Читать книгу God and Love on Route 80 - Stephen G. Post - Страница 13

It was early morning, misty and silver-gray, at the end of a long road to the unknown west. High above the sea, a long-haired blond youth leaned outward over a ledge, about to let go, when out of the mist appeared the light blue image of an angel’s face. Speaking softly and with great love, the angel said, “If you save him, you too shall live.” Then she faded back into the silver-gray mist.

The boy’s dream was vivid after he awoke, and it stuck with him over the course of the day and beyond. It started with a silvery-gray luminosity like a Tiffany stained glass window, and then came the leaning youth. Slowly it brightened into light blue, and out of that blue appeared the beautiful angel’s face. Then spoke her deeply soothing and peaceful voice, after which she faded into silver-gray.

The boy was asleep when he dreamed this dream but felt as though he was in a state different than mere sleep, though nothing like usual wakefulness. It was a strange feeling of being beyond place and time, and, when he awoke from this dream into the quiet of the dawn, he was unsure of where he was but felt secure and in oneness with something mysterious and peaceful. But then his sense of time and place would come back, and the day was upon him with all its chronological demands, and he would get dressed for breakfast and eight o’clock morning chapel.

The boy had a fabulous sacred studies teacher, Rev. Rod Welles, an Episcopal priest who loved the Buddhism of Alan Watts, and the boy told him about the dream over a formal Sunday dinner in the school’s large North Upper dining hall. North Upper was as elegantly constructed as the great dining hall in a Harry Potter novel, with sweeping varnished wooden beams pointing skywards, and oak tables and chairs in which sat five hundred young boys—a dozen boys per table—all suited up and just returned from mandatory Sunday chapel. Rev. Welles listened carefully, nodding his head, and said, “Well, in scripture an angel is a symbol of protection and brings messages, and light blue stands for purity and truth.” The other boys rolled their eyes and smiled, but no one actually laughed because they agreed that the boy was an okay kid, even if a bit ethereal and independent.

“Who knows, maybe there is synchronicity at work, and a youth on a ledge awaits you somewhere in the future,” Rev. Welles added. “Anyway, it’s just a dream. But it could be from God; it could have a true message and reflect something more than your own classroom worries about that ‘swirling downward vortex slowly sucking you into an immoral universe,’ as you tend to put things.”

“Maybe,” the boy responded, and now his friends around the table nodded in wide-eyed approval.

The boys of St. Paul’s called their teachers “Sir” at the time. They dressed in jackets and ties, lived simple and disciplined lives, and studied hard. It was a pure and good place to be, and Anglican in style and litany as it was a school still firmly rooted in the Episcopal tradition. He had just a few close friends because he preferred to remain self-possessed and simple. There were lots of people he got along with well, but they knew they had to give him space to be himself, and that was all he wanted. He figured it was simple to be happy but hard to be simple, and not everyone valued simplicity.

These were not tough times in the boy’s life—he was not spending long afternoons under a hot sun raking fall leaves for Mr. Chapin to work off his very occasional demerit points, nor was he eating dyspepsia-inducing hotdogs or flunking courses, and he had not been bullied or abused by anyone. Though he was surely outclassed up there because he was from Long Island and not New York City, St. Paul’s was a beautiful place that got him out of Babylon. Rev. Welles came to refer to the boy as “the Babylonian dreamer” and would mirthfully mouth Namaste with palms touching and fingers pointed upwards when the boy walked past his seat in the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul each morning. The boy was really from Babylon, literally, but not the ancient one with hanging gardens, rather the one on Long Island by the Great South Bay, which was for the boy an isolated commuter town far away from anything interesting other than the clamming.

He took to reading about ancient Babylon because all the other boys in history class knew about the great city in Mesopotamia, yet the boy knew nothing of it, drawing gasps from his more sophisticated peers when he proclaimed before all in his first class as a freshman Third Former, “Oh, I know all about Babylon because that’s my home town. We have hanging plants in Argyle Park on Main Street. And I snag herring in the little waterfalls.”

Sometimes Rev. Welles would seek the boy out in the crowd of “Paulies” scurrying from the chapel to the main schoolhouse along ice-covered, winding red brick paths in the cold New Hampshire mornings and ask, in a tone of pastoral warmth, “So, Babylon, any more blue angel dreams?”

“No, Sir. It’s just once every few months at most, but nothing for a while, no, Sir.”

Rev. Welles enjoyed hearing about the dream because he was always spiritually curious, and sometimes a good Episcopal priest needs a whispered hint that “God” is not dead. Kids can sometimes have spiritual experiences that adults can’t even begin to understand. The boy had tea on occasion with Rev. Welles and his lovely wife Julie in their dorm apartment, and they were a bit mystified by the spiritual side of him but found hope in the idea that maybe there really is an inspiring universal Mind and they really had eternal souls. The boy was entertaining in his simplicity, telling only tasteful light jokes and keeping things memorably mirthful. He was a natural starry-eyed wanderer, and he felt comfortable speaking of the dream to the right sort of people to get their opinions. He was never overbearing or overly serious because he liked to see people smile, but he raised a lot of sincere, big questions without becoming unwelcome. He was the one who asked that one last big question when everyone thought the conversation was done and wanted to head out the door.

Over time the boy came to think that certain dreams are inflowing gifts from the infinite Mind that our little minds are a part of, like small points of light within an endless field of brightness, but we lack awareness of this. If we were more aware of this spiritual connectivity, we would harm no one, do good to all including ourselves, and we would be healed and healing in every encounter without exception. Some dreams can reveal destinies and should be followed, although following them brings testing…there must always be tests. He believed in destiny more than goals because if he had many goals he would never be open to destiny. He couldn’t be filled with his own little goals and be open to having a larger destiny at the same time. This frustrated many of his teachers because they thought he had good potential but was markedly different from the other boys. He started to read about dreams and symbols, and he wore a simple silver ring with a green stone in it because a book said that green was the color of the Holy Spirit and comforting, like when you rest on a grassy field under the summer sun. He would wear that ring, which he purchased for five dollars in a little spiritual store in Cambridge, all of his life.

If the dream did nothing else, it awakened in him many questions and endless possibilities.

