Humainologie creative dialogue tonight and the Roseto effect and a short story

“To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating.” - Julia Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation – experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.” - Paul Theroux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Theroux

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” - Orson Scott Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card

It is in the process of becoming that we find ourselves. Becoming a good cook, becoming a good basketball player, becoming a good friend. Becoming a good storyteller ….

The walls of silence that separate us from strangers are like writer’s block. There are stories inside each of us. If you begin discovering the stories that only strangers can tell you, it will enrich your life and the lives of strangers and the community where you live.

It can also improve your cardiac health. The Roseto effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseto_effect refers to the remarkable improvement in cardiac health in a community with excellent social interaction. Imagine that!

Here’s the Zoom link for tonight’s creative dialogue

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: June 23, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Jun 30, 2021, 9 occurrences Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86972034113?pwd=M2g3MzEvMWs5dXhHcFVCbVNkVG1idz09 Meeting ID: 869 7203 4113 Passcode: 12345

And a short story contributed to last year’s Humainologie Short Story Festival is appended below.

Arthur

The Swimming Pool

by Salima Stanley-Bhanji

Momentarily examining the deep wrinkles in her right hand as she pulled the sliding glass door open, Giselle stepped outside onto her deck. Her feet were bare and the warmth of the sun against the tiles seeped into her soles delivering the feeling of a silent internal sigh.

These days, there was very little for her to sigh about. She lived a simple routine existence without any of the daily stresses of her prior life. It had been at least a dozen years now since she had quit legal practice and the fullness of her professional life had initially been greeted by a gentle segue into enjoying her golden years alongside Maxwell, who was ten years her senior. But when Maxwell passed just a year later, there was so much more space than she had ever been accustomed.

Giselle wasn’t the most social of humans, nor did she take particular pleasure in the company of animals, and her occupation with her work had left her indecisive about children, which she never ended up having. So, in the absence of living companions, she found a certain fulfilment in her daily routines.

She placed her phone down on the small wicker table along with a tall glass of soda; one slice of lemon wedged on the side. She then unfolded and arranged an off-white linen sarong with tassled edges on the sun lounger, and sat down on top of it. Giselle was still for a moment as she took in her small backyard oasis.

She had moved to Sedona six years after Maxwell’s death on doctor’s orders and had found the house right away. It was tiny, with just one bedroom and one bathroom, immaculate and yet rustic, and it had been designed with every single detail considered. When Giselle had first stepped outside onto the same deck where she sat right now, she knew this was where she would live the last days of her life. A deep salt water rock pool surrounded by saguaro cacti had been nestled into the edge of the deck and the pool was large enough for Giselle to float on her back with her arms outstretched. Her immersion in the water each day felt more necessary than leisurely; a softness craved by her body, a weightlessness that freed her from her body.

Giselle got up, removed a kimono-style wrap, and walked toward the rock pool. As she stepped down from the deck, she caught a glimpse of a ripple in the water, suddenly appearing as a result of the day’s gentle wind touching its surface. At first, she just observed the phenomena of that ripple without connecting the occurrence to its name, ripple. Her former self had been so quick to analyse, to breathe life into words (or maybe it was breathing words into life), to define and to compare; but she now found this other aspect of herself awakening, a part of her that often found space between her experience of something and her definition of it. It was an unfamiliar way to process the world for Giselle, and she had a certain curiosity about it. Was she losing her mental faculties or was she just opening up to the big wide void and inherent mystery of life?

When the word ripple finally entered her consciousness, a flood of memory followed and almost suddenly, the corners of her eyes felt moist; a quiet protest against the dryness of her environment. As her body dipped slowly into the water, her lips mouthed the word “Sai”.

She was just 28 and working as a junior associate at a small law firm in downtown Toronto. As a Black female lawyer in the late 60s, it had taken her almost a year to land this first position, and by the end of her first day on the job, she understood why she had been hired. No one else had lasted more than two months working for the Verne Hardy, the unpredictable and exacting partner she had been assigned to. Four years later, she was still in his employ, and though it had worn her down, it had also created a layer of resilience, almost like a crystal-coated skin that could withstand any kind of pressure.

It was about that time that she had met Sai. On the train. On the way home from work. There was nothing remarkable about that meeting, or the one after. Also on the train. On the way home from work. But just like the repetition of her current routine gave her a certain kind of solace, somehow the repeat meetings with Sai had done the same. Initially they exchanged few words, but slowly, their exchange grew into conversation and one day, he asked her out.

Their first date was on a Sunday afternoon just as the weather was turning to spring. They met on the Danforth, got fish and chips from Duckworth’s and took a long walk down to Beaches Park by Lake Ontario. Their conversation flowed, interrupted only by short moments of comfortable silence where they both looked out at the water. Giselle felt closer to Sai in that silence. It was a strange thing that words sometimes obscured what could otherwise be communicated in their absence.

After one particular, brief, silent interlude, their gaze turned away from the water and towards one another. Wrapped up in that gaze was both the future love they would find and the pain it would deliver: it was like somewhere inside they both already knew their whole story. Sai reached his hand towards Giselle’s, gently guiding her bangs to the side of her face. “I like your face,” he said. He had a tendency to be direct, but there was a softness now in his proclamation. “And I like this ear,” he said, as he tickled behind her left ear, a mischievous grin spreading across his face. “I like your ear as well,” Giselle responded.

“Oh, which one?”

“This one,” she gestured.

“Not that one?” he asked, pointing to the other ear.

“No, not that one.” They smiled at each other and looked back out to the water.

