Dear Briar...

Eve of 3/10 -Sweet Irony
Dear Briar -
It’s late. My mind is racing. My mom is away for a few days, so I am staying over with my dad, Harry. He’s on that bloody (no pun intended) Atkin’s Diet with the rest of the planet, so I made him my most unfavorite of the processed meat delicacies for dinner; sausage and onions. Yuck. The only thing worse would probably be scrapple. I have seen it once. The name says it all. I also sauteed spinach and garlic on the side to give it a little bit of a cosmopolitan flair …and he loved it.

He is always so complementary of my (as he calls them) delicious delights. Only tonight, his pallor changed within five minutes of finishing his meal, and he began to hold his stomach, grimace and make jokes about impending diarrhea. “Maybe it was the spinach,” he laughed, poking fun at my affinity for vegetables.

“Lunacy,” I smiled, and washed the dishes. I snuggled in upstairs with my dogs and a Deepak Chopra book, and immersed myself in a chapter entitled, “What you see, you become.” I was reading about the vedic seers, the rishis, and the yogis of India. Fascinating stuff. I got into an anecdote about a father who is trying to humble his “educated” son about sanskrit meaning of Brahman ...an all-inclusive term, signifying all things in creation - physical, mental, and spiritual- as well as their uncreated source. I am the universe:

“Go and Pick a fruit from the banyan tree,” Svetaketu’s father said.
“Here it is, sir.”
“Split it open and tell me what you see inside.”
“Many tiny seeds, sir.”

I heard something stirring downstairs ...a dog, a cat, maybe my dad.

“Take one of them and split it open and tell me what you see inside.”

I heard a low, muffled moan. I couldn’t decipher whether it was the television, or ...

“Nothing at all, sir.”

The moan began to grow more pronounced, cradled by heavy, uneven sighs ...

Then his father said, “the subtlest essence of this fruit appears as nothing to you, my son ...”

Then my father, sighing between expletives came stumbling, heavy footed, up the wooden stairs toward the porcelain goddess with broken hinges.

“Are you okay dad?” All I got was a moan.

“ ...but believe me, from that nothing, this mighty banyan tree has sprung.”

With that, the broken lid crashed to the ground, and through moans and heaves and prayers, poor Harry definitely sold his soul to the goddess.
I ran downstairs and got him water, and his blood pressure medication, and came back up to find him neatly tucked into his bed with the dogs, deep in thought.

“Maybe it was the sausage,” he giggled.

Love, Ana

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