They took off when the others had turned in. The headlights bounced back and forth off the trees and highway as they wended their way down the mountain and into Calistoga. On the cozy main street, they parked, walked a short distance and broke into the Saturday night din of Johnny’s Bar. The only two seats available were two stools at the bar.
A bar tender zipped over and took their orders: Sauvignon Blanc for April, a Calistoga water for Jerry.
“So, what brought you here?” Jerry asked.
“I meet with a group called Dream Catchers. We’re women who interpret dreams. Dreams have great meaning, you know. Anyway, someone there mentioned this workshop. I liked the idea of studying Jesus without it being attached to any particular faith, stripped of all the religious trappings.
“But I thought you were Jewish.”
“Culturally Jewish and always seeking. Lately, I’ve been reading A Course in Miracles and attending a Unity Church. The author of that book was Jewish. And she channeled Jesus.”
“What do you think so far?”
“Who I am I must become, I get that. It’s the only way to know God. And to know who I am requires that I know the parts I want to deny and to embrace them. It’s the whole bag. So yeah, I like this workshop. I’m learning.”
“John Petroni gives me the willies.”
“I know what you mean: his eyes.”
“His eyes.”
“Tortured…”
“Soul,” they both said.
“Jinx,” said Jerry.
And they both laughed.
“Do you believe in synchronicity?” asked April.
“The album?”
“It was a concept conceived by Carl Jung. He described it as a meaningful coincidence. Well, I feel like it’s God’s way of talking to us, if we choose to listen. ‘He who has ears to hear let him hear,’ right? In Port Townsend, where I live, synchronicity is the lingua franca. You just think an intention, and you get a response. Say, you need to talk to a certain person. Don’t even bother picking up the phone. Guaranteed you will run into that person that day.”
“So when we both walked into that bathroom, that was synchronicity? What was God saying?” Jerry asked.
“We both need to deal with our shit.”
They both laughed.
“Actually,” said April, “You gotta crawl through your shit in order to get to heaven.”
“Sounds like a good sermon.”
“Read Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. In the final scene, Andy, the hero, crawls through a sewer pipe full of shit to escape prison and get to Zihuatanejo, a sleepy fishing village in Mexico, but it’s his vision of heaven. The novella is an allegory. I wonder if King knew that the word Zihuatanejo is from the Aztec language and means place of women. Heaven is a place of divine nurture. And that perfectly describes Port Townsend. It’s the Zihuatanejo of the Pacific Northwest.”
“Hmm.” Jerry flashed on the absence of nurture from his mother. Maybe that was why he envisioned her dead. Maybe that was the source of his rage. “Where in the Pacific Northwest?”
“Two hours northwest of Seattle. It was supposed to have been the end of the transcontinental railroad but they never made it past Seattle. Too bad for Seattle; good fortune for Port Townsend. Seattle became another typical male dominated harbor filled with brothels, while Port Townsend became a haven for the feminine.
“The mayor of Port Townsend’s a woman, a professional jazz pianist; the chief of police’s a woman, most of the store owners are women. The whole town has this harmony about it, like we’re all connected, all one giant organism, moving in concert with each other. Nature and nurture.”
“I could use a little nature and nurture.”
Jerry gazed at the mirror behind the bar. People surrounding them looked like they were from a Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville convention: over-tanned Californians flashing bleached teeth, talking way too loud and way too often.
“Let’s go,” said Jerry.
***
Who I Am I Must Become ended with the benediction, “In this strange season when we are suspended between realization and expectation, may we be found honest with the darkness and more perceptive with the light.”
Jerry, back on the highway, headed back to his church. The further he drove, the more troubled he became. Was he now right with Jesus? Hardly. So now everything’s fine? Of course not. He’s a renewed minister? No way. So what was he doing?
Jerry veered off the highway, pulled over and stopped. Silent God was no help, yet perhaps Jerry was listening in the wrong way. Perhaps there was another medium of communication, this synchronicity that April was talking about. He looked around. Vineyards everywhere, fat with grapes. Was that synchronicity? And, if so, what was God saying?
Vineyards were a common metaphor in the Bible and especially the New Testament. “I am the vine; you are the branches,” said Jesus, John 15.5ff., “He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” Seek the vine, perhaps that was the message of how to proceed.
This was a new way of making choices, blind, not seeing, yet knowing. Life off the highway would offer no clear direction. Guidance comes not from the rational mind but a new center within the body, a homing device to take him to his true home.
He turned his car around and headed in the opposite direction, towards the Pacific Northwest.