Chapter 29
The Resident Saint of Kenilworth didn’t know how to pray. She didn’t know a Thee from a Thou, couldn’t decline the verb beseech, would get lost in a labyrinth and tangled in a rosary. She was never sure to whom her prayers were addressed, which pronoun to use, what was the proper name for the Divine. She could never know that her prayers were heard, her appreciation acknowledged, her petitions fulfilled. When she came across a meaningful prayer, she would learn to recite it; then, once recited, it would lose all its meaning.
She tried to pray standing up and sitting down, on her knees and whirling on her feet. She lifted her head and bowed it low. She raised her hands and folded them on her lap. She stretched out on her stomach, touched her forehead, and ate the dirt. She stretched out on her back and marveled at the stars. She twirled and danced and sat very, very, very still. She sang and muttered, davined and declaimed, supplicated and invoked, implored, petitioned and entreated. She spun prayer wheels and fluttered prayer flags. She prayed on mountaintops and in closets, in despair and in delight. Whenever she did it one way, she thought she should be doing it another. When she spoke, she didn’t know what to say. …
Chapter 28
The next day, still, no one had seen or heard what had happened to the Lisping Barista; but the Cowboy was at the counter. When things got slow and the Therapist Emeritus was free, he approached her, hat in hand, placed it on the table in front of her, and asked permission to speak.
“I’d like to tell you Ma’am, the story of how I got my hat.” The story, as he told it, took the biggest part of the day. I’ll summarize it for you.
The Weather-Beaten Man in a Cowboy Hat was not always a weather-beaten man in a cowboy hat. At one point, he wore a Michigan Wolverines hat. What began as an attempt to shed the unnatural voices of Art and Edith Gates, ended as a loss of identity. …
Chapter 27
Nothing ever happened at the Epiphany Café without the Head Surveyor witnessing it. He examined every part of the town of Kenilworth. He had the whole place measured, calculated, charted, and appraised. There was nothing that missed his omniscient eye, except that which cannot be measured, calculated, charted, and appraised.
For instance, the Head Surveyor didn’t know what to make of the Weather-Beaten Man in a Cowboy Hat. He liked his coffee: Cowboy Coffee. It was good, stick-to-your-ribs coffee that kept the Head Surveyor going through a whole day of tromping through overgrown thickets, briers, and rock-strewn fields. It sharpened his eye for the transit and steadied his hand for the rod. The Head Surveyor liked the Cowboy’s coffee, but he wasn’t sure about the man. He was a working man, to be sure, but not a plain man. Not an upfront, straightforward, easily understood man, but a man with thickets and briers, who’d traveled a rock-strewn path. His fences were built on the wrong side of the line, his corner stakes were missing. …
But he does get appointed as this year’s Jesus
After a single night in Boise City, Oklahoma, with all its ghosts, the ghost-avoiding Weather-Beaten Man in a Cowboy Hat decided to get as far away from the dust bowl as he could. He thought he would go to somewhere lush, verdant, and green; where a man’s feet need never touch the ground because there’s always vegetation to bear him up. Where the air is not black with dust but has a bluish tinge from water molecules floating around. He thought he’d go where water itself is not hoarded like a precious gem. He got as far as Pecos, New Mexico, which is not very far at all and not much different from the place from which he came. …
Chapter 25
The Weather-Beaten Man in a Cowboy Hat spit tobacco juice into his cup. Even though he was the official barista, I went behind the counter to get a new cup of coffee for him, just to keep his tongue loose, and one of those dinner-plate-sized cookies for the Therapist Emeritus, just to keep her mouth shut. You don’t want someone interrupting a good storyteller with too many questions when he’s in the zone, even when you’re not supposed to be listening.
“Thank you, rightly, Sir,” he said to me. A moment later he had us back in the bready kitchen of Art and Edith Gates, somewhere where the second knuckle of the frostbitten middle finger would be on the mittened hand of Michigan. …
The death cat of my father’s nursing home approached me directly, sat just out of my reach, and studied me. The cat was well known for its ability to forecast death. Whenever it began to sleep on a resident’s bed, that resident would expire within a week. Scientists and newspaper writers came to learn from and report on the cat, showing far more interest in its activities than the humans of the nursing home, though the oldsters often surrounded the visitors with their wheelchairs and pulled at their sleeves. …
The Geeky Guy’s date with the Lisping Barista, chronicled in Who Killed the Lisping Barista of the Epiphany Café?, takes a turn for the worse in Chapter 22, The Geeky Guy Finally Has His Panic Attack and the Lisping Barista Comes Back From the Dead. Then it’s concluded in The Remarkable Day Expires, Chapter 23. In Chapter 24, The Geeky Guy Makes a Deal, he does something in the hopes that the Lisping Barista will be with him forever.
With all that, the book then takes a turn to focus a character we have barely met, The Weather-Beaten Man In a Cowboy Hat Tells a Ghost Story, Chapter 25. …
A Field Guide to Feelings
Could it be the aimless feeling of anomie?
Imagine an ordinary city bus. It stops and passengers get onboard. Every passenger changes the atmosphere of the bus. If it’s a grieving old lady, she reminds everyone of loss. If young lovers get on board, the whole bus smiles a little because they’re happy. If a thug gets on, looking for a fight, everyone gets ready for a fight. No matter who gets on, the bus still follows its route, and everyone gets off when they’re ready to leave.
Now imagine that, instead of going to the back and finding a seat, every new passenger sat where the driver belonged and drove the bus to where they wanted to go, regardless of the route. The grieving old lady would take everyone to the cemetery; the young lovers to their love nest; and the thug would take everyone to a fight. …
Chapter 25
Not everything is as it seems. Not everyone wearing a cowboy hat in a Connecticut coffee shop is a cowboy. Not every moody, taciturn man, brooding over his latte, has a story to tell. But sometimes things are exactly as they seem. Funny how it’s always surprising when that happens.
I won’t go into detail about how the Geeky Guy bought the Epiphany Café. Analysis of financial transactions is a literary form that has yet to catch on. Suffice it to say that he was a single man with no children, possessing an engineering degree and a good job, living in his deceased parents’ free-and-clear home, with his sister. All that was needed was to move around some money, then the Owner would present the keys to the Geeky Guy and he’d wait for the Lisping Barista to come in and pick up her check. …
A Field Guide to Feelings
Locked within the inescapable solitude of the self.
Unlike some other species — cats, for instance — humans are social creatures. That means we naturally tend to form alliances to accomplish objectives we could never accomplish alone. It means we’re comforted by the presence of other humans. It also makes us subject to the feeling of loneliness.
Loneliness is that warning light that tells you to form or repair an alliance: make a friend, find a mate, kiss and make up, call your mother. It notifies you of the danger of isolation. You can feel loneliness when there’s no one around, but the pangs are especially acute when there are people nearby and, for some reason you’re failing to gel with them. That can happen when you’re feeling misunderstood, ignored, marginalized, exploited, or experiencing a betrayal. …