Why the Boy Was Known as “the Boy”

In the fall of his last year at St. Paul’s School, the boy and Rev. Welles drove the four hours down to Yale Divinity School, where the Babylonian spoke of the dream in a class on adolescent psychology and pastoral care taught by one Professor James E. Dittes. Rev. Welles was a Yale Divinity grad and still very much a part of things there, and he wondered what these aspiring ministers would think about his Babylonian boy. The boy was happy to get out from classes for the day and take such a special trip. The Rector of St. Paul’s, Rev. Matt Warren, thought this would be a great educational adventure so he supported it, although he himself did not know much of the dream.

And so Rev. Welles and the boy drove through New Haven along Prospect Street to the Divinity School and sat down in a seminar room around a wooden table with about twenty students, and the boy described the dream in detail, concluding only that maybe God was calling him to an unknown western ledge. This scared them a bit. To everyone’s consternation, the boy revealed that the dream had prompted him to apply to a far-out West Coast college in distant Portland, where the Jungian Beat poet Robert Bly taught the musicality of words and no St. Paul’s boys dared to venture. The boy would sometimes quote Bly and veer off into a stream-of-consciousness word flow like Beat poets do, like his favorites Kerouac and Muhammad Ali, and later Maya Angelou.

“Yes, the ledge and the angel and the road to the west, and the feeling that the road will find me when I stumble on it,” the boy summarized, after telling the students about his dream. The students were cordial and asked many probing questions until the two hours were over. The boy had a few of them on the edge of their seats. They took notes.

“So what does it all mean to you, spiritually?” asked one of them.

“Well, I think it is about finding my destiny. It is Emerson’s Over-Soul reaching down and saying that my destiny lies within its wisdom, not mine, limited as it is. We all read Emerson up at school because it’s required, but no one really takes him seriously. I do though. He inspired me to read Hindu scriptures a bit. The Hindus write about the “Supreme Mind” or “God,” and we are all of us a part of it because each mind is a precious drop of this infinite Mind, plus it underlies the whole universe. It is infinite, universal, and supreme. So we are free but connected with one another, and that explains a lot of why we have spiritual feelings of oneness. It makes the blue dream I had maybe something that was given to me rather than something I just imagined after a long day.”

Professor Dittes asked, “Well, that’s what Jung would say, more or less, with his collective unconscious. The Hindus get it, too. Western folks think it’s a little crazy. We in the West have no idea what Mind is all about. So what is God to you? Mind?”

“Sir, God is an infinite universal original loving Mind that is all around us and within us, and all of our individual minds are a part of God’s mind like small flames in an eternal fire, which means we are all connected with God and one another and even with nature, and that explains spirituality,” answered the boy. “So I sometimes call God ‘IM’ for infinite Mind, but it so happens that in the Hebrew Bible it says God is the unnamed ‘I am,’ so it works out. Maybe universal Mind is better in some ways. It sounds less far away, and I agree with the idea that Mind is right within everything. But infinite Mind seems to work best. And when I stare into the fireplace, I see all the little shoots of flame flickering around in the big flame: they are parts of it but also distinct. God is the big flame and we are the little ones, but all is one. I like the passage from Acts 17, ‘For in God we live and move and have our being.’ ”

The professor was a bit startled. “That’s a little fuzzy. Do you think that there is just this single Mind?” he asked.

“Well, Sir, I feel it mostly. But yes, Mind is one, and we all have this indwelling Mind that is beyond place and time like Emerson wrote, and this explains why we can have blue angel dreams and intuitions and premonitions and feelings for the oneness.”

“Anything else?” asked the professor.

“Well,” said the boy, “I also think that, because of this oneness of Mind, when we help someone else we also help ourselves, and that may be what the blue angel was saying with ‘If you save him, you too shall live,’ but I do not know for sure and I do not know how I will find that out.”

“So are you okay? Did Grandma Emily tell you too many times not to put your peas on your fork with your thumb? Did she teach you too much etiquette?” one of the Yale students asked with a laugh.

“Ah, Rev. Welles must have mentioned that,” and the boy nodded toward the Reverend.

“Hey, I feel great. And Emily wasn’t really my grandmother because my granddad Edwin divorced her when he got involved with a great-looking Broadway chorus girl in 1906 who became my real grandma, most likely. I don’t know for sure because my folks are never very explicit about these details. That’s when Emily started writing those books about manners because Etiquette paid the bills. I only met her once in New York when Dad was visiting his half-brother. I was a little kid. But Ned Jr. wrote me a letter to get me into St. Paul’s. Grandfather Edwin lost all his money and his seat on the Stock Exchange in bad railroad investments, so Babylon was really the end of the line for him. But she got her last name from him and a couple of sons.”

Everyone cracked up.

“So what’s the blue angel message?” asked Professor Dittes.

“Well, like I said, maybe there is a message in the words ‘If you save him, you too shall live.’ Maybe the words will find me before I find them. But I am not headed for a gray flannel suit à la Sloan Wilson or drinking martinis.”

“But all Episcopalians drink martinis, and Jesus drank wine,” the students responded collectively, with smiles.

“Well, folks, if I were living back in the days of the Old Testament, I would have been a Nazarite, one of those people who abstains from wine and alcohol by some sort of vow. The idea is that you want to keep your mind clear and open to the infinite Mind, to divine inspiration, to intuitions and things, and drinking just gets in the way. It’s an obstacle. Jesus did drink wine, but that was all they had back then, and he got to a point where he said he would no more drink of the fruit of the vine in Mark 14 as he got closer to the end. And John the Baptist was a lifelong Nazarite. St. Paul was too. Nazar means “set apart,” but it really means staying clear-headed and mindful of spirit. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else, but different. See, my Uncle Gary, for whom I was given my middle name, died of liver failure, and I went to his funeral in Groton. He was only forty-five or so. I don’t look down on people who drink, but I don’t understand why they do, and I wish Uncle Gary was alive. He gave up so much in life for one thing when he could have given up that one thing and had everything, including a good nephew. I drank beer a few times a year ago, mainly to try and fit in with the Long Island Babylonian guys that summer, or even once last fall with some St. Paul’s guys on a long weekend in Boston at the Statler Hilton Hotel by the Commons, but it just made me feel blocked and stuck, so I am now officially a lifelong Nazarite and plan to stay this way. I don’t want to miss true inspirations of Mind. Why should anyone give up a feeling of the living presence of the infinite Mind to drink?”

The Yale students looked shocked and wide-eyed, and one responded with a “Well, whatever floats your boat. But it isn’t our culture.”

“So how do you fit in with people up there in New Hampshire?” someone else asked.

