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 The Way Life Works
Ft. Lauderdale-Miami Beach-Marathon, Florida-Lamoine, Maine
December 1999-August 2000
The Spiritual Traveler
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December 19, 1999
What is life all
about? How does it work? What determines whether
our lives are lucky or unlucky, filled with miracles or
disappointments, joy or suffering? These questions were on
my mind when I flew into Ft. Lauderdale from Detroit for a two-week
Christmas vacation. Dan Fullmer, an old acquaintance from
Michigan, greeted me at the airport. Dan was a former
linguistics professor who had retired for Florida about a year
previously. He offered to lead me to his place via the
scenic route, even though it was already late evening. I
picked up my rental car, a striking blue Mitsubishi, and followed him
through an evening paradise of lights, and palm trees, and high-rise
apartment buildings. A wide boulevard ran directly along the
shore, with a wall on the beach side and a collage of apartment
buildings fronted by cafes, tourist shops, and boutiques
opposite. It reminded me of the high-rise apartment sections
of Washington, DC. There was the same palpable sense of
wealth and power, but wrapped in subtropical
garb.
We drove up into the courtyard of a white apartment complex bathed in
pastel lights and shadows. A flowerbed heavy with hydrangeas
bordered the parking space as I stepped out. In the near
distance, I could hear the splash of a fountain. We walked
up to a stucco apartment after passing through an elaborate steel
gate.
"What's the gate for?" I
asked.
"Just ego," he
laughed. "I like the idea of people passing through multiple
entrances to get to my
apartment."
The apartment itself was
elegantly furnished. There was a prominent oriental motif,
including liberal displays of collectible china. The study
was devoid of academic books; Dan seemed to have completely abandoned
his former lifestyle and identity. The balcony opened on to
the inland waterway, with a group of high-rises in the distance, to the
east.
"What do you think?" Dan
asked.
"It has an other-worldly feel
to it," I replied. I don't know if it's just the effect of
the plane flight, or
what…"
"Yes, I know what you mean,"
he said. "It's like we're on some other plane of existence
or in some other
universe."
I told Dan about my plan to
visit some car dealerships in the morning. I wanted to drive
down to the Keys the next day, but planned to stay longer than I could
afford to keep the rental car. If I bought a used car, I
could leave it in Marathon and drive it whenever I came
down.
"What kind of car are you looking for?" he asked.
I like Toyota. We have three of them in our family."
Dan suggested a couple of dealerships. We looked their phone
numbers and addresses up in the phone directory, and then pinpointed
their locations on a road map of the Ft. Lauderdale area. "I
also e-mailed my friend Fadi yesterday," I told Dan. "He's a
young Arab guy, also from Michigan. He just moved to Miami
Beach last year. I mentioned to him that I was looking for a
car. I could still call him
tonight."
I decided that wasn't too
late to call Fadi, and dialed his number. He answered the
phone as soon as it started to
ring.
"Hi, Fadi. I'm in
Ft.
Lauderdale."
"Welcome. Welcome
home. You're looking for a car, right?" he
asked.
"Yes. Do you know
of
one?"
"As a matter of fact, my
cousin is driving down from Orlando. He has to leave for
Lebanon right away, and wants to get rid of his car."
"What kind of car is it?" I
asked.
"Toyota."
"You're kidding me," I said
in wonderment, more to myself than to Fadi. "That's just
what I'm looking for."
"It's got over 100,000 miles on it, but it has a brand-new engine,"
Fadi continued. "There's only one
problem."
"What?"
"My cousin is driving down on Tuesday. He won't be in until
the evening. That means if you want the car, you probably
won't be able to drive it away until Wednesday
morning."
"That's OK. I'm
not in a hurry. I can stay the extra
day."
"You can stay with me
tomorrow night and Tuesday night, then," Fadi suggested.
