THE CHURCH OF BIRCH

I tried texting my good friend David Schoffman the other day ...

... but he was busy talking to God.

He does that a lot lately.

He almost severed the lumbrical tendon of his right index finger in an accident that involved a small jar, a bathtub and an anonymous double-jointed friend and ever since then he seems to have found religion. 

This more circumspect David spends hours staring

at the stars and when he's not intoning some rhyming Sikkimese couplet he's painting bright mandalas on seasoned birch panels.  

He used to light votive candles in his studio but he almost burnt the place down. He then tried wearing shirts and slacks strictly made out of red burlap but his chest hair got too caught up in its itchy weft.

Talking to God seemed to him the kind of pastime that was vague enough to be innocent but lofty enough to merit the investment of his valuable time.

Oh ... did I mention he was a Pisces?

ACT III

 
There comes a moment in the life of a man of promise when the promise becomes undeliverable and the options evaporate into the ether of "what ifs." It is at this precise moment when the road forks into two gloomy throughways.

The first points toward compromise. The second toward danger. 

Whichever way our traveler veers he'll find stones in his rucksack and pebbles in his shoes.

My good friend David Schoffman has just reached that point.  

Like a tall tree bent by a gentle wind, the agency we inappropriately call free will is both less and more than we think. The forces that brought our hero to this crisis point are immaterial.

The wasted efforts, failed romances, geographical dislocations, unwanted pets, bad jobs, bad digestion, poor investments and unsolicited riches have all played a part in David's undoing. But the past is immaterial. It's his next move that is the subject of this screed.

I've known David for over forty years and I have never seen him in such fruitful despair. His painting, the very vocation that defined his essence and through its usury extracted the marrow of his afflicted life, no longer interests him. His relationship with Dahlia Danton, once the source of such joy and hope has crumbled like a coffee cake. 

What little zest that's left is squandered on fantasies of rebirth, new love and a quiet retirement in a cottage by a lake.

He'll be in Paris this summer and something always sprouts out of his shiny dome whenever he visits the City of Lights. We are still in the youth of our old age and class is very much in session in this unruly school of life.

David, je t'attend!