“Well, okay. I am mostly happy to have escaped Babylon and for being up there, but those guys are really into big financial goals and Ivy League schools and I just don’t think about those things. I fit in really well with nature up there—I love the woods and the architecture and the sermons on Sundays. I am lucky to be there, and people treat me better than on Long Island. The Babylon that I know is pretty rough. There are a lot of hoods and bullies, and St. Paul’s is like a really cool orphanage and folks leave me in peace, even though I don’t go to hockey games because they are mostly violence interrupted by long unnecessary meetings and guys blowing whistles all the time.”

“What about the dream’s ledge?”

“Who knows, but aren’t we all a little on the ledge? Aren’t we all running on empty a little and that’s why you’re here listening to a kid like me? I’m not actually on the ledge in the dream, it’s the other guy. But this whole world is on the ledge.”

“Do you play sports?” the good professor asked.

“Well, I run cross-country well and do cross-country skiing, because that’s more me than the team stuff, and it keeps me independent. People call me ‘the boy’ because that’s what the cross-country coach, Señor Ordonez, calls me when we’re out running. ‘Okay, Boy, up the hill,’ he yells out. He never calls the students by their first names, only ‘the boy so-and-so,’ like ‘the boy Smith.’ But he just calls me ‘the boy’ and says that’s all I need, because my older brother was in school there a couple of years ago and he already claimed ‘the boy so-and-so.’ Plus, he and I are not much alike, and Señor Ordonez liked my brother a lot.”

“So people just refer to you as ‘the boy’?” asked the professor.

“Yes, they do, or at least many do, and I like that because Rev. Welles says that we should all go through the whole course of our lives staying a little childlike, keeping connected with the child within us all, like Jung wrote. That’s our true self, the self that isn’t beaten down by disappointments and loses the mirth and joy of the child. Plus, I look a little more boyish than some in maybe a slightly mischievous, half-Irish kind of way, and as I grow older I want to stay a little immature to balance out aging. Even when I am an old man, I will still be the boy, and that is how I want it. I don’t want to grow up if that means losing the boy. I almost think of growing up as an illness and aging as a disease, just because look at what happens to people, all bent over and stuff! I still like old folks a lot, but they have hard times ahead.”

The students all smiled and discussed this inner child, and they said that if he could stay spiritually young all his life it would be great.

Rev. Welles chimed in, “You just have to put aside all the pressures of life and look deep into your soul and remember yourself as an innocent happy child and connect with that image. We all are only here a while anyway, and we are spiritual children so long as we don’t get completely bogged down.”

“And that drop of the Mind within us that we talk about in philosophy class that is beyond time and place, that is really the child within,” offered the boy.

Professor Dittes was, like Rev. Welles, a Jungian, so he understood the boy. The boy was fun for all the Yale folks, and he helped them reclaim their souls in a way that all their theology books could not. He liked to challenge people to reclaim their souls, and that’s why he spoke of the dream when he might just have easily pretended that he never had it. Being a blue angel dreamer does not quite pack the resume like hockey does, and it is no way to begin a college interview.

After a couple of hours, the professor thanked the boy, saying, “Well, some dreams happen for reasons we do not know. We are all connected in the collective unconscious, which Jung thought was the core of all spiritual experience and symbolism. So for next week, everyone, write a little reflective essay on the boy and his blue angel dream.”

“Yes, we are connected,” added the boy. “I mean, Alan Watts says even physically. Look at my glasses—thousands of people helped make these. Someone gathered the sand and melted the glass, and someone made the machine to do it with, and someone had to mine iron ore to make the steel to make the aluminum frames, and someone drove a truck to deliver these but there has to be a road and workers and it just goes on and on and on. We depend on the kindness of countless others for every detail of our lives. But, Professor, what I believe is that we are also all connected spiritually, all part of the divine Mind and so all kinds of spiritual connections are possible that completely go beyond the limits of time and place. The problem is that we think we are more separate than we are, so bad stuff happens.”

“Do you think anyone will ever prove that this God, this infinite Mind, is real?” he asked the boy.

“Well, Sir, I would like to be more certain of it myself. And that is what the dream may be about. So I am inclined to follow it…who knows where, but west, somehow. I almost want to go on a westward pilgrimage, but I have no real idea of where to. Otherwise I might.”

Then the whole group walked down the hallway to an early evening chapel service. The boy played Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring on his classical guitar, and Rev. Welles gave a little sermon on how the pelican is a Christian symbol of love because it plucks its breast vein if it has to in order to feed its offspring. The pelican is the school symbol at St. Paul’s for that reason, explained the Rev. Welles. Finally, they all had dinner in the dining hall before the boy and his teacher drove back up Route 91 to New Hampshire.

Sometimes at the start of his philosophy class, where the boys read about psychology and religious experience that can shift emotions toward tranquility beyond time and place, Rev. Welles would ask, “How real does that dream feel?”

“Well, like more than just any dream. It has a glow to it, and it feels real enough to puzzle me. It calls me, it pulls me,” the boy answered, to the delight of his accepting peers. After all, the boy had visited Yale Divinity School and taught the students there about universal Mind, which to them was kind of wacky but also impressive. They wondered why the boy did not want to apply there for college, but he didn’t want to. Nothing Ivy would do.

“It feels a bit like I am actually headed west to do something. It’s only a dream, and I don’t really believe in angels, and then I wake up and it’s gone, but I remember it clearly. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I am sleeping but not really, kind of in some special zone. Sometimes I think this is infinite Mind telling me something that I don’t understand yet, something that I have to discover and not give up on, because in the long run I might find out where I am headed. Guys, you know you are all trying to get to someplace or other like Harvard or Yale, but not me. If I have a goal, I am going to be lured to it by divine Mind, because it isn’t coming from me. Goals are desperate detours from destiny.”

The other boys were not at all surprised to hear this, because they knew the boy. “Well, if you are into this infinite Mind stuff, who really needs school?” one asked.

The boy answered, “Good question.”

There was a beautiful life-size bronze statue of St. Paul outside the chapel, and the boys would pass by and touch its outstretched hand with a smile on their way to dinner at the Upper.

“For luck,” they would exclaim, but the boy had read enough Jung to reply, “For synchronicity, not luck.”

“Hey, whatever floats your boat, Babylon!” his classmates said. “So where does Jesus fit in?” they asked in class.

