I don't consider myself a religious person, and I've never given much credit to miracles or saintly apparitions. To me magic is truly "smoke and mirrors" and ghosts, goblins, and ghouls are just products of people's over active imagination.
Humans began creating myths before they even invented a written (or maybe even spoken) language, as attested by the carvings in bone and stone of gods and daemons by prehistoric peoples. After I read the four volumes of Joseph Campbell's "The Mask of God," the mysticism of religion's dogma was reduced, and rightfully so, to a plethora of universally adopted and adapted symbols, which are probably the only things all of us on this planet share and have in common. I am a strong believer in the findings of comparative mythology.
I write all of the above to assure the reader that I am not one to fall under the sway of "the unexplained", or "powers we cannot phantom," and the like. If not a strict rationalist, I can say that I always approach things with a jaundiced eye and the belief that there is an explanation to every phenomena one encounters. To me shamans are shameless hustlers, and priest, preachers, and predicators, are bunk artist peddling Hell and Heaven for fun and profit.
In other words, if you win the lottery it is not because you prayed to a god or saint; no "miracle" has happened, no "mysterious powers that be" answered your call. It was because of a coincidence: you bought a ticket with a certain number and by coincidence that number was picked as a winner.
Right, so, enough disclaimers and on to the anecdote:
I was into the third week of my month-long stay in Paris when my friend and I had a disagreement. The subject matter is of no importance but after a day or so I began to feel remorse. Since my friend and her family had been very kind and generous with me, especially that first week when I had lost all my money and passport, I decided to apologize and as a gesture of my repentance, I bought a very nice flower pot with a live bush of living, white flowers. I wrote a note saying I was sorry I had been so unfair, asked the flower shop attendant to wrap the flower pot up in pink paper, to put a large white bow on it, include my note, and then deliver it.
I went off to my hotel to shower and change. After the shower I dressed and whistled all the time feeling very good about my actions and gesture of good will. Once dressed, I went down to the lobby and as I was about to exit the hotel, the manager owner said, "Monsieur, you had a telephone call."
He showed me the slip of paper on which I recognized my friend's telephone number.
"May I use the phone?" I asked the manager.
"Mais, oui, monsieur."
After a few rings, my friend answered,
"Hello? Who is this?" There was a hard edge to her words. I thought she might have had an argument with her mother, or something.
"It's me, Ro..." before I could say my name she cut me off.
"How dare you send me that thing?"
"What thing? I didn't send a thing, I sent you some nice flowers, in a bush, I mean in..."
"You call those things flowers? They look like something you got from a cemetery, like something that had been over a grave for a month!"
"What? No! I bought them just a few hours ago, at the flower shop in..."
"Come and get your horrible thing or I'll throw it out the window." She hung up.
I rushed out of the hotel, but before I got to my friend's apartment, I dashed into the flower shop and demanded to see the woman in charge. When she appeared I complained that there had been some mistake, that the flowers I had ordered had not arrived and in their stead there was a dead bush. The woman's eyes widened to the extent that I thought they might pop out of their sockets, She assured me that less than an hour after I had gone, the flowering bush had been delivered as per my instructions.
I was about to ask for a dozen red roses but wishing to take no chances, I left the flower shop and went into the wine store which was just half a block away. Knowing that my friend likes white wine I bought a bottle of cold Pouilly-Fuissé.
Not even waiting for the wine merchant to wrap it up, I took it in my hand by the neck and rushed a block and a half to my friend's apartment. I pushed the button of her door bell and I was buzzed in. I went up the two flights of stairs, and as I reached the landing before her apartment door, I grazed the metal post of the staircase handrail with the bottle of wine which burst like a water balloon. It made a loud pop!
I stood there, flabbergasted: half of the broken bottle was in my hand, and the other half was on the landing; the wine was dripping down the stairs.
The apartment door opened. It was my friend.
"What happened?"
"I don't know," I said, "I was bringing you some wine and the bottle burst or something."
"Leave what you have in your hand there. I 'll ask someone to clean up. Don't step on any of the pieces."