"That's great." I made arrangements to call him the next
day, and hung up. As soon as I got off the phone I told Dan
about the conversation. "Fadi might have a car for me," I
told him. "He cousin is driving it down on
Tuesday. Is that amazing, or what? I just
e-mailed him the other day and mentioned that I needed a car, and he's
got one. And it's a Toyota!"
"That's the way life works," Dan replied, smiling. "Any
moment you can expect a small miracle!"
December 20, 1999
When I got up the
next morning, Dan was already making breakfast. After
breakfast, I said good-bye to him and spent most of the day at Dania
beach. I arrived at the beach and parked my car in the vast
lot. I needed quarters for the meters, and headed on foot to
a place called the Beach Grill for change. In the parking
lot, a young man rode by on a skateboard while talking on a cellular
phone. Sleek brown plovers with long black bills darted in
and out among the succulents that grew as a barrier between the parking
lot and the beach. I changed into my bathing suit and walked
on the sand, passing a couple sitting in matching deck chairs, the
overweight woman sleeping open-mouthed in the sun, as if she had just
died. I waded into the water in the shadow of the massive
Dania pier, then nosed around an inlet opposite the shore, called
Whiskey Creek. I waded in the shallow water, the opposite
bank utterly tranquil, with thick mangrove bushes growing out beneath
tall pines, hanging, as if suspended, inches above the surface of the
water.
When I finally felt hungry, I stopped at the Beach Grill, and ordered
the boiled peanuts. They came still in the shell, boiled in
a Cajun broth, and tasted something like pinto beans. They
required a certain amount of concentration to eat, like steamed clams
or boiled lobsters, and were highly addictive. I called Fadi
from a pay phone in the late afternoon, and he gave me directions to
his place. Then I drove down I-95 to the 79th Street exit,
and headed all the way East, across a series of bridges and causeways,
to Miami
Beach.
I knew Fadi Allaouie from
East Dearborn, a dominantly Lebanese community. He was a
tall young man, in his thirties, with an olive complexion, prominent
nose, glasses, and goatee. A Shi'ite, he had grown up in
West Africa. He was working for an Arabic translation
service and taking courses in psychology at the time I met
him. Later, he got a job as a salesman for a web-hosting
company, and after he was let go was reduced to working in a gas
station for a while. Now he had his own web-hosting
business, and was apparently doing very
well.
Fadi's apartment was a
modern, two-bedroom affair located at the very extremity of a dead-end
street. The parking area was shaded by palms, beyond which I
could make out the green expanse of a golf course. There was
an exterior walkup of one flight.  Fadi
greeted me from the window as I came up. The interior of the
apartment was furnished in bare fashion. He was still moving
in. He had his office set up in the entranceway, with two
monitors, a router, and other high-tech gadgetry. Fadi set
me up on a king-size air mattress set on an elegant bed frame built
into the wall, which he covered with sheets and a quilt, and I went to
sleep.
December 21, 1999
I got up at about
8:00 in the morning, and took a little walk around his
neighborhood. It was a typical suburban community for
southern Florida. Most of the houses were one-story stucco
affairs, painted in white or soft pastels-yellow, gray, pink, peach, or
blue-interspersed with thick oleander bushes, saw palmettos, date and
coconut palms, hibiscus, and succulents. There were also
cats everywhere, most of them wary creatures sitting on the tops of
cars, ready to take off if I got too close. I rounded a
corner and passed a telephone pole with a metal connection box next to
it that was about waist-high. A large, orange tomcat was
sleeping on the box, oblivious to everything around him, like a drunk
passed out on a San Francisco street. I could have just
reached out and petted him as I walked
by.
When I got back, Fadi was cooking breakfast and talking on his cell
phone at the same time. The doorbell rang, and I answered
it. The visitor was a strikingly beautiful young woman, tall
and statuesque, with straight dark hair and black eyelashes, think and
soft as the bristles of an expensive new paintbrush. The
three of us breakfasted together. Then I went for a walk,
and by the time I came back, Fadi's friend had left. Fadi
said his cousin would be coming with the car the next day, so I had
just the rest of the day to kill.