“Well,” answered the boy, “we are all sinners and can’t get to high goodness on our own, but there is a power of goodness in the universe that we could all draw on and use if we let it come our way. Something needed to happen to close the gap. Jesus had complete God consciousness, and this explains his amazing healing and creativity and love; it made his sacrifice very special and far more spiritually transformative than anything anyone else could do to open a window into the divine. I don’t recite Creeds much in church, but I believe that Jesus had the unique spiritual calling that got him betrayed and nailed to a cross while maintaining the dignity of perfect love and forgiveness, so that God could overlook the fact that human nature is not a pretty thing and cherish us all anyway despite ourselves. The test for infinite love is the manner of response to infinite adversity.”

In the library, the boy read spiritual classics and Frankel and Huxley and Bly and Kerouac. At Rev. Welles’ suggestion, he devoured the ancient philosopher Plotinus because he was into the One, the infinite Mind and its continuity with every human mind. He dug into scriptures of the world’s religions and wrote essays about how material things, competition, and glory do not constitute success, but that an awareness of our connection within the divine Mind can spring from sensing the emptiness of it all.

“Thoreau-like,” his English teacher, Mr. George Carlisle, called him more than once. “The boy is a good kid, but not in a very useful sense.” Occasionally, instead of going to watch the teams play soccer or hockey on a Saturday afternoon, the boy would wander the wooded paths up at Turkey Pond, pondering some passage from a book by whichever mystic he was reading that week. And he would read while walking around the library pond, uplifted by the magnificent fall colors or the snow, sometimes tripping on a rock. His good friend, the poet Ned Perkins, who edited the literary magazine and whose grandfather Malcolm Perkins was the editor for F. Scott Fitzgerald, referred to the boy as a “peripatetic spiritual road duck.” “Peripatetic” means that you walk around reading stuff on paths, and road ducks sometimes get run over.

Most Sundays the boy joined a handful of other students with a Catholic history in the cab ride to attend Mass at Concord Carmel—short for the Carmelite Sisters of the Monastery of Our Lady and St. Joseph—down Pleasant Street from St. Paul’s. They practiced silent prayer there and seemed to get the idea of a connecting Mind that we become more aware of when we stop talking and thinking, when we get away from reason and logic and go deeper into a still awareness of the divine Mind.

The boy was a natural-born Carmelite mystic, and sometimes also stopped by Carmel on Saturday afternoons on the way to Charlie’s Pool Hall in downtown Concord, which was about a three-mile walk. He liked the nuns a lot, and often spoke with the sisters when they were out on the grounds and not sequestered about how they experienced what they called the Mind of God in their quiet rooms.

He then would continue on to Charlie’s because he thought pool was Zen à la Kerouac, bumming cigarettes from the townies to look Bogart-cool in his old trench coat, even though he didn’t smoke them really. It was just to blend in at Charlie’s. They liked the boy because he tutored their little brothers and sisters at the Millville School, a red brick grade school across from St. Paul’s on Pleasant Street. The students were mostly poor and lived out in the country. In his last year the boy tutored math and reading most afternoons for a few hours and got to know a lot of the parents. He liked the Millville School and it felt like his kind of place, where he could be who he was. Giving was living. He felt a giver’s glow.

Then there was the mandatory Sunday mid-morning Mass in the school chapel, a thing of beauty to the boy, with sermons and music and common prayers that shaped him and made him who he was and would be.

Working with Rev. Welles, he had written his Sixth Form or senior paper on this infinite Mind and love that pervades the universe, and from which our individual minds at least mostly originate. That was a core belief for the New England Transcendentalists, who borrowed it from Hindu metaphysics. Our minds, wrote the boy, are more than matter; they have their origins in a Mind that preceded the universe and matter. Plato and Plotinus both thought so, and the boy agreed. “My mind,” he wrote, “is a very small part of the infinite Mind such that I have a separate identity and individual destiny, but without ever being separated from the wholeness of a universal Mind that includes all other minds as well. We are all small points of light in the endless field of divine luminosity.”

“Honors in Ancient History and Sacred Studies” was the sole distinction conferred on the boy at graduation, except for La Junta—the Spanish club—and cross-country. The other boys had a lot more items listed under their photos in the class yearbook because they were aiming high. The boy wasn’t aiming at all, which made all the difference. He was runner-up for the math prize. The boy kept it simple.

At graduation, when Rev. Welles asked the boy about his plans in life, he answered, “Well, Sir, I am supposed to go to Swarthmore College, as you know, and thanks for the letter of recommendation. Gerry Studds wrote a good one too for American History class. They let me in off the waiting list a week ago. But I really just am not sure I need college. Maybe there is some westward road. Sir, you have been the best, the best—and Julie too.”

Rev. Welles smiled, shook his head a bit, and raised his thick dark James Bond eyebrows a little pessimistically. “Well, keep us posted and stay in touch. Do some good, that’s all we can ask. And stay off Wall Street, Babylon.”

“Yes, Sir, I will. Thanks for everything. There’s a road out there somewhere.”

“All right, Babylon. It will find you.”

And the boy returned to Babylon, from whence he had come.

But now things get a little confessional. The wild side of life—including the mea culpa part—is always there waiting, and the boy was about to experience it in a way that would alter his path forever. He really was heading west.

Why the Boy Took the Car, the Big Argument, and the Journey West

Most boys who are honest and trustworthy have at least one big argument with their dads growing up. That doesn’t mean that they should seek it out, but if it finds them and involves defending their integrity, the confrontation must be accepted with courage. This doesn’t mean that dads are bad, or boys either. It’s just about growing up.

It was early July, and the boy was home in Babylon after graduation, thinking that college made no sense. One Saturday evening he drove out to Westhampton Beach, a seaside town filled with lively young people and quite a few St. Paul’s guys celebrating the end of school at a class graduation party. The boy felt so removed from the scene and the drinking that he walked away. It just seemed like such a waste of minds.

That evening did not find him struggling to escape from some dark valley of despair. But he saw no meaning in going to Swarthmore anymore, where he had in the end decided to go because it was supposedly more acceptable and East Coast than heading out west to Reed, where he had received an offer that he turned down.

After returning home late that night the boy was feeling claustrophobic, stuck on a too Long Island, and, thinking about his dream, determined that he just might journey to the west after all. Now, anyone who would follow a blue dream as though it were a direction sign is trusting the universe more than most, but the boy sort of wanted to do just that. He had no worldly goals, but he was open to surprises.

