THE FROG HANDLED MUG: Chapter Three

What do I believe? Damned if I know. The sun rises in the east. Is that a belief? It seems more like fact to me. The subway platform is sparsely populated at this time of day, what with most riders at work. Mostly students, hooked up to their mp3 players, stand motionless next to me. I never quite got how anyone could just stand mannequin-like as a great rock tune blasted their senses. I mean, why listen if it doesn’t move you. There’s a belief. It’s also a judgment. Rock and roll should move you physically and if it doesn’t there’s something wrong with you. Hmm, I didn’t know I had that one. A few other elders and I hear the train approaching just seconds before the ear budded students. For some reason I feel a certain pride in that.

I think about Alexander Hastings and his precociousness. I wonder if he will leave his mark on the world. So few of those kid geniuses do. I step into the car and facing me above the window is an ad for a documentary. It is three years old. Many others are older than that. It said, “What do you Believe.” It was a film appearing at the 2006 Staten Island Film Festival. I’m not kidding. It really said that. You can’t make up something like that. What the hell is going on? I’ve ridden this subway hundreds of times since 2006 and I swear that ad was not there before. Well, it might have been there…maybe I never noticed before. That’s my rational take on it, but I like coincidences. I never attached any meaning to them, but that didn’t stop me from appreciating them. Placing meaning would be anathema to a rational mind like my own. I ask the rider next to me if she had seen that ad before.

“No,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned it’s a waste of the advertiser’s money. I’ll look at them, but just the pictures.”

“Thanks,” I said and turn away from her. I’m not interested in a conversation about the merits of subway advertising. What do I believe? I believe this subway train will get me to my destination safely. How’s that for a belief, Mr. Cawley. I believe it, but do I know it? I don’t know it one hundred percent, but I never fret over whether it will get me to where I’m going each time I step aboard. I guess it’s a matter of trust. This is pointless bullshit. Why am I bothering with this? I think I’ll go for a run in Central Park when I get home. I live at the Eldorado, located at Central Park West, so it’s no big deal to skip across the street to the park. I’ve been a runner for over fifty years. For me it’s a meditation, and a meditation might be just the ticket right now.

When I get home I change quickly into my running gear. I have a dinner date with my girlfriend of two years. Debra is an inch taller than me, a legitimate catch for a short guy like me. She’s a genuine 9, a blue eyed brunette with killer legs. She is also twenty years younger than me. A twenty year difference I can deal with. Anything greater makes me uncomfortable. I look ten years younger than my age and act and feel twenty years younger. In my mind that makes Debra and I equal. She looks and acts her age. Does that make me shallow? Maybe, but that’s me. I think I just bumped up against another belief. Oh! Here’s another one. If Debra was more than two inches taller than me I wouldn’t have dated her. Why? Because we’d stand out, and not in the way I like to stand out. I always thought Mutt looked silly standing next to Jeff. That’s for those of you old enough to remember who Mutt and Jeff are.

Taking an elevator to go running strikes me as wimpy. I suppose it is a feeling I easily live with as I never take the stairs. I’m a decent runner. I have a shelf of age-group trophies. I don’t display any seconds or thirds, just firsts. What does that say about me? Shit! Maybe I’m shallower than I thought. I’m beginning to sound like Jimmy Lewis, a patient of mine. He’s as shallow as a tidal pool. What’s going on? Until last night I never entertained thoughts like these. Screw you David Cawley…even if you are me…which I really don’t believe.

It’s colder than I thought. Ever since a nasty experience with bad dick-freeze I do not challenge the cold unless properly bundled in the necessary place. There’s another belief. Proper bundling prevents frost bite of particularly sensitive body parts. Or, is that a fact? So far I haven’t learned a thing from my beliefs other than I believe them. This is uncomfortable….the cold, that is.

I cut my run from four to three miles and head back to the Eldorado. What a pretentious name. It works for a mythical city of gold, but not for a high rise apartment building, no matter how art deco it is. I give my street address to those who ask, even though most New Yorkers would more easily recognize the name, Eldorado. “Where do you live?” “Oh, I live at the Eldorado!” Come on!