"Do you like sushi?" I asked Fadi toward evening. I saw a
sushi place just down the road when I came here. I'll treat
you."
"Not especially," Fadi
replied.
"Well, I feel like going out
for a while, so I guess I'll go myself." I got ready to go,
and just as I was halfway out the door, Fadi said, "Why don't you let
me cook you a
steak?"
"You don't have to do
that."
"I've got the steaks all
ready."
"Well, I feel like going like
a little drive,
anyway."
"So take a half hour, and
when you come back, the steaks will be
ready."
"OK," I agreed. By
the time I got back, Fadi had prepared two steaks and a fine salad,
along with a generous plate of olives. He opened a bottle of
wine. We sat down together, and he started regaling me with
stories of his experience as an electronics salesman in
Canada.
"Selling is all about sizing up the customer," he said, "making them
comfortable. If they come into the store, they're ready to
buy. You just have to lead them to the merchandise that
suits their needs. You can't get in their way. I
remember once a very stiff couple came in. You could tell
that they hated salesmen. I just followed them through the
store, kept pace with them, but never said
anything. Finally, they called me over and asked a
question. I was careful to only answer their specific
question, and not to say anything else. If I had given them
a big sales pitch, they would have walked out
immediately. Another time, a woman came in dressed in very
flashy fashion. She brushed all the salesmen
aside. No one could talk to her. I walked up and
the first thing I did was to compliment her on her alligator skin
boots. We talked for a long time. I never asked
what she wanted to buy. All the other salesmen stood around
watching, wondering what we were talking about. She ended up
buying two giant television sets and a VCR."
I was somewhat mesmerized by Fadi's stories of his sales
career. I listened politely, for the most part, with little
to say in reply, feeling that this was the price I had to pay for
getting a deal on that Toyota. "I can tell you're a good
salesman, Fadi," I said.
"Sure, I sold you on the steak, didn't
I?"
"And I didn't sell you on the
sushi."
"You didn't
try."
"I don't have the instincts
of a
salesman."
I was getting an
uncomfortable feeling about his cousin with the Toyota. It
was now late evening, and the cousin still hadn't shown up.
December 22, 1999
The next morning,
Fadi announced that he had talked to his cousin on the phone late the
previous evening. "He's still in Georgia," Fadi
said. "He's going to Orlando today, and he'll be here
tomorrow.
"So it'll be an extra day's wait," I murmured, trying to hide my disappointment.
Fadi shrugged. Making the best of it, I decided to go into
town that day. I hung around Miami Beach, and did some
writing in the public library. I didn't get back until
around 8:00 in the
evening.
"I talked to my cousin
again," Fadi told me. "He won't be able to give up the car
until the 6th of January. His other car is in a repair shop
in
Orlando."
The news didn't come as a
surprise to me. I had been feeling all day that the deal
would go sour. Fadi had sold me on the Toyota in the same
way he had sold me on the steak. All his effort went into
sizing up what the person wanted to hear, and then telling them
whatever that was, no matter how far removed from reality it might
be. I wasn't angry with Fadi, only with
myself. It made me aware of my own weaknesses-my lack of
self-reliance. Fadi had me dangling on a string because of
my desire to get a 'good deal'. I wasn't really as
interested in Fadi as in what he could do for me. I deserved
what I had gotten from him--a steak dinner and a two-day delay in my
vacation. "That's the way life works," I thought
ruefully. "It was just a series of
disappointments."
I drove down to Marathon that
evening, and got in just past midnight. The back patio of my
mother's little condo was a mess-completely overgrown. The
hibiscus had become tall and woody, the bougainvillea was spilling over
practically onto the ground, the bleeding heart was everywhere, and the
entire patio had a thick mat of crab grass over it.
