Talking Taxicab Therapy

It’s happened again. The curse of people with my day job struck at 9.36 this morning, when I was riding in the perfumed back seat of a minicab on my way to work.

Being a minister and being found out carries all sorts of risks.  I have had to change barbers and cab drivers. There is a certain stationery shop I can’t go into any more because the sweet woman who runs it wants to talk about her dead father’s soul. The fact that I don’t know where her father is, or what he’s doing, makes no difference.

Today I had travelled no further than the end of the street when the driver said, “Oh my God, Father—what am I going to do?”

I studied the back of the man’s head. I had no memory of having seen him before, but he spoke to me as if we were intimates. The trip to Crystal Palace takes about ten minutes.  I looked at my watch. Nine minutes to go.

“Sorry?” I said.

His girlfriend is drinking and earning £100,000 a year.  She’s a Hindu and he’s a Muslim.  She’s on anti-depressants.  She left him six years ago and married a Christian, then came back. She won’t take his calls, but turns up sobbing at his flat after midnight. Their sex life is great. He’s thirty years older than she is. He’s in hell. Plus, his voice is rising.

“That sounds painful,” I said. Four minutes to Crystal Palace.

“You have no idea.” Strangled sobs.  I made sure my seat belt was secure.

At two minutes till touchdown, I tried, “Why not leave her?”

“Because she’s so helpless.”

We pulled over near my office. I opened the door.  “Well, be strong,” I offered.

“That’s it!  Oh my God, Father, you’re right!  I must be strong.” He turned to face me, tears of gratitude coalescing in his lower lids. “I just knew you’d have the answer.”

One foot on the curb. “Eight pounds,” he said.

I should have said, “No charge, friend.  It’s on the house.”

But I didn’t.  It’s my job, right?

Catching Alligators

Where I grew up in Florida, there were real, live alligators.

          You didn’t see them all that often, but we knew they were there.  Sometimes, while out fishing, you could catch a glimpse of those two little bumps gators have over their eyes, and maybe the swish of a large tail if you rowed too close.  You could hear them at night in the rural areas, making croaking songs of love for each other.

          One summer I was in a YMCA camp about forty miles from home.  I was eleven: too young to be brave about snakes and alligators and too old to admit it. There were gators in an area of swamp that we were technically forbidden to visit. But of course we did.  One boy had a near brush with one of the mainly somnolent big reptiles.  So that evening, Mr Parker came to our cabin.

          Mr Parker was the camp director. He was incredibly old—maybe fifty. We all liked him because he had a pet monkey that he would let us play with sometimes.  He sat on someone’s footlocker and talked to us about alligators. He started by asking if we were scared of them. A few hands crept upward. He stared silently at us until every boy had his hand in the air.

          “OK, boys,” he said. “I’m going to teach you how to catch an alligator. All you need is three items of equipment: a telescope, a matchbox and a pair of eyebrow tweezers.”

          The idea was that when you saw a gator, you were to turn the telescope around, making the beast look small.  Then you’d pick him up with the tweezers and put him in the matchbox before you could say, “Yippi-ky-ay-yippie!”

          We laughed politely, not wanting to forfeit monkey privileges.  We were wise enough to know that this was another one of those stories that grownups thought were good moral lessons for children.  This one about everything depending upon your point of view was OK, but not great.  We didn’t know what a metaphor was.  And, of course, we didn’t believe a word of it.

          I do now.

Guy Looks

          One of the reasons for having a blog of your own is that you can say what you like without having to run and hide. You anonymous readers do not know where I live, so I can get away with lots of stuff. That’s why today I’ve decided to debunk some myths about the superiority of women.

          You know that line about how men can’t multi-task, but women can? Let me sweep that aside straight away.  I CAN multi-task.  In fact, at this very moment, as I write, I am practising the ancient Japanese art of origami with my bare feet under the desk.

          Well, actually I’m not. But I’m pretty sure that if I applied myself, I could turn out plenty of paper swans and seabirds, and toe-flick them nonchalantly onto the carpet while disgorging reams of deathless prose into cyber-space.

There is one little problem for us men, however. It is sometimes referred to as the “guy look”. That’s when we men can’t seem to find things in the house, even though they are perfectly evident to our spouses. Like this:

“Darling, where have you put the new jar of mayonnaise?”