I avoid the stairs. Actually it is less an avoidance than it is never even a consideration. How do you avoid something that doesn’t enter your consciousness as a choice. Debra believes that to keep her waiting is tantamount to treason, a great betrayal of trust. When it comes to bowing to this particular belief of Debra’s I have no problem stepping into Chuck Tynedale’s obsessive compulsive shoes. And besides, it’s no big deal for me being on time. What is a big deal is being late. I hate being late. Why is that? Maybe it’s because I believe that being late when being late is avoidable is rude. There’s another belief. Are beliefs truths? Mine seem like they are.

It’s strange, now that I think about it. My belief is only about me. That is to say there are millions of people who are always late. You know who they are. There are also entire cultures, Tynedale’s Japan for one, that to be on-time for a social event is a sign of rudeness. Hmmm. Maybe I don’t have to get so wigged out when I’m about to be late. Being on time isn’t a cosmic law. It’s just my law, and not even a law. Sure seems like one, though. I guess I turn my beliefs into laws…Augusto’s Law. I like the sound of that.

I meet Debra on time at Mama Leone’s, a tourist must-see, but their great spaghetti makes up for it. I look a lot like that guy who played Gandhi in the movie. What’s his name? Oh Yea, Ben Kingsley. So I get a lot of stares from the tourists. I’m occasionally asked for an autograph. Sometimes I sign Ben Kinsley, sometimes Augusto DeRosa. When I sign my own name the yahoos invariably ask if I’m famous. A simple yes is enough for them. I wonder if they Google me when they get back to their hotels. They would find me since I’ve written a couple psych books, but they would be disappointed at the miniscule scope of my fame. The good thing about being a writer is that even the famous ones go unrecognized. If I didn’t look like Kingsley I’d be invisible.

Anyway, I don’t invite Debra home with me because to be honest, I was more interested in sleeping with David Cawley. She doesn’t seem that interested anyway. Maybe she has a headache. I am excited about going to bed, which is different than looking forward to going to bed. It feels a little like how I feel the moment before the Rolling Stones walk onto the stage. I haven’t missed a single US Stones concert in thirty years. At the San Francisco concert in the 70’s I bought a Forty Licks baseball cap that I still wear around Columbia. Even young people know who the Stones are. The same can’t be said for the Four Tops.

Sleep doesn’t come easily. You can’t force sleep any more than you can force a bulldog to learn anything. But, it does come and so does David Cawley. This time he sports a mustache and walks arm in arm with a tall blonde woman along a shopping mall promenade. They amble into a ceramic store, no different than one you’d see today. They walk to the mug section where he selects the same dark green frog handled mug that I saw him sipping from in my last dream. Maybe he broke the one I saw in my last dream. The odd thing is that he just walked out with it. In fact, there are others there that leave the store with the old five finger discount. No one pays for anything. I feel no anxiety in David Cawley’s body. I can come up with no rational explanation for the behavior, a mall full of thieves.

In the next moment the scene changes. David and the blond are back home. It is their home and I recognize the location from my many visits to my sister’s place in Storrs, Connecticut. It is the same David Cawley, but not the same. Some things are difficult to explain and this is one of them. The woman is definitely his wife as I could see their wedding picture in the living room. What happened to Julia? I leave and cruise around the house. I stop short at a picture that sits on a credenza with several other framed 5x7’s. In one of the photos is David arm and arm with Julia on his left and what’s-her-name on his right. He obviously knows them both, but where …what happened to Julia. As in last night’s dream I know that David is thirty-six in this scene. I also know he’s not a Mormon. Didn’t they give up polygamy in the late 1800’s?

