Two-thirds of three

 Two-thirds of three 

Corner Coffee

Because something was happening somewhere in the world – a broken Brazilian butterfly wing, an Orthodox priest having trouble micturating in Minsk, a leak in the Michelin man – something had tweaked the schedule at work, and I had yesterday morning off, if I’d make it up, of course, somewhere along the line at a time uneasily unspecified. So I was having coffee* with Axel Sundstrøm, who wanted to talk more about centering prayer.** He’s disturbed about any attempt to lasso and corral God, to put him inside; he’s also concerned about what might be going on in peoples’ centers, their insides, especially given what is going on in his. I share the latter concern – sadly, I can’t imagine a soul disinterested in its own best interests. But every word about God is another strand of hemp in the rope and every book of theology is an attempt to fence him in.

     Still, I listened. I didn’t say to Axel what I just wrote to you, because it didn’t occur to me until later. Then, his phone went off; then he did. Then I moved from our table to the armchair in the corner of the window that looks onto Bye Street, deciding “I’ll just sit for a minute.” After which I needed to go home to dust. Roz had said the night before, “If you’re going to have the morning off, you might at least dust.” She didn’t care what else I did was the implication, but dusting was what pundits like to call – coughing the stern gravel they carry in their guts into their throats – “non-negotiable.”

Two young women were sitting at the table next to the big chair, sisters surely – maybe even twins: the same dark eyes, inky eyebrows, hard nose; the same high forehead and delicate chin. But the neatly-cropped hair of the one as opposed to the wild mop of the other threw everything off. They might be twins, but it was hard to tell; surely, though, they were sisters: you could have told that with eyes closed by the way they talked to one another – the complaining sister and the explaining sister.

Not these sisters.

     I didn’t follow the conversation as well as I would have liked. It was murmuring for one thing; words were lost as they chuckled at each other like doves. The angry dove and the shrugging-here-we-go-again dove. Whole sentences were lost as they went back and forth from English to Spanish according to no pattern I could discern. The plaining dove would say something in English, and her patient sister would answer in Spanish; then they’d be Spanishing for an exchange or two. Annoya raised her voice in English. She was mad at a mutual acquaintance, a victim of . . . I didn’t hear what. “She keeps saying, you know, ‘I’m different, so you have to listen to me, so shut up.’” Two paragraphs later, the listening sister responded to something in Spanish – about eating I’m pretty sure: “Mom says that’s not good for you.” “Yeah, well, Mom’s not good for me.”

     At settling that she got up and went toward the rest room. And I got up, bussed my coffee cup and started up the hill toward home, thinking suddenly and a bit sadly half-way there, I should have stayed a little longer. I needed another nugget from the sarcastic sister. I wanted to write about her, but I hated violating the “rule of three.”

     “You really shouldn’t do things by two-thirds,” I thought.

11.16.16

______________

* See here **and here.