“It’s in the cupboard over the fridge.”

“No, it isn’t.” (said patiently)

“It’s right in front of your eyes.”

“No, it’s not.” (less patiently)

 

Deep sigh, heard all the way from the living room. She arrives, striding self-righteously, and picks up the jar of mayonnaise from beneath his eyes. Arched eyebrows form a look of triumph.

“Well, they’ve changed the jar.  The top used to be red, not blue.”

I have identified the problem. You may use the solution freely. We men do not so much look at things as scan them. We have a mental image of what a jar of mayonnaise looks like, and we discard all other objects as irrelevant.  This was probably useful when we were hunter-gatherers, looking for a juicy buffalo for dinner. When hunting like that, we probably wouldn’t have noticed a Volkswagen if it rolled past us on the steppes.

So let her find the mayonnaise.  We’ll get the buffaloes on the table.

How to Speak a Foreign Language

I just saw the statistics on this little blog of mine.  There’s a page that shows you a map of the world and highlights countries where you are being read.  And guess what.  I’ve got a viewer in Russia!

I wish I knew how to say “thank you” in Russian.  In fact, I wish I was a better linguist generally. I once studied Hindi for a few weeks in India. I can still count to five, and I think I remember that the taped course told me how to say, “Waiter, please take your finger out of my wine glass.”

I can find a toilet in France and ask the price of things in a whole lot of countries. But it’s dangerous to speak a little bit of another language.  I have a friend named Phred, who once told a group of Spanish peasant women that he had recently experienced an orgasm.  He was trying to say that he was tired.

I used to speak Swahili.  That’s a fact, though you wouldn’t believe it now. When I lived in Kenya it was essential, but it’s not all that useful in London. So, ni me sahao yote (I’ve forgotten it all). I do still speak Spanish. I learned to do that in a village in the mountains of The Dominican Republic where no one spoke a word of English.  The method was simple: learn or starve.  I recommend it.

When I first got there I was asked to say a few words to an assembled group of local farmers.  I went into a room with maybe a hundred hard-faced peasants, sitting with their hats in their laps. I had stayed up the night before, employing the “word for word” method.  It works like this: you take an English word and look up its equivalent in Spanish. Never mind grammar, syntax, colloquialisms and all that.  Put a big smile on your face and go for it.

I still marvel at the hospitality of those people, who sat without a twitch or a murmur or a guffaw, as I said, “Ladies and horses, I am very pregnant today.”

Trout Tickling

Have you ever tickled a trout? I have tried, but I’ve never caught one. Here’s how you do it. Lie on a flat stone in a trout stream and dangle your arms in the water. Try not to wriggle around, even though it’s probably cold, and don’t disturb the bottom if you can help it. At first, the water will be hard to see through. That’s because of all the reflected light on the surface, but after a while your eyes will adjust and you’ll be able to see quite clearly.

          The next part is tricky, because it involves a process of—to steal a phrase from the Buddhists—unlearning. All your life you have been learning to search for things, to maintain your vision in a state of tight focus. To tickle a trout you need to relax your eyes, let the emphasis on focus gently become a process of gazing, as you do when you let your eyes rest on the far distance. At first you won’t see anything much, but then, you’re not peering; you’re trying to see without effort. After a few moments, the landscape at the bottom of the stream will start to appear more clearly. Resist the urge to focus; just relax and wait.

          You will suddenly see a trout. The fish will be quite visible, but before that you will have seen nothing of it. Then others: you will note that dark-topped fish hug the shadows and hover above dark stones; light-hued fish will seek the bright sands. This is their strategy for hunting and for protection, a subtle camouflage that works on prey as well as predators. If you have been still, sooner or later a trout will actually nudge your hand, and if you are quick, you’ll have him. Just like that.

          Is this a metaphor, maybe about science and faith?

          You bet.

Culture and Coiffure

We were living in northern Kenya, at in a place called Arjiju, 14 km from the nearest outpost, in a house meant for the teacher of a school that was never built. Around us were the nkangs, or stockades, of Maasai families, and very little else.

It took months before we had the first approach from our neighbours. We could see small troops of warriors skirting the roads to avoid being seen by government police.  They sometimes carried assegai, spears, and this meant instant arrest.

