always screaming and fighting in their front yard.

  “Brown milk comes from brown cows,” Mervin’s mother said, and he took her word for it. “We drink white milk because it is healthier. And besides, brown milk makes those boys next door run wild.”

  The milkmen, themselves, were all different as well. The Sealtest man was short and dark-haired. His bow tie was always askance. He was round-shaped, and his face was sweaty. The Neilson’s man wore some medals on his chest and was old. He had been a soldier in a war more than forty years before, and Mervin’s mother remarked: “Poor guy, he’s getting on.”

  Mervin called to the Neilson’s man “hey poor guy,” but that milkman never responded to his calls.

  The Borden man was tall, and red-haired, thin, with black and gold frame glasses perched on his nose. He had a spring in his step. By noon of every morning when it was time for Mervin to come in and have his lunch and his nap, the parade of milkmen would have come and gone, leaving their jangling white and brown bottles on people’s steps, or in boxes set into the walls at the side of each house. On hot days Mervin would catch the smell of something sour and unpleasant from the trucks, mostly the Sealtest truck. He imagined their milk tasted the way it smelled.

  During the first summer Mervin remembered, his mother took him to the Exhibition. The swan rides were for girls. He watched the girls clamber aboard the large, hollow birds and announce to everyone that they were princesses. Mervin drove a shiny the blue car that went round and round the track, and made a beeping sound when he pressed the centre of the steering wheel. The girls in the swan looked over their shoulder and stuck out their tongues at him every time he beeped his horn.