I put the half bottle down and stepped over the pool of wine and went into my friend's apartment. I was feeling kind of dazed but felt worse when I saw what was on a side table of the entrence hallway where we usually left our shoes. It was the flower pot I had bought that noon. It was unrecognizable. It looked like it had been dead for weeks, and all the flowers had dropped off into a pile surrounding the dead trunk.
"Is that what they flower shop delivered?" I asked.
"Yes," she said curtly, but then seeing my face she added, "Here, you'd better come into the living room and have a drink. I think you would use one. You look pale."
I went into the living room. My friend's mother was there. She had a drink in her hand.
"Good evening, Ama," I said.
"Ah, good evening, young man. Come and sit down and tell me all about your flower shopping experience. By the way, where did you get those things? Did you pinch them at Père LaChaise?" She hissed the last part of the cemetery's name.
I was beyond responding to her sarcasm. My friend came in with my drink and said,
"Oh, mother, stop it. Something is going on. He was bringing a bottle of wine and it burst just as he got here."
"Just now?" Her mother asked.
"Yes, just now."
The mother looked at me as if she was trying to examine my face for chicken pox or something.
"I see what you mean. Yes, something is going on."
I finished my drink in silence and then my friend asked if I would accompany her to her rehearsal. I did but I sat through the whole two or three hours of it glumly, trying to figure out what had happened to the damned flowers, and why the wine bottle had burst. I thought maybe the paper had kept the heat shut in the flowers and they had died, and that maybe the wine had gone bad and produced gas. But, all my reasoning seemed a bit far fetched.
The next day when I went to the construction site to see how the setting up of the hemispheric screen was going, I found the engineer in charge was furious with me. He said they had followed my instructions on balancing the load of the structure but the front panels had still warped and some had buckled.
I climbed the catwalk and looked at the rigging. In Guadalajara, we had figured that the front panels of the dome in other sites had warped and wrinkled because the weight of the structure had cause the dome to slip forward since the 86 foot diameter dome was inclined 26 degrees from the horizontal. In Guadalajara we had reduced the inclination to 20 degrees and set up a cable system to "pull" on the dome so the weight would not make it slide forward. The key was that the "hook" where the cables were attached to the dome had to be dead center on the dome's "polar axis" position. The instructions were in english and so were the measurements. I found that the French had measured in centimetres, not inches. They were off about two feet. Nevertheless, I was blamed for not having told them about the English measurement system, even though the instructions were clearly marked. The damaged panels were expensive and there would be explanations to be made to the government overseer people before the panels could be replaced.
After I explained the correction that had to be made, I went to the hotel to change and then went to my friend's apartment. I told them what had happened and Ama, the mother said,
"The other day, I could see there was an aura of bad karma about you."
"No, not bad karma, just bad luck."
"Karma, luck, call it what you will, but I can see it all over you." She got up. "I will give you something for it."
I thought she would go fetch some green pills like the ones that were all the rage in Mexico a few years ago. They were supposed to cure everything from cancer to bad investments. When someone sent them to a laboratory for analysis they turned out to be no more than hard rock candy. When that scam petered out, a new one came along. This time it was a weed called "cat's claws." You were supposed to make tea with them and it was supposed to cure everything from cancer to... People will always believe there is a magic cure for things.
Ama came back, not with little pills or tea, but with a small silver box, like the kind people of yesteryear used for keeping snuff.
She said,
"Don't move. I am going to put something on your head."
I didn't move but I felt her finger rubbing something on the top of my head. She also murmured something in what I think must have been Gujurati, which was her native language. When she was done, she snapped shut the little box.
"What was that?" I asked.
"I put some ashes of my guru, a saint on hour head. They will make that aura of bad karma disappear."
"Ashes? You mean from..."
"His cremation, yes," she said.
I looked at my friend. She was smiling a sort of "just keep quiet and go along" smile. I did.
The next day I went to the construction site. Expecting that the engineer in charge would still be on the warpath, I tried going into the office by the back way. But, no luck: the engineer was coming down the hall just as I reached my office. But, much to my surprise, he greeted me with a smile and a handshake.