Unlike the David Cawley in Norwich this David seems unaware of me, and yet, again, I know he is me. David washes his new mug and pours a cup of coffee. I decide to try and find a mug like it. The scene grows hazy and then fades completely, only to be replaced by David Cawley in his Norwich home. This David is aware of me observing. In fact, I sense he invited me to observe. I cruise around his home. In the bedroom on one of the dressers is the exact same picture I saw in the Storrs home. And when I say exact that’s what I mean. The three of them look to be in their early twenties. How could he marry both women? I move back to the living room where David sits reading. I look at the book. Breaking Addictions by Augusto DeRosa Ph.D. It was my first book, published in 1995. It made me a lot of money because there were a lot of addicts, and for every addict there was at least a mother and a father and sometimes a wife and sometimes a husband. Drug addiction, especially among young people was rampant in 1995 and even worse in 2009. I guess my book didn’t help much.

Julia walks into the living room that is lined with ceiling to floor windows. There is a large scotch pine out front that has several inactive bird feeders dangling from its lower branches. A red humming bird feeder is filled with a water and sugar mix. The Cawleys live in the woods and so there is no need to fill the other feeders during the warmer months. Two Siamese cats lay at the base of the tree hoping for a speedy return of the cold. They look bored, but maybe it is just me anthropomorphizing them. I do that a lot with animals. Julia looks at the cats and walks to the bedroom.

David Cawley closes my book and tosses it into a wastebasket sitting next to his recliner. On the maple side-table is another book. Addiction as Choice by… me. Impossible. David Cawley picks up the book and turns to the copyright page…2011.
“Julia,” he calls. “Could you come here for a minute?”

“I’m busy,” she said. “Since you’re the one with something on your mind, why don’t you come to me? I’m in the bedroom.”

The woman knows her mind, I thought.

David Cawley hoists his trim body out of the recliner and walks to the bedroom. “Is Christine bringing Bill to the dinner this evening?”

“No,” Julia replies “They couldn’t find a sitter so Bill’s got the duty. Why do you ask?”

“I wanted run some of my project notes by him. I guess it can wait.”

“Is that the project on your Augusto focus?”

Why is David Cawley referring to me as a project? And what is a focus? Their conversation turns to small talk, a form of banter that I avoid more than thumb screws. I fast-forward several hours to their dinner party. To my amazement and the further destruction of my rational mind I discover that Christine was the same woman that was married to the Storrs David Cawley. It is clear that Julia and Christine are best of friends and that their friendship goes back to their childhoods. So, why is one David married to Julia and a second David married to Christine? This in itself is a conundrum, but a bigger one is where was David and Christine while I was observing David and Julia? There are two of each of them… so far.

I feel like Alice must have felt when she dropped through the rabbit hole. It all challenges my understanding of reality. Each present moment is all there is. I believe that. And I believe that the future can only be impacted by the present moment, but it is a future that I can never arrive at because I am always residing in present moments. And yet… and yet here I am observing the future in my dream. It’s more than a dream. It’s more a visitation, no different than visiting Spain or Egypt except my body is missing.

A few hours pass. An old man, early eighties maybe, enters the house to the delight of those assembled to honor him. He looks vaguely familiar, but I cannot place the face. He wears a hearing aid in each ear and the guests are careful to speak directly to him. At the dinner table David Cawley stands and hoists his wine glass in a toast.

“To Alexander Hastings, the University of Connecticut’s first Nobel Prize winner. Happy 82nd birthday, Professor.”

“Thank you Professor Cawley…David. It’s been a tumultuous journey, but worth the bumps…always worth the bumps as you all know. I owe much to David’s past focus, Augusto, and to you Professor Cawley. You have been instrumental in all of this. Am I to understand that Augusto is watching as I speak?”

“That’s correct, Dr. Hastings,” David Cawley replied.

“Then I shall proceed and address Augusto directly.”

Alexander Hastings’s voice is unlike what one might expect from an old man of eighty-two. His voice and body carriage suggests he could squeeze out at least another twenty years. You never know, though, when your ticket will be punched.

Professor Hastings holds his left hand up to his ear as one does when suggesting someone call them. “There is much to be done,” he said into his pinkie. “I suggest you call me tomorrow.”

That’s all he says! I am so deflated that I immediately awaken from my dream, or whatever it is. I make a note to call Alexander Hastings lest I forget my dream when I wake up in the morning. I couldn’t possibly make this shit up. I fall back into a stage four delta wave sleep. That’s the deepest level of sleep for you non-psychologist types.