Dept. Of Speculation

45

The weather is theater here. They watch it through the window from their bed.

What Singer said: I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes?

The husband feeds the stove so she can stay in bed. He goes outside to get more wood. The sky looks like snow, he says.

Saint Anthony was said to suffer from a crippling despair. When he prayed to be freed from it, he was told that any physical task done in the proper spirit would bring him deliverance.

At dinner, the wife watches the husband as he peels an apple for the daughter in a perfect spiral. Later, when she is grading papers, she comes across a student’s story with the same image in it. The father and daughter, the apple, the Swiss Army knife. Uncanny really. Beautifully written. She checks for a name, but there is nothing. Lia, she thinks. It must be Lia. She goes outside to read it to the husband. “I wrote that,” he says. “I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice.”

The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.

The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?”

So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now.

Attention. Attention.

Sometimes the wife still watches him sleep.

Sometimes she still strokes his hair in the middle of the night and half asleep he turns to her.

Their daughter runs through the woods now, her face painted like an Indian.

What the rabbi said: Three things have a flavor of the world to come: the Sabbath, the sun, and married love.