           As we gradually got to know the people around us, one character stood out. His name was Desi. He was physically intimidating and very dangerous looking. I knew that Desi had been in and out of jail for such things as fighting, causing pregnancies among the wrong tribal groups, and escape, but his main crime was rustling the expensive sheep of the white ranchers who had all the good land enclosed behind fences.

One day I glimpsed him across the road, inside the rancher’s fence. He cornered a long-haired sheep and darted forward, catching it by two legs and heaving it over his shoulders.  He climbed the fence with the animal and set it down in the road.  I noticed that he seemed to be glancing in my direction.  I waved, but he ignored me.

           He shooed the sheep into a run, and when it was about fifty feet away, hurled his orinkaa, a traditional club, at the sheep with great force.  I imagined that I heard the animal’s ribs cracking as the heavy club—topped with the lug nut from a truck-- struck. The sheep dropped dead in his tracks.  With a long—I thought defiant—glance at me over his shoulder, he picked up the animal and disappeared.  I enjoy lamb chops, but I felt as if I had witnessed a murder.

One afternoon Desi was lounging on the grass where the school was meant to be with another neighbour, Letai. He was looking at me and pointing. I was trying to act casual, but got nervous when the two men approached me. Letai asked me, in the polite form of Swahili he used for communicating with palefaces, if I had a camera.

           In those days of film photography, a camera was a rare thing.  I had a Kodak Instamatic, and told him yes. He conferred with Desi for a moment, then asked if I would be willing to take his picture. I agreed happily. This seemed a chance to get friendly with these scary guys.

 Desi spoke to me for the first time. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He left at a trot, and I went inside to brag to my wife that I had made contact with the locals. I got out the camera, loaded a new roll of film and went back outside to wait.

            And wait.

An hour passed, then two. The sun was slipping toward the line of trees to the west.  Sundown at the Equator comes very suddenly, and I began to think Desi might miss his photo op. Finally, three hours after we made the arrangement, I saw him walking with great dignity toward the house. He was dressed in Maasai finery: red plaid sarong, leather and bead necklace and bracelets.  His hair was smeared with bright ochre mud, making a damp mat on his head, and he wore facial makeup that gave him incongruously doe-like eyes.  He had his assegai with him, too. He looked like a postcard.

           “Sorry I’m late,” said Desi, the terror of Arjiju, “I couldn’t do a thing with my hair.”

What I Wish I Had Said to Mary

My stepdaughter Mary was about six years old when she came to me holding a tiny object. She had been playing in the front yard and found what appeared to be a cut gemstone.

          She opened her fist slowly to reveal it.

         “Is it real?” she asked in a quavering voice.

           It looked to me like a badly made glass stone from a costume jewellery ring. I held it as solemnly as I could up to the light. I was stalling, because I didn’t know how to answer her. If I had said, “No, dear, it’s just glass,” I would have been telling the truth, something I place a fairly high value on. But then that look of childish wonder, poised on the razor’s edge between reality and fantasy, would disappear from her face. If I had told her the stone was real, on the other hand, I would have been setting her up for a fall later. That felt too much like betrayal. I couldn’t even say I didn’t know, because I did.

          I don’t remember what I said. It was probably one of those trick answers grownups use when they’re stumped. Something like, “It’s very pretty dear. Now go and help Mommy with the flowerbed. That’s a good girl.”

          Not long ago, I realised what I should have said. Too bad we don’t get a second chance, and by the time we are wiser the grownup children are making their own mistakes. Because it matters what we say to one another. It matters a lot.

          I could have said, “Look, I’ll tell you what. Bring me a little box, a matchbox, or something. You can colour it with your crayons and stick little stars on it. Then we’ll find some cotton and put the stone carefully inside. Then you take it and hide it somewhere safe, where only you know where it is. Next year at this time, we’ll open it, and then you’ll know whether it’s real or not.”

          That’s what I wish I’d said to Mary. Maybe that’s what I would like to say to myself. The thing to do when something comes along that might be important is not to get carried away, but not to explain it away, either. Put it somewhere safe, until the world has revolved enough times that I might be ready to understand what it is I’ve found.

          Because the truth doesn’t change. We do.

A version of this story appeared in my book, Seeing with Your Ears.