I was feeling like just staying on the couch, Saturday, the last day of my weekend.  My eyes were puffy, itching, my sinuses were feeling the reaction the tree pollen.  I had my mom on the phone.  "Ted, these people like you, and they care for you."  Yeah.  "Go see them.  Put on a jacket and go."

And I was glad I did.  My old friend Monika's pad, there on Montrose Walk.   The vibe of a Berlin art gallery, perfectly clean, dimly lit.  Large modernist painting, Deibenkorn and Rothko came to my mind.  A Bang and Olufsen CD player...

After everyone else had gone, the fancy real estate woman, Jake the photographer, the last people, I sat down with Monika, after we walked around her condominium, examining the expression of a hanging bamboo segment shower hung form the ceiling in the back room, overlooking the garden, Harry's piece of art on his old desk, a piece of a particle accelerator, blue, metallic pipe, half, opened, and a picture then of Monika's mother, a framed photograph, from Berlin, their lives, 1940 or so, a painting of her brother, as a boy, who was gunned down in the Ukraine during the war, at age 18...  We sat and talked, catching up, there in the front room on a black leather couch, Harry's chair opposite.

Ted, you're such a part of the community.  You don't know how much you mean to people.

Eh, I can never tell, if they want to get rid of me...

No, Ted.  They wouldn't want to do that.

But she knows my finances, and why I do it, because I'm a writer.  She's one of the truly rare people who really get that people need to make art.

The clock passes, now nearing ten.  Do I have enough wine at back in the apartment.  I have another mini-quiche. Some grapes.  Some lightly candied cashews.  I break down and have one of the crescent shaped powdered light almost flaky butter cookies, made originally to celebrate the Ottomans being pushed from Vienna.  I have some more California Mumm, I have some of the fancy real estate woman's California Cabernet.  Yeah.  I'm not even sure which glass is really mine anymore, but it is great to catch up, after my efforts to politely converse with strangers at a party, all of it enjoyable.  Obviously all the neighbors have got it figured out.  Law firms.  International lives.

But, misery hits these lives of neighbors too.   The architect, a father, going blind.  A nice young man who worked at the World Bank, from near Lake Como originally...  I believe I met him, a handsome friendly man with a beautiful young brunette wife, just after he had returned from Vietnam with a good case of food poisoning, such that he could not have any wine.  The neighbors heard his pain as he died.


Tragedy strikes.  Monika smiles plaintively in her empathetic way.   Oh, Ted, can you imagine...

In Japan, the elderly go up in the mountains.  We talk a little bit of what it might be like, to go that way.  Some people just stop eating, she tells me.  Their body gives up the will to live.  Three weeks, they are gone, but it must be so hard on the people around them.  Yes, as you near freezing to death, you feel warm at the end...    Harry, his heart gave out.

She tells me about her relationship with his children.

Her dear friend, Crystal, a doctor back from Berlin is not so much worried about the new Corona Virus, but of the rise of the right, the hatred of foreigners coming in...

Earlier we had looked at a bookshelf of hers.  I noted the D.T. Suzuki.  There was a little book by a German philosopher, and she had read it for classes during her school days.  About the Zen of Japanese archery.  Simply concentrate on the target, and the arrow will hit its mark.   Yes, what to focus on...  I wish it worked that way with co-eds, with the Princesses of college days, and it would have, had altruism been put aside, replaced by simple open-eyed focus.

Oddly enough, earlier in the day, thinking of making my great rebellion, after napping on the couch and falling into dreams with women from the past in them, dreams of uneasiness, failings, I'd picked up the little paperback which I'd enjoyed back in January cold, Thomas Merton's The Silent Life, which had since grown impenetrable.  Attempts had been made to open up the thing, but it wasn't easy, a desert, brambles, and I didn't see the monastery nor Jesus on his own retreat as I tried to read with my mind wafting like smoke through various topics, food, finances, how much wine, health, the possibility of becoming energetic enough to start exercising again...  I hadn't even written anything, not in weeks, nothing, on top of a long what seemed to me a dry spell, adrift...

And Father Merton of how, in true reality, it can only be the will of The Heavenly Father coming through me, of the One who sent me...  And this always being my own problem, as if indeed something had made me predisposed to find it very difficult to have enough of a will to impose upon other people with my own wants and desires.  As if everything good should happen naturally.

And there I was, getting dressed--I'd already showered and shaved the night before, who cares--with some comparably decent clothing with a tweed Harris jacket over a purple checked shirt and light grey sweater... getting ready for the five o'clock afternoon bus in to town, where I would get off at Wisconsin Avenue, then walk up the hill, with my old surplus trench coat on.


Monika insisted, we take her VW Bug to drop me off.  I'll drive there, then she will be able to drive herself back.  Back at the apartment now, I don't know if I'm hungry or not, but it might be worth it, to get some Chinese carry out now at 11 PM, inexpensive, can't hurt, just more money spent.

I have a sip of wine and wait for the delivery man.



I wake up in the middle of the night, as I clock it.  4 AM.  Anxious.  Wide awake.

The apartment is small.  It's not a long walk from the creaky bedroom through the living room into the kitchen.  Dishes from the previous night beef stew with plenty of onion, almost as an onion soup still in the RubberMade little  tub.  I get the hot water going, and with some reluctance pour out some wine from a large liter and a half bottle, Italian, 12 percent, not bad chilled and then poured on the rocks.  Getting the tedious dishes done, and cleaning the top of the stove, the brain gets the small signal of some sense of accomplishment, the good effect of getting out of the house lingering.

I remember Father Merton again.  Calmer now.  Yes.  There is truth there.   Even as I am awake, turning the galley kitten's overhead light off, lighting a candle.  Dostoevsky hated electric lights;  they made him nervous.  Candle light, indeed, much better and soothing.


And then I can say to myself, well, we only write to put down our quest for the things that are practical, that keep us up and running, the things that make sense to us, that have the effect of easing the ticking heart...

Father Thomas Merton the great writer is correct.  We ourselves do not necessarily know on our own what is selfish and what is not, wha is the will and the tasks of the selfless realization of a longer deeper more far reaching will than the kind we feel exposed to.  Yes, this and that would have been great, an honorable life well-led, but...  It is a will beyond, when things go right, the only way they can finally go right.

As a writer, sure, of course, you are going to learn a lot about will.  The self will try, attempting to write, and will largely get nowhere, but for a few exercises, staring at the open blank space of the page, mirror of the blank space of the mind where any thought is quite too elusive to capture with the will, such that you can only bring back sad words, lonesome words.   And sometimes it will seem that  those written thoughts which come from following the greater will are empty, void of anything significant and interesting to the any other human being.  But then, you wonder again, and the longer view comes into focus again.

You make some unlikely friends in this world, if you let things happen.