Anyway, St. Paul himself was always on the road, and so were Kerouac and Whitman, he thought. Sometimes that early July he would drive over to Huntington along the North Shore and stop at Whitman’s birthplace on Route 110, or to Northport, the next town over, to visit Gunther’s Tap Room where Kerouac spent years drinking heavily after he wrote On the Road. The boy would hang out there, ordering Cokes and asking the fishermen about Kerouac. Some remembered a guy jotting words down on napkins at a corner table while others just drew a blank. The bartender knew a lot about Kerouac and hung old news articles about him on the wall.

“After all,” said the bartender, “Kerouac coined the term ‘Beat Generation,’ so we give him most of the wall space on that side.”

It was heaven-sent that, in the middle of that July, the boy and his dad got into a fierce argument; otherwise he would never have had the audacity to follow the dream to the west in the way that he did. There had to be a push as well as a pull, and it really helps if the push is strong when the pull is as vague as a recurring dream. Why the argument? The boy had been offered a great summer job tutoring inner-city kids in the Bronx, building on his Millville experience. But his dad thought the location was dangerous. He said he’d had someone check it out, but the boy doubted it. The bottom line was that his folks did not have any sense for who the boy was, and anyway he was overshadowed by two superstar older siblings.

“It’s dangerous in the Bronx, and your mother is against it,” Dad said over his standard whiskey on the rocks. It was mostly Mom who’d pressured him to take a stand against the Bronx.

“Dad, this is something that I planned on and it means everything to me,” said the boy. “Rev. Welles pulled a few strings and set it up, and it is one thing I really want to do.”

“Look, you can’t do it. I won’t put up with it. That’s it. No further discussion.” The tone was terminal.

The boy managed a few words of defiance: “Look, folks, this just makes no sense. It confines me, and I am going to do this.”

“You will not,” said Mom, in a serious throaty tone, red lipstick covering her cigarette, martini in hand.

Dad stood up angrily and thundered, with all the strength of the WW II Navy Commander that he had been, “You are upsetting your mother!”

“I am not dropping this job, that’s it!” the boy repeated.

Then, Mom, having had her several drinks, and Dad too, raised the stakes. “I’m paying for Swarthmore, so either you drop this job or you’re paying on your own.”

He paused. “Okay, but I am not thinking of you as good parents. So what am I supposed to do this summer?”

“I can call Bill De Bono,” Dad said. “Bill’s got a lampshade factory. You can make lampshades in Patchogue.” At the time Dad was the VP of W&J Sloane’s Furniture Store on Fifth Avenue, so he knew a lot of people around New York who were in the lamp business.

“Oh, what the heck!” the boy relented. He had nothing against hard work, but it would be empty manual labor.

So now he had a job in Patchogue, a town about half an hour farther east, in Bill De Bono’s lampshade factory. The boy tried it for a couple of weeks. Old Bill, cigar in hand, stationed him on an assembly line, cutting cardboard forms between two large Italian women, Maria and Cassandra. These were hardworking, salt-of-the-earth women, and the boy got along with them okay; the boy got along with everyone. But the factory did not have air conditioning, so it was hot and sweaty and smelly. And with each passing day he became angrier and more ready to head off to greener pastures in a way that might just declare his total and complete emancipation from his parents’ influence forever and ever.

Dad still had that second-hand gray Mercedes 190 that he had bought to look good when he visited St. Paul’s. One hot, muggy Friday, two weeks into his factory job, the boy drove the 190 to the factory as usual and put in a solid day of hard labor. Then, that evening, he drove out to Westhampton again to spend a few days with friends—good old Livy, a buddy from St. Paul’s, and the boy’s nice blonde girlfriend Lee, whom he liked a lot because he could look into her eyes and see the universe as the waves were crashing into the dunes. The folks were okay with his borrowing the 190 because they could drive the other car. The next night, a Saturday, was the fateful night the boy finally decided to set out on an unspecified quest west.

That evening the boy sat on the bench pondering his favorite book, Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, about “Ultimate Reality” and dharma, and knew he was worried that everything he was doing was pointless and that at his dying breath he would be filled with regrets over a meaningless life. Putting aside his copy of Huxley, he pulled his heavily underlined copy of Hesse’s Siddhartha out of his backpack. It tells about a young man born into a rich family—a.k.a. the Buddha—who took to the road on a spiritual journey of self-discovery, seeking meaning and authenticity.

At eleven that night, feeling the need to resist the downward vortex of family life, he got into the Mercedes 190 and said goodbye to Lee and Livy without telling them anything about his plans. He just started driving west. He followed the Sunrise Highway (Route 27) to the Long Island Expressway (I-495). He drove through the Midtown Tunnel and up the FDR Drive and over the George Washington Bridge and just followed the signs for Route 80 West. He did not have a road map, but west is west, and the only other sign was for I-95 South. There was nothing about “south” in the dream.

Route 80 runs from the George Washington Bridge in the east to the Bay Bridge in the west. But when you’re following a dream any long highway will do, so you can pick your own.

After a couple of hours on 80, rationality kicked in a bit and the boy began to have real doubts about taking Dad’s car, although he was pissed about the job—and maybe he even lost a little faith in the dream for a few minutes. He decided to turn around and head home, like any respectable kid should, and try to renegotiate things—although communication with his parents had never been good. If he turned back now, no one would ever know that he had even been out on Route 80. That was the boy’s thinking at the time, but the divine Mind had other plans.

Synchronicity intervened, gracefully but with awesome power. The boy was close to making a U-turn across the midway when something totally uncanny and unexpected happened that changed his life forever—and ultimately for the better.

Rather than crossing over the median, the car barely made it to the right shoulder of the highway as the generator failed and the entire engine went dead. It was still dark, but the sun was beginning to rise. The boy had all of fifty dollars in his wallet, no credit cards, and there at the intersection of Route 80 with Route 215 near Milton and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, there was nothing visible for miles but wheat fields and cornstalks. The boy felt like the generator had broken as an act of God, and for one good reason: the universe was now forcing him to live out his dream. And since he was now pretty far from home, there was no turning back.

So the boy did what only an adolescent male with limited management skills and a typical underdeveloped frontal cortex might do. He took a pencil from the glove compartment and carefully printed in large block letters the following note on a scrap of paper:

To the Pennsylvania State Police:

Please return this car to Henry my dad,

44 Davison Lane East

West Islip, New York

Call 516-669-5655.