December 23-28, 1999
The next day I
spent the whole morning dealing with the crab grass and carving an
entranceway through the bleeding heart. The afternoon was
taken up in further compulsive activity, trying to install a new
ceiling fan. I decided to keep the rental car for one more
day, so I could look in the newspaper for car ads and possibly drive
down to look at possibilities. The following day I spent the
better part of the day in Key West. I looked at a little,
red Geo Metro, but it wasn't a car that felt comfortable to
me. The weather turned cold. I began to get
depressed. I picked up a copy of the Auto Trader at the
local drugstore. There were all sorts of ads for cars at
reasonable prices, but the phone numbers were all in the Miami area,
which didn't do me any good, now that I was down in the
Keys. I pedaled my mother's bike down the length of Vaca
Key, and stopped at a number of car dealerships, but didn't succeed in
finding anything.
After a few days, the weather started to improve. The
temperature was predicted to get into the 70s for the first time in ten
days. I decided to take a dip in the bay, and walked out to
the pier, which was whose fresh planking was twisted like a roller
coaster. It had been partially rebuilt in the wake of the
hurricane a year previously, only to be re-damaged a couple of months
ago. The same assemblage of pelicans, gulls, and cormorants
perched on far side of the horseshoe-shaped structure, as
always. But now, the planking sagged like a hammock, and the
rocks that I clambered down on last year were covered up with timber,
leaving me no place to enter and exit the water. One of the
neighbors, a woman from Guyana whom I knew by her nickname of Bucky,
happened to be cleaning up outside her condo, which was close to the
pier, and spotted me.
"Looking for something?" she
asked.
"I just want to swim in the bay. Do you know where I can get in the water?"
"Not really," she replied. "But let me come with you, and
we'll take a look." We went around to the right side of the
pier, but it was cordoned off. The maintenance man came by
in his golf cart, pulling a utility wagon.
"Why can't you put a little stepladder in, so people can get into the
water?"
"Then the kids would be going
in all the time," he replied. There's a strong current, the
coral is sharp, and there are boats going in and out all the
time."
"I see your
point."
"Why don't you go in on the
other side, at the boat launch?" he
suggested.
"That's your best bet," Bucky
chimed in. "It's always good to have a Plan B."
"And a Plan C, and a Plan D," I
added.
"That's right," she
chuckled.
It suddenly occurred to me
that Bucky had given me some very good advice about my car
problem. The reason I was disappointed at not finding a used
car was because I had formed the idea that this was the solution to my
transportation problem. But was it really the only solution?
If it was really so important to me to be mobile, I could shell out a
little extra money for a rental car, and things would be
fine. "That's the way life works," I
decided. "There were always alternatives." But I
wondered if the answer was really as simple as that.
August 15, 2000
It was now eight months later. I was in Maine, and was doing
some writing. I had written up the story of my search for a
car in Florida, and had just given it to a friend to
read. That very day, I decided to visit an alternative
practitioner named John Penkalski, whom I had consulted about a chronic
health problem several years before. He lived on a small
road near the village of Lamoine, on the way from Ellsworth to Mt.
Desert Island. I had been there once, a long time ago, and
wasn't sure if I could pick out the house. I had to double
back a couple of times and ask some neighbors, but eventually I found
it--a compact white frame house with a long extension in
back.  An
English garden full of purple echinacea and other herbs faced the back
entrance. As I approached, I could see Dr. Penkalski sitting
at the garden window. I knocked on the screen door and the
next moment he was greeting me heartily, apparently pleasantly
surprised at my unannounced visit. He was a physically
imposing man, past middle age, quite striking in appearance, with white
hair, jet black eyebrows, wattles under his eyes, and a straw hat--all
of which combined to give him the look of a Chinese
sage.
"It's great to see you," he
said. "You're looking good--more relaxed than when I saw you
last."
"Thanks. I feel
OK," I
replied.
"What are you doing now? Did you get your Ph.D.?"
"Yes. But I'm
getting out of the academic field," I told
him.
"But you're a scholar," he
protested, in a gently mocking
tone.
"I come from a family of
scholars," I replied. "But I feel that I just followed that
path because I didn't know how to think creatively about what I wanted
to do with my life. For some people it's easy.
