When Monday falls on Tuesday

 When Monday falls on Tuesday 

Down Dr. Feight's stairs

I have been seeing Dr. Feight on Mondays and Thursdays since early 2017.* I saw him yesterday. Which was Tuesday. Uncle Albert went with me as he usually does. He reads the magazines in Dr. Feight’s waiting room, or he sleeps. Afterward, we come home for lunch. Usually, I fix soup and a sandwich. Yesterday, though, I made pancakes. That’s when I realized it wasn’t Monday but Tuesday.

This morning I was telling Dr. Feight about another letter from Moira. She and I had been writing back and forth about humility, about which the Sikh spiritual teacher wrote could disarm hostility, could ultimately conquer it; or so Moira said. But she thought it depended on the source of the hostility. If it came from arrogance . . . . Well, nothing could conquer arrogance, she didn’t think.

     Speaking of which, I wrote her back, I had gotten another letter from Stephen.

And I had to explain to Dr. Feight who Stephen was. It seems the letters Moira and I wrote back and forth had opened some sort of channel, and now I was getting letters from someone in the Bureaucracy, a lower level acolyte of the Lord Most High, who, this Stephen assured me, was keeping an eye on me, especially since I’d stopped going to church except when Uncle Albert needed a ride.

     But I had been that Sunday, so he had written to congratulate me. “For some reason, he writes in red on yellow paper,” I told Dr. Feight.

     “Mmmm,” he said.

     “He calls me ‘Theodore,’” I said. “‘Dear Theodore,’ and he goes on to ‘commend’ me for getting to church. It did me good, he assured me, to hear the Word read and proclaimed, the prayers murmured, to watch the pageant of the Eucharist. Whatever my attitude, he said.”

     “Did it?” Dr. Feight said.

     I said I didn’t know, but sitting there I had developed a theory that Jesus was really a Samaritan. The gospels suppressed it, but it was there in - it had sneaked into - the reading from Luke.

     “Oh,” Dr. Feight said. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.” But not then because our session was over.

“Isn’t today Tuesday?” I asked Uncle Albert.

     “Yes,” he said.

     “I thought I saw Dr. Feight on Monday,” I said, “and Thursday.”

     “Not for a while,” Uncle Albert said. “Tuesday and Friday,” he said.

10.16.19

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 * My story with Dr. Feight, and links to the posts he features in, may be found here. About my poor dead sister Moira, see here.