—His son, who just quit the lampshade factory for good

Just as the sun was rising, the boy stood on the side of Route 80 with his thumb out, his classical guitar case and backpack full of spiritual books at his side, and prayed for a ride. The very first vehicle that came along, a big white truck, pulled over and the driver yelled out, “Okay, kid, where you headed?”

And the boy responded, “Thanks, sir. Goin’ west, looks like!”

“Well, how far?”

“Far, sir!”

“Well, not sure where far is, but I can get you to Chicago, so jump in. My name is Gary.”

“Okay, I had an uncle named Gary, but his liver failed. He almost drank himself to death in Africa and came home to live in Connecticut. He visited the house once or twice but was falling all over the place. He was too far gone to take any interest in me, even though I got my middle name to honor the guy. Those heavy drinkers give up everything for one thing when they could give up one thing for everything.”

“No drinking here, kid, not on the road.” Gary had a Bible on the seat and a wooden cross hanging from the big mirror in front of him.

“So what are you doing out here, kid?”

And the boy told him about the lampshade factory and then a little about the dream. Gary was very quiet as the boy spoke and looked deeply pensive. He was a good listener, and very present in the moment. After the boy finished, there was a long silence.

“Well, kid, that Mercedes 190 back there and the note, it should make its way back to your dad, but he won’t be happy. That’s a long way from Long Island. You sure you want to head west? You should at least call home.”

As Gary spoke, he pointed to the towering mountains and steep, rocky granite cliffs right at the edge of Route 80 after you pass that Lewisburg/Milton exit.

“Did you ever see mountain cliffs like that, kid?”

“No, but wow! They are amazing,” answered the boy.

“Up on that one over in the distance you can see a big white cross at the top. People along Route 80 have all done things that they probably shouldn’t have. We all do. But down here below the cross we are all still okay, because even when we don’t look up and think about that cross as we drive on by, we are always covered by it. Still, you need to call your mom,” he said, without sounding judgmental.

“Kid,” he continued, “you still have to try to do your best and someday, somehow you will make the most of things.”

“I might have handled this better, Gary,” I replied. “But the car broke down and there was this dream and the world needs dreamers. Plus, I really wanted that tutoring job. Dad, he will get the car back somehow. I should be okay heading west. I will get back at some point, I guess. Anyway, the car breaking when it did was some kind of quantum alchemy. It happened for a reason.

“Well, you never really quite get back to where you left from in the same way. But that’s not too bad, kid,” said Gary. “And your dad will eventually get his car. So let’s head to Chicago. But it’s early morning, so I will say a prayer. Yup, way kind of leads on to way.”

And Gary improvised a prayer out loud for the boy and his journey to the west, ending with, “Now Lord, wherever this boy goes and whatever he does, let your Light shine on his highway, and protect him from every kind of danger because he could get in trouble. So take care of him please, and take care of his parents, and let him learn from all this. Amen.” It was deeper than anything the boy had ever heard, heartfelt rather than formulaic.

***

As the morning sun started to shine brightly and puffy white clouds filled the Ohio skies, the boy began to feel tranquility. Forgetting about the car and how angry Dad was going to be, he fell asleep and woke up in Indiana.

Around noon they pulled into a McDonald’s and Gary treated the boy to lunch. Gary was tall and thin and dressed in Western style, his well-worn jeans and red-and-white checked shirt topped with a brown leather vest. He carried himself with grace and was careful about what he said. He was kind to the boy.

“Kid, maybe you could call your mom now from that booth,” he suggested.

“Not now, maybe later for sure. I’m not certain what I would say,” answered the boy.

The boy didn’t take the journey so much as it took him. We are all more taken than in control, and the journey finds us even if we are not quite clear about seeking it. That includes mechanical failures on Route 80. Sure, we have some control over our lives, but so much that happens to us is a surprise. The boy had no idea, for example, that the generator would break near Lewisburg. Okay, you can say that, when it happened, he should have waited for the police and called home. But he was so tired of cutting cardboard, so mad about not doing his summer tutoring job, that he was ready for a big escape. Was it infinite Mind that caused the generator to break down and stopped that big white truck as soon as the boy stuck out his thumb? It all happened so quickly, it felt like a perfect divine setup. A lot of things that happen are much more set up than we realize, but we need to notice this and listen to the whispers.

Backtracking to Birth

As far as the boy was concerned, even his conception smacked of synchronicity.

He owed his embodied existence to a car crash on the LIE, the Long Island Expressway or I-495, which at the time was known as the Queens-Midtown Expressway. It runs east from Manhattan, a stretch of highway packed with big trucks in a hurry and tense commuters snarled in traffic jams—drivers so stressed-out by trying to make ends meet in the glittery pressure cooker that is Greater New York that they cut you off, cursing or gesturing obscenely in the process. In 1948, two perfect strangers in two separate cars were driving east out of Manhattan after work. Henry was a lamp buyer and Molly was a saleslady at Macy’s. It was a Friday afternoon and traffic was bad. Somewhere in Queens, Henry’s Chevy rear-ended Molly’s Ford.

Now the boy’s Irish Catholic mother, Molly, who was raised on a Bridgehampton potato farm, used to say that the crash and the meeting that followed was an “act of God, a bit of grace.” Like a lot of Irish folks, she tended to attribute divine meaning to things. Otherwise, when the boy asked Mom how she met Dad, she would only be able to say, “Well, Dad plowed into my car on the LIE and he looked pretty good.”

When the boy was at St. Paul’s, he had to give a chapel talk one morning about how little control we have over how we enter this life. So he told the story of how his parents met, which was shocking to the elite student body who were a little too high-brow to think well of marriages born on the road, and especially on the LIE.

The boy said, “Yup, Dad just rear-ended Mom on the LIE.” Everyone laughed, and the boy couldn’t figure out why until Rector Matt Warren, the imposing headmaster, tapped the boy’s shoulder and asked, “Would you possibly be referring to her automobile?”

“Yes, Sir, her automobile, of course, Sir!” he responded.

“That’s better,” said the Rector. “Be careful with words.”

The boy had no love for the LIE, that noisy, ugly, congested slab of concrete covered with fumes, and he avoided it for the most part because of the trucks. But he had to affirm it as key to his conception. If there had been no crash, he would not have gotten his start as a zygote a few years later. He tended to view that crash as synchronicity in action; there was clearly nothing rational or normal about how his parents met.

How Mr. and Mrs. Muller Taught the Boy

Wise old Mr. Karl Muller and Mrs. Muller saved the boy in every way that a kid can be saved, especially spiritually.

