When Talya and I entered Ben & Irv's, the place was mobbed. All you could hear was the happy sound of people talking and the clank of dishes. She ordered pastrami and I got the tongue. We hadn't stopped talking since we met up earlier this blustery wind-filled February day.
We'd visited the library where we'll give our talk Yes I Can: Living Successfully with Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. We stopped in the meeting room and decided how we wanted the chairs to be arranged. She had definite ideas. I listened calmly. Asked some questions and said, That makes sense. We'll arrange the chairs that way.
There was only one table available at Ben & Irv's. We didn't like it so we waited ten seconds until another one became available. We are two women, two stubborn women, who refuse to settle for the ordinary. She wore a red-knit sweater that kept her neck warm and tiny diamond stud earrings. I told her if she didn't live so far away and have so many children and one husband I'd call her up more often cause I like talking to her.
Just yesterday, I told her, I was driving and was amazed at all the thoughts my mind produced when let loose outside the house. Oh, there's the usual neighborhood thoughts, so-and-so's garbage can is rolling in the street, this one's got the Roto-router in his driveway, whatever happened to the color of the grass, and then, suddenly, the thought that No one is out, everything is still, what if the bomb went off and I'm the only one alive.
I wonder what it would be like, I thought, if I were God himself driving around and going to town for a cup of hot chocolate. What ever would God be thinking. I knew his thoughts would be quite different from mine since I carry around half a century worth of baggage inside which interferes with living in the moment. All thoughts are tempered by the layers and layers of experiences I've had over the years.
God, I imagined, would be driving invisible, a sylph through which all material objects passed through unchanged. But God never changed. He was always the same. The Eternal Present Tense Dude.
That's the closest I could figure him out.
He is, by the way, unbothered by the current state of the world, having given up on us, oh, sometime after the first fist-fight between two chimpanzees. By then it was too late. Evolution, he discovered, was capable of making mistakes in the twisting of the DNA strands, the lining up of the chromosomes. His perfect beings, relatives of the chimps, once bore perfect DNA strands.
But somewhere down the line the signal was given that allowed in errors and God could only cringe when he saw his own quirks reflected in his creations. And how he suffered for it, sleepless nights on the mountaintops, sighs of sadness at the rivers' edge.
He was not a happy camper. But then again, he simply waited around a while for someone like Mozart or Beethoven to come and cheer him up with their music. He immensely enjoyed the 17th century concerts in Leipzig and stood in the balcony for the premiere of Handel's Messiah.