"Look here," he said, "I talked to the government overseer of the project and if you stand by the fact that you had explained to the foreman that the instructions were in inches and feet, we can claim it was a workman's oversight, due to misunderstanding in the translation or something of that sort and he said he would put it down to natural work delays which are always contemplated anyway and that he would authorize the buying of more panels."
"Oh, that's good to hear," I said, still in shock at the fellow's demeanor. "But, the foreman won't get into trouble, will he?"
"No, no," he said. "I'll just reprimand him verbally." And off he went.
I went to the site and saw that the workmen were already starting on the corrections.
"Well, nothing to do here," I thought and left.
I went back into town on the Metro and got off at the Etienne Marcel stop of Line 4 with the idea of going into the flower shop and complaining about the dead flower bush. I walked in forcefully and went up to the counter. The lady in charge was there.
"I've come to see about the flower..."
"Ah, monsieur, oui. The lady you gave the flowers to called and explained. I sent for the bush and saw that les racines...
"The roots," I translated.
"Yes, the roots...were bad. I apologize and I send another one that arrived very good," she said.
"But, why would it die so fast? It's strange, don't you think?"
"Oui, monsieur. I 'ave never seen it. Mais, c'est comme ça."
This was curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said. I decided to go to the wine shop just to see if that bit of bad luck would reverse itself, too. I took a left turn coming out of the flower shop and went to the wine shop.
I went in and saw that the wine merchant was unpacking wine from a wooden crate.
"Monsieur," I said, "yesterday I bought a bottle of Puilly Fuissé and..."
"Ah, oui, oui," he said without looking up from his unpacking, "it was vin bouché, n'est pas."
"Corked? You mean it was...yes, yes, of course. As soon as we tasted it."
"Oui. I have sent it back to the provider," he said, "what I can do, monsieur, is give you another bottle, not as expensive, but still very good, at 'alf of the price, eh?"
"Yes, yes, that's acceptable," I said deciding not to say a word about the broken bottle.
When I got to my friend's apartment, I told her about the reversal of my fortunes.
"That was a heck of set of coincidences," I said laughing.
"Not coincidences, young man, not coincidences," said the mother.
(The next and final part will be about a very funny concert at the UNESCO theater.)
Humans began creating myths before they even invented a written (or maybe even spoken) language, as attested by the carvings in bone and stone of gods and daemons by prehistoric peoples. After I read the four volumes of Joseph Campbell's "The Mask of God," the mysticism of religion's dogma was reduced, and rightfully so, to a plethora of universally adopted and adapted symbols, which are probably the only things all of us on this planet share and have in common. I am a strong believer in the findings of comparative mythology.
I write all of the above to assure the reader that I am not one to fall under the sway of "the unexplained", or "powers we cannot phantom," and the like. If not a strict rationalist, I can say that I always approach things with a jaundiced eye and the belief that there is an explanation to every phenomena one encounters. To me shamans are shameless hustlers, and priest, preachers, and predicators, are bunk artist peddling Hell and Heaven for fun and profit.
In other words, if you win the lottery it is not because you prayed to a god or saint; no "miracle" has happened, no "mysterious powers that be" answered your call. It was because of a coincidence: you bought a ticket with a certain number and by coincidence that number was picked as a winner.
Right, so, enough disclaimers and on to the anecdote:
I was into the third week of my month-long stay in Paris when my friend and I had a disagreement. The subject matter is of no importance but after a day or so I began to feel remorse. Since my friend and her family had been very kind and generous with me, especially that first week when I had lost all my money and passport, I decided to apologize and as a gesture of my repentance, I bought a very nice flower pot with a live bush of living, white flowers. I wrote a note saying I was sorry I had been so unfair, asked the flower shop attendant to wrap the flower pot up in pink paper, to put a large white bow on it, include my note, and then deliver it.
I went off to my hotel to shower and change. After the shower I dressed and whistled all the time feeling very good about my actions and gesture of good will. Once dressed, I went down to the lobby and as I was about to exit the hotel, the manager owner said, "Monsieur, you had a telephone call."
He showed me the slip of paper on which I recognized my friend's telephone number.
"May I use the phone?" I asked the manager.