The boy at age five

The boy’s family lived a very long seventy miles east of Manhattan where culture mostly meant boats, clamming, and drinking on the beach or at yacht club parties. The sand at the end of Oak Neck Lane was littered with beer cans and broken bottles, so kids would sometimes slice their feet when they went swimming and have to head to Good Samaritan Hospital.

When the boy was six years old, there were no kids his age on the lane. Mom worried that he spent too much time by himself and encouraged him to “go out and do something for someone.”

“Okay, Mom, I’ll go to Mr. and Mrs. Mullers’ place.”

He was gone for the rest of the day. He headed down the street about a quarter mile to the Mullers’ little white house, walked up the back steps to the second story over the garage, and knocked on their door. The Mullers had no children of their own. They were well into their seventies and more quietly reflective than effusive, but there was a depth about them, and they always welcomed the boy. They kept a cross on the wall in their kitchen and a Bible on the table just below it. They did not drink, but Mr. Muller smoked some. The Mullers didn’t have a lot of wealth, but they were at peace: simple folks, unpretentious, plainly dressed, like in a spiritually evocative Rembrandt painting. Mr. Muller had a pension because he had worked for years building airplanes for Grumman, which was a big deal on Long Island before it moved away.

“Mr. Muller, I’m here to do something for you, like maybe rake leaves or rake the gravel on the driveway. Is that okay with you? Mom sent me.”

Karl Muller rose and walked down the steps with the boy to find something for him to do. The boy got two nickels for his work.

“Save it so you can go to a good school one day,” he told the boy. That seemed like sound advice, and the boy thought that Mr. Muller seemed like he would be a good manager for a young kid to have.

Mr. Muller also told him, “Boy, you get a lot done, but you seem kind of old for a kid of six. That’s good, but you’ve got lessons ahead of you, and hard lessons are learned hard. That’s the only way. No one can learn your lessons for you.”

“Why can’t I learn from other people’s mistakes? Do I just have to learn from my own?”

“You can learn from others, but not the hard stuff.”

Mr. Muller was a Presbyterian who believed rightly that human nature is a mixed bag. He smiled some, and when he did it was a warm, generous smile, but he didn’t smile all the time.

“Smiling is okay. Be cheerful, but never trust people who smile all the time,” he said. “They are just after your nickels. The thing about people is, they’re never all that good, none of them, and you have to tolerate them as best you can and forgive them because you can’t change human nature.”

Mr. Muller was quite pessimistic in a nice way.

“What does ‘tolerate’ mean, Mr. Muller?”

“You can’t expect anyone to be too good. If they are real good it isn’t actually them, it’s God in them.”

To be good at clamming, you have to know where the clams are. When Mr. Muller and the boy went clamming in the Mullers’ little flat boat, Mr. Muller’s method for finding the clams was to offer a brief, improvised prayer: “Dear Lord, we have faith that there are clams out here today, but we don’t know where they are. Please guide us to the best spot, if it be Your loving will, because we can’t clam unless we know where they are just like You do. Amen.”

When they did very well and harvested a lot of clams, they figured that prayer was the reason why.

They also raked hard, standing on the deck.

Mr. Muller taught the boy that “God does the finding, but you do the digging.”

He also had the boy memorize Bible passages, and they burned some of them into wood planks and then varnished them before nailing them to the trees all around Mr. Muller’s property. They did the same with lines from Robert Frost poems and read aloud together pretty much all of Frost’s stuff in the living room by the fireplace.

“Are you reading the Bible I gave you every day at home?” Mr. Muller asked the boy.

They read a lot of Bible passages and talked about them. Mr. Muller gave the boy extra nickels for knowing Bible quotes, King James style, including book, chapter, and verse. The boy went home and underlined them, including the words of the prophets and Jesus and St. Paul, and that explains a little why he was attracted to St. Paul’s School, and why he knew the blue angel dream was more than a reaction to dyspepsia.

Mr. Muller taught him a lot of other things, including, “Don’t expect gratitude for helping people out, don’t expect people to clap for you.”

He also taught that “God loves a cheerful giver.”15 They burned that passage into a piece of wood, did the varnishing in the garage, and up it went on an oak tree along the driveway.

“It’s good to give, and don’t ever be sad about giving,” Mr. Muller told him. “If you can’t be cheerful about helping your neighbor, then the spirit isn’t in it. When it is, you give and you glow.”

Mrs. Muller was always kind. The boy never heard from her that loud, annoying, out-of-control kind of talk that he considered pointless and had learned to dislike a lot. The Mullers never screamed. Mrs. Muller wanted him to be prayerful and peaceful in his mind all the time. “The Bible says ‘pray without ceasing,’ ” she reminded him, and the three of them burned that into a plank as well and nailed it to a tree down the street, right next to his mailbox.

The boy’s favorite afternoons were when Mr. and Mrs. Muller had him in for clam chowder and warm, homemade bread, especially in winter after shoveling snow from their steps and the long gravel driveway. The three held hands and Mr. or Mrs. Muller said grace in a sincere and beautiful way. How different this was from his home, where there was no everyday spirituality, although he and his family did make it to church some Sundays. The Mullers were deeply spiritual people, so they did not need to get rowdy or out of control. They practiced temperance and were joyfully close to God. The boy felt peaceful with them.

“Don’t expect people to come to your funeral, I don’t expect them to come to mine,” Mr. Muller told him. “But you should come.”

“Okay, I will,” the boy promised. And a few years later, he did.

Looking back on Oak Neck Lane, it seems that the Mullers were the perfect people in the right place at the right time to be the boy’s spiritual mentors. It seems as though they were put there to shape the boy’s youth. This is what it means when people say that sometimes we only recognize synchronicity when we look backward and connect the dots.

But then came the big move, and the boy and his family landed at 42 Dorset Lane in Babylon, on a creek so Dad could keep his boat in the backyard, and there were more kids around.

The downside was losing Mr. Muller, who was now about ten miles away. The boy rode his bike over there to say hello every once in a while, but Mr. Muller died not too long after the move. The boy was nine when he rode his bike all the way back to the old street one afternoon in summer and Mrs. Muller said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Muller passed away the other day. He died of lung cancer.” They said a pretty emotional prayer for him, and the boy cleaned some junk out of the garage, for old time’s sake.

The boy went into the Mullers’ old tool shed, where he sawed a big pine plank and burned a passage across it before he varnished it and nailed it to a tree: “Thank God for Mr. Muller.”