They know what they want to do from the time they're very
young. But for other people, if they want to be happy, they
have to learn to think creatively about their lives. If they
don't learn it, they're going to be
miserable."
Dr. Penkalski listened to my
explanation with an air of approval, and then asked about my
health.
"Well," I began, "I'm sure you remember my condition. It had
already been chronic for three or four years when I first started
seeing you. I had gone to a regular MD, originally, and he
had given me a superficial diagnosis and a prescription I couldn't
tolerate. After that I spent years going to alternative
practitioners--you included--but nothing helped. I often got
temporary relief, but the basic condition persisted for eight or nine
years. Then just this past year I found a cure, and it was
so simple, it had been right under my nose the whole
time."
"What was the
cure?"
"I finally went to an MD in
my home town who found I was chronically mineral
deficient. I was taking multivitamins to supplement my diet,
but my system wouldn't absorb them. The doctor simply put me
on a type of multimineral formula that my body could more easily
absorb, and in a week the condition that had tormented me for almost a
decade cleared up
completely."
"It seems to me that I
prescribed some foods that would have supplied the same minerals," Dr.
Penkalski
remarked.
"Well, for whatever reason, I
didn't get enough of what I needed that way," I responded. I
didn't want to quibble with Dr. Penkalski about his previous
recommendations because they were beside the point. I
respected him for reasons quite unconnected to his prescriptive
abilities. I valued my conversations with him as much as his
expertise in matters of health. And he was only one in a
long series of practitioners I had consulted, all with impressive
skills, who had failed to find the key to my condition.
"It's strange, though," I added. "I don't understand why I
had to go through all those years of acute discomfort. If I
hadn't searched for a cure, I would understand it
better. But I looked high and low for the
answer. What was the meaning of that
experience? Why did I go through it? Why did the
answer elude me for so long, and then present itself so suddenly?"
"It's not strange," Dr. Penkalski replied. "That's the way
life
works."
I was so startled by his use
of the phrase that had recently been on my mind again that I asked him
for an explanation of what he
meant.
"Let me tell you a story,"
Dr. Penkalski said. "I used to have attacks of appendicitis
for years. Finally, I decided that to avoid the possibility
of an attack coming at an inconvenient time, I should have it
out. So I had the appendix removed. About a year
later I had a sudden attack in the same area where the appendix had
been, and only when it subsided did I realize that I was finally rid of
the
condition."
"What you're saying is that
the function of the appendix is independent of the presence of the
actual
organ?"
"Exactly," Dr. Penkalski
replied. "In many cases in which the gall bladder has been
removed, people still report symptoms similar to gall bladder attacks
in exactly the area where the organ was
located."
"In other words, you're
saying that at some higher rate of vibration, the appendix or gall
bladder still exists, and only its physical manifestation has been
removed."
"Yes."
"So what you're saying
is..."
"I'm saying that life is a
complex mystery that we know very little about. We run into
obstacles, we have periods of ease and enjoyment. Some
people put forth great effort to apparently little effect while others
fall into success like pigs in a mud hole. But as a health
practitioner, I often can tell which of my patients have the capacity
to be cured. It takes a degree of flexibility, and often the
cure does not come until they have turned some kind of a corner in some
other aspect of their lives. For instance, let me ask you a
question. How long were you working on your doctorate,
writing your book, and applying for academic
jobs?"
"About the last eight or nine
years."
"The same period as your
health problem lasted?"
"Pretty
much."
"So what does that tell
you?"
I nodded, having already
anticipated his reasoning. "I have to admit, it's quite a
coincidence."
"It's not a coincidence. Life has nothing to do with
predictability or unpredictability, with good luck or
bad luck, joy or suffering. Instead, it poses certain
problems for us to solve, without indicating the nature
of the problem or its solution. That's for us to figure
out. As long as we're working on the same problem, our
circumstances will not change. But as soon as the
solution is discovered, everything shifts, and we are
given a new problem to solve." |
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Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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