"Mais, oui, monsieur."
After a few rings, my friend answered,
"Hello? Who is this?" There was a hard edge to her words. I thought she might have had an argument with her mother, or something.
"It's me, Ro..." before I could say my name she cut me off.
"How dare you send me that thing?"
"What thing? I didn't send a thing, I sent you some nice flowers, in a bush, I mean in..."
"You call those things flowers? They look like something you got from a cemetery, like something that had been over a grave for a month!"
"What? No! I bought them just a few hours ago, at the flower shop in..."
"Come and get your horrible thing or I'll throw it out the window." She hung up.
I rushed out of the hotel, but before I got to my friend's apartment, I dashed into the flower shop and demanded to see the woman in charge. When she appeared I complained that there had been some mistake, that the flowers I had ordered had not arrived and in their stead there was a dead bush. The woman's eyes widened to the extent that I thought they might pop out of their sockets, She assured me that less than an hour after I had gone, the flowering bush had been delivered as per my instructions.
I was about to ask for a dozen red roses but wishing to take no chances, I left the flower shop and went into the wine store which was just half a block away. Knowing that my friend likes white wine I bought a bottle of cold Pouilly-Fuissé.
Not even waiting for the wine merchant to wrap it up, I took it in my hand by the neck and rushed a block and a half to my friend's apartment. I pushed the button of her door bell and I was buzzed in. I went up the two flights of stairs, and as I reached the landing before her apartment door, I grazed the metal post of the staircase handrail with the bottle of wine which burst like a water balloon. It made a loud pop!
I stood there, flabbergasted: half of the broken bottle was in my hand, and the other half was on the landing; the wine was dripping down the stairs.
The apartment door opened. It was my friend.
"What happened?"
"I don't know," I said, "I was bringing you some wine and the bottle burst or something."
"Leave what you have in your hand there. I 'll ask someone to clean up. Don't step on any of the pieces."
I put the half bottle down and stepped over the pool of wine and went into my friend's apartment. I was feeling kind of dazed but felt worse when I saw what was on a side table of the entrence hallway where we usually left our shoes. It was the flower pot I had bought that noon. It was unrecognizable. It looked like it had been dead for weeks, and all the flowers had dropped off into a pile surrounding the dead trunk.
"Is that what they flower shop delivered?" I asked.
"Yes," she said curtly, but then seeing my face she added, "Here, you'd better come into the living room and have a drink. I think you would use one. You look pale."
I went into the living room. My friend's mother was there. She had a drink in her hand.
"Good evening, Ama," I said.
"Ah, good evening, young man. Come and sit down and tell me all about your flower shopping experience. By the way, where did you get those things? Did you pinch them at Père LaChaise?" She hissed the last part of the cemetery's name.
I was beyond responding to her sarcasm. My friend came in with my drink and said,
"Oh, mother, stop it. Something is going on. He was bringing a bottle of wine and it burst just as he got here."
"Just now?" Her mother asked.
"Yes, just now."
The mother looked at me as if she was trying to examine my face for chicken pox or something.
"I see what you mean. Yes, something is going on."
I finished my drink in silence and then my friend asked if I would accompany her to her rehearsal. I did but I sat through the whole two or three hours of it glumly, trying to figure out what had happened to the damned flowers, and why the wine bottle had burst. I thought maybe the paper had kept the heat shut in the flowers and they had died, and that maybe the wine had gone bad and produced gas. But, all my reasoning seemed a bit far fetched.
The next day when I went to the construction site to see how the setting up of the hemispheric screen was going, I found the engineer in charge was furious with me. He said they had followed my instructions on balancing the load of the structure but the front panels had still warped and some had buckled.
I climbed the catwalk and looked at the rigging. In Guadalajara, we had figured that the front panels of the dome in other sites had warped and wrinkled because the weight of the structure had cause the dome to slip forward since the 86 foot diameter dome was inclined 26 degrees from the horizontal. In Guadalajara we had reduced the inclination to 20 degrees and set up a cable system to "pull" on the dome so the weight would not make it slide forward. The key was that the "hook" where the cables were attached to the dome had to be dead center on the dome's "polar axis" position. The instructions were in english and so were the measurements. I found that the French had measured in centimetres, not inches. They were off about two feet. Nevertheless, I was blamed for not having told them about the English measurement system, even though the instructions were clearly marked. The damaged panels were expensive and there would be explanations to be made to the government overseer people before the panels could be replaced.