Mom took the boy to Mr. Muller’s memorial service—his funeral, which the boy just had to attend. There were maybe two dozen people there from Mr. Muller’s church, and Mrs. Muller. The boy said a few words.

“Mr. Muller taught me the Bible and we prayed and we clammed, and he taught me how to use tools. He was always there, and he taught me to save my nickels. He taught me to be realistic about people and not to expect a lot, but he believed that God could still inspire them to do good.”

At age twelve, the boy got his first job in Dave Southard’s Boat Yard, building small wooden-hulled sailboats. That too was thanks to Mr. Muller, who made the boy into a carpenter. When the older guys at Southard’s would ask the boy where he learned how to use all the tools, he always answered, “Good old Mr. Muller.” But his dad was an excellent carpenter too and a hard worker, so the boy learned from him as well.

Synchronicity as Protection—A Risky Moment in Mexico

Things happen that you don’t control, like your parents’ car accident on the LIE or the Mercedes breaking down on Route 80, and all that remains is the journey forward. Truth be told, though, in general following dreams on Route 80 can be quite dangerous for a boy. Maybe the Mercedes could have died lightless right in the middle of 80 and gotten plowed into by Gary’s truck with the boy inside, or maybe he could have been hit trying to walk over to the shoulder. But the car had just enough to make it over to the side before it went completely dead. But the boy had always been protected by God, like when he was hitching through Mexico at age thirteen.

The summer of his Third Form year at St. Paul’s (ninth grade), the boy took an Areonaves de Mexico flight with a one-day stopover in Mexico City, en route to a school in Saltillo to study Spanish and guitar. After landing, he walked for most of the evening and spent the night in Chapultepec Forest, Mexico City’s large and very dangerous park where people got robbed, kidnapped, and killed a lot. The next night he spent in a small motel called Agua Caliente, “The Hot Water Motel.” They did have a hot shower and he took one, but he slept in his jeans because the sheets looked pretty well used. The next day he flew from Mexico City to Monterrey and hopped on a bus to downtown Saltillo, where there is a beautiful plaza, a nice but not magnificent cathedral, and an okay university.

It took five minutes to walk from the university to the family home, where he shared rooms with two college students from Florida who were studying Spanish literature. He liked the family, ate meals with them, and went to the outdoor market for shopping, where he learned a lot of Spanish about the physiology of the bull. All over the city, radios blared music by The Kinks or The Animals, contemporary ‘60s rock bands that were taking the US by storm. He frequented a movie theater downtown that showed mostly old black-and-white films, dropping coins into the palms of the native Mexican Indians sitting around in large groups out in front, begging in the shade.

It was a productive summer. The boy played music on his guitar and received a Spanish Language Certificate from La Universidad de Jaime Balmes, which made him quite proud.

But when the time came to depart for home, the boy screwed up. The young male mind is not worth much when it comes to advance planning; it is a disorganized mind at best. He woke up that August morning around ten o’clock, packed for the flight home, and only then did it dawn on him that he had forgotten something crucial—he needed to catch the Saltillo bus to get to Monterrey airport, about ninety minutes away, but he had just missed it!

“Whoa!” he thought. “The flight for New York leaves at noon!”

He quickly picked up his little tan suitcase, grabbed his guitar case, said goodbye to his host family, and ran a couple of miles until he reached the edge of town and the two-lane highway. He had been warned that it was a dangerous place, though, and as he stood there two really big, bad-looking guys with bats started walking his way. Quickly the boy stuck out his thumb and prayed. Behold the miracle: An immediate act of divine synchronicity! A nice old farmer wearing a straw hat pulled over in his rusty, greenish old truck filled with chickens in crowded cages. Now the two bad hombres started running toward him, so this had to be quick.

The farmer asked the boy where he was headed, and the boy told him, “Monterrey Aeropuerto, por favor, y muy rapido! Veinte dolares para usted!”

Then he jumped into the back of the truck and the farmer took off as fast as that old truck would go, with the chickens going crazy as he sat beside them in the truck bed and shouted at the two guys disappearing in the distance. By the way, all the other Mexicans he met that summer were really nice people.

And he made it to the airport in time! The boy gave that farmer every bill and coin he had, thanked him profusely, and ran across the parking lot of the little airport—the whole place was only about fifty feet long. The boy showed his ticket and passport, and the attendant told him to run because the plane was just about to close its door.

So run the boy did, screaming out “Por favor, espera para mi!”

Well, it all worked out. He shoved his guitar into the space above his seat and crammed his suitcase under his feet.

When the boy arrived at JFK, Mom and Dad met him at the gate. Mom looked really anxious, and blurted out, “You’re safe! Here you are. Alive!” As we drove home, the boy gleefully told them about hitching to the airport from Saltillo, the two really bad-looking hombres coming after him, and the kind chicken farmer who saved him. Mom was turning green and even Dad was ashen. The boy should not have told the story.

But ever the Irish mystic, Mom declared, “Only God could have arranged that ride along the highway, because otherwise you would be dead in the desert!”

“Mom,” the boy responded, “something in the universe was at work.”

What a perfect moment of synchronicity. The boy could have died, but somehow the right truck driver came along, chickens and all, at the right time, and saved him.

Julie’s Big Worry

One day in April of 2015 the boy, now an adult and considerably older, went to Boston to see Julie Welles, his second-year dorm mother at St. Paul’s. He found her still vibrant and thriving despite her eighty-five years. She remembered how her husband, Rev. Welles, had wondered about the boy’s future, and the boy asked her to try to write down how she remembered him as a teenager. A few weeks later he received an email with her response: “I met you more than forty years ago, upon your arrival at St. Paul’s School. I was surprised by your openness and innocence. You wore your heart on your sleeve, and your lack of sophistication was a rarity at St. Paul’s. I remember hoping it would survive. I have never seen you compromise that ‘goodness.’ Many times, as a student you dared to take the road less traveled, and it has led you to a career as a beacon of thoughtfulness and integrity in a complex society. You worried me because I thought you would fail miserably or succeed plentifully.”

Clearly, Julie had picked up on things.

And she was right to worry about the boy. Meaning is everything, and when boys—and girls—don’t find meaning, they get pretty desperate.

The boy had decided to take Route 80 in the direction of his dream, but he doubted himself until that misty silver-gray morning, high above the western sea, just like in the dream. This is where he reclaimed his soul for good, despite modern skepticism.