Giselle had only ever dated one person, a white man she had been assigned as a study partner in college, and there had always felt like an empty space in their relationship, as though there was a body of water between them and they were shouting to each other from opposite sides of the river bank, never quite hearing everything the other person was saying. Sai’s skin and eyes were dark and there was a comfortable familiarity in his struggle and his commitment to outshine his White peers. He was a journalist covering human interest stories at a community newspaper. He wanted to be taken seriously and had aspirations of becoming a crime reporter.

Giselle and Sai had been dating for almost four months the day it all began. Verne Hardy had arrived at the office fuming that day, and by noon, shouts had erupted with another partner, and two of his staff had succumbed to tears. By the time Giselle left work at the end of the day, she was ready to face an onslaught of professional rejections if it meant freedom from the tyranny of her current situation. She picked up a newspaper on the way home and leafed through the employment classifieds while eating her Styrofoam-packaged dinner. There were few legal positions and the only position she took note of was a current affairs reporter for an unknown publication in Detroit.

Giselle placed the newspaper in the garbage can along with the remains of her dinner and readied herself for bed. Tomorrow was Saturday, and Sai had bought them tickets to see Cats at the Winter Garden Theatre, but by the end of the day Giselle had come down with a fever and runny nose, so Sai gave the tickets to his brother and came by to see Giselle instead.

Giselle lived in the kind of studio apartment anyone could have lived in. There were no framed pictures on walls or magnets on fridges, no insight into her personal life or identity was offered. It was just a place she came to sleep, eat and shower. A single bed with an orange bedspread sat between an arm chair found at a thrift store and a half empty bookshelf. Sai sat next to her on the bed.

Giselle was describing the drama at work the day before when she remembered the classified ad she had seen. Sai got up and walked to the kitchen, retrieved the newspaper out of the garbage, came back to the bed and silently read the posting. Without saying much, he tore the ad out of the paper and then looked down at Giselle and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

Six weeks later, Sai had a job offer in Detroit. “Would you prefer if I didn’t accept the offer?” he asked Giselle one evening over pizza. At that moment, a server came to clear their plates and she was let of the hook from answering. Giselle didn’t think she should prevent Sai from following his dream. It was still early days in their relationship – too early to make any life altering decisions, even if she was falling for him.

The next few weeks passed by in a blissful flurry of heightened connection. Rather than backing away from each other in self-protection, Sai’s impending departure caused them both to cram as much pleasure and joy into the time they had left. Even at the last moment, when Sai kissed Giselle goodbye, a small tickle behind her ear erupted into laughter and Giselle’s smile carried until Sai’s car was no longer visible. And then she cried. And she cried. And she knew that something very special had just ended.

Giselle felt the edges of the water at her hairline as she gazed up into the sky. She hadn’t intentionally avoided the memory of Sai all these years, life had just pointed her attention in other directions. Their time together was but a few months in the span of about eight decades of living and it was buried under so much love and messiness, chaos and ambition.

The phone had rung at Giselle’s studio apartment and she got out of the arm chair while still clutching her book in one hand. “Hello?” It was Sai. He had been gone for three days now and this was the first time they had spoken since he had left for Detroit. It had felt like the longest three days Giselle had ever lived and now she was talking to Sai, every single emotion that she had tried to contain within herself since his departure came ripping to the surface. Sai would never have known. As he talked about his first day on the job and the family he was boarding with, he interpreted Giselle’s silence as keen listening. But it was not keen listening, nor the comfortable silence Giselle had enjoyed in the past in Sai’s presence. It was a silence of boundaries, born from pain and hurt and an inability to know where to start or how to express everything that was living inside of her.

Giselle had been mad at herself twice over: once for ever showing Sai that classified ad, and twice for being the type of person who wished she had never shown it to him. She had, one by one, lined up all of the incidents that had coalesced into Sai’s departure. “You know, if I hadn’t had that one bad day at work, you would still be here,” Giselle injected into the conversation, somewhat randomly. She decided it was best not to throw every other thought she had had out into the open. Like what if she had walked into the station that day from the westerly entrance, as she often did, and hadn’t passed the newspaper vendor and didn’t buy a paper? Or what if she hadn’t seen that particular ad in the paper, or if she had emptied her garbage and the newspaper had been thrown out, or if she hadn’t been sick and they still went to see Cats and Sai never came over that day? “I guess it could seem like a ripple effect began that day,” said Sai, as though he had just heard everything she didn’t say. “Yes,” replied Giselle. “I guess it could.” She paused, and then in a soft voice said, “I’ll always remember you, Sai.” Giselle placed the receiver down. One thing every single relationship had in common with every other relationship, was that there was always a final conversation. And this had been theirs.

Giselle smoothly drew her head under the water of the rock pool and remained hovering just beneath the surface, her body limp, until she needed to come up for air. As her short-term memory had begun to fade, on some days making it feel like a reach to recall what she had eaten for breakfast, it had simultaneously brought the depths of her past into brilliant focus. And here she was, reliving moments from half a century ago with Sai. Sai. Sai Premanathan.

She moved easily as she found her way out of the pool and relaxed onto the sun lounger. The sun dried the beads of water on her skin as she considered what she would do with these memories she was now once more reacquainted with. She reached for her phone, opened safari, and launched a google search.

Sai Premanathan. Award-winning crime fiction novelist, Sai Premanathan. 1936 – 2018. She took in what those numbers meant and for a moment, she felt that very same searing pain she had felt so many years before when their story had ended. Except this time, that pain made her feel alive, and somehow grateful.

Then she heard herself whisper, “I’ll always remember you, Sai.” Giselle reached for her glass, squeezed the wedge of lemon and dropped it into the soda. Taking a sip, she placed the glass back down, lay back, and closed her eyes.