After I explained the correction that had to be made, I went to the hotel to change and then went to my friend's apartment. I told them what had happened and Ama, the mother said,
"The other day, I could see there was an aura of bad karma about you."
"No, not bad karma, just bad luck."
"Karma, luck, call it what you will, but I can see it all over you." She got up. "I will give you something for it."
I thought she would go fetch some green pills like the ones that were all the rage in Mexico a few years ago. They were supposed to cure everything from cancer to bad investments. When someone sent them to a laboratory for analysis they turned out to be no more than hard rock candy. When that scam petered out, a new one came along. This time it was a weed called "cat's claws." You were supposed to make tea with them and it was supposed to cure everything from cancer to... People will always believe there is a magic cure for things.
Ama came back, not with little pills or tea, but with a small silver box, like the kind people of yesteryear used for keeping snuff.
She said,
"Don't move. I am going to put something on your head."
I didn't move but I felt her finger rubbing something on the top of my head. She also murmured something in what I think must have been Gujurati, which was her native language. When she was done, she snapped shut the little box.
"What was that?" I asked.
"I put some ashes of my guru, a saint on hour head. They will make that aura of bad karma disappear."
"Ashes? You mean from..."
"His cremation, yes," she said.
I looked at my friend. She was smiling a sort of "just keep quiet and go along" smile. I did.
The next day I went to the construction site. Expecting that the engineer in charge would still be on the warpath, I tried going into the office by the back way. But, no luck: the engineer was coming down the hall just as I reached my office. But, much to my surprise, he greeted me with a smile and a handshake.
"Look here," he said, "I talked to the government overseer of the project and if you stand by the fact that you had explained to the foreman that the instructions were in inches and feet, we can claim it was a workman's oversight, due to misunderstanding in the translation or something of that sort and he said he would put it down to natural work delays which are always contemplated anyway and that he would authorize the buying of more panels."
"Oh, that's good to hear," I said, still in shock at the fellow's demeanor. "But, the foreman won't get into trouble, will he?"
"No, no," he said. "I'll just reprimand him verbally." And off he went.
I went to the site and saw that the workmen were already starting on the corrections.
"Well, nothing to do here," I thought and left.
I went back into town on the Metro and got off at the Etienne Marcel stop of Line 4 with the idea of going into the flower shop and complaining about the dead flower bush. I walked in forcefully and went up to the counter. The lady in charge was there.
"I've come to see about the flower..."
"Ah, monsieur, oui. The lady you gave the flowers to called and explained. I sent for the bush and saw that les racines...
"The roots," I translated.
"Yes, the roots...were bad. I apologize and I send another one that arrived very good," she said.
"But, why would it die so fast? It's strange, don't you think?"
"Oui, monsieur. I 'ave never seen it. Mais, c'est comme ça."
This was curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said. I decided to go to the wine shop just to see if that bit of bad luck would reverse itself, too. I took a left turn coming out of the flower shop and went to the wine shop.
I went in and saw that the wine merchant was unpacking wine from a wooden crate.
"Monsieur," I said, "yesterday I bought a bottle of Puilly Fuissé and..."
"Ah, oui, oui," he said without looking up from his unpacking, "it was vin bouché, n'est pas."
"Corked? You mean it was...yes, yes, of course. As soon as we tasted it."
"Oui. I have sent it back to the provider," he said, "what I can do, monsieur, is give you another bottle, not as expensive, but still very good, at 'alf of the price, eh?"
"Yes, yes, that's acceptable," I said deciding not to say a word about the broken bottle.
When I got to my friend's apartment, I told her about the reversal of my fortunes.
"That was a heck of set of coincidences," I said laughing.
"Not coincidences, young man, not coincidences," said the mother.
(The next and final part will be about a very funny concert at the UNESCO theater.)
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