At the Drop of a Pigeon

      “It is all a question of fate,” cousin Saul was saying.
      We were back in his brownstone discussing the life and work of our ancestor Meyer Shapiro, the rabbi with no use for God.  Saul had that annoying smirk on his face that reminded me that he was a retired – no, emeritus! – professor who loved the deep decree.
      “Yes, fate,” I said, yawning.
      “Well think about it.  In a world without God, as it was for our Meyer, it is up to us to decide our own fate.  Not because we are told what to do but because we discover it for ourselves through our choices.  He was an early existentialist, our Meyer.”
      “He smoked French cigarettes?”
      “He believed that life was about choices.  Even that our emotions were free choices that we made.”
      “Like choosing to make yourself miserable,” I suggested, relying on personal experience.
      “Like choosing to feel anything at all.  Choosing to feel.  If our fate is in our own hands, then the world is our oyster…for good or bad.”
     “Oytser?” I jumped, mishearing. The word snapped me out of my funk.  “Did you just say oytser?”
     “What?  Oytser means, what…a treasure?  I guess you could say that too.  To dismiss God, as our Meyer did, is to find the treasure of our own choices.  I like that.  You see how even slips of the tongue guide us in our journeys.  Freud was right.”

      Maybe; but the only journey I had in mind by then was a nice nappy-poo.  The heat, the tea, the talk of fate…all too big for my britches and frankly exhausting.  I was out there in Brooklyn again just to find more photos but Saul, of course, failed to pick up on this; things either had beardy meaning or meant nothing at all to him.  I could easily imagine him back at NYU oozing his students into a snooze.  I envied them.
      “Rabbi Meyer actually performed an experiment once.  In honor of one of his heroes…Galileo.  It was a pigeon drop.”
      “He read pigeon droppings?”
      “I am so happy that humor has also been passed down through the generations.  For me too.  No.  Meyer went to the tallest building in Vilna and dropped two pigeons from the roof.”
      “What is all this with the pigeons?”
      “What do you mean?”
      “Pigeons keep cropping up.  It’s some kind of family motif.”
      “Is it?  Well, Meyer dropped two of them.  One was dead and the other alive.”
      “Is this a joke?”
      “Depends on whether you think it is funny or not.”
      “Not so far.”
      “Well what do you think happened?  The dead one dropped like a stone.  Pure fact, pure materiality, pure Newtonian physics.  You could calculate where it would land.”
      “Okay.”
      “Ah…but the live pigeon took off into an unknown future.  Pure possibility, pure choice.  So from this we learn…”
      “That live birds fly.  Fascinating.”
      “That life is not determined.  Not by God and not by fate and not by mathematics.  Living is full of possibility.  This is a part of Meyer’s canon still to be explored.”

      Saul raised his brows as a kind of invitation to discourse but he lowered them when he saw that I had made other plans…a different course through the portal of a languid yawn.
      “My brother, your cousin Mike, was working on this.  That’s his picture over there.  Doesn’t look like a scholar but he was, although somewhat lazy about it.
      I took the photo: “And he was working on what?”
      “This idea of a unfateful fate.  The future in our hands.  But sadly he never finished it.  In fact, he died last year on March 4th…the very same day Meyer was born.”
      “That’s a strange coincidence.”
      “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” Saul toned.
      “Is that Meyer?” I fluted.
      “No, Einstein.”
      “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
      “I am a student of Meyer Shapiro, the Tipsch Gaon of Letz.  I am still learning.  He started out as a believer.  Then in the beginning of his work, he struggled with a hidden god, a silent god, a god of distant gestures.  Later on he came to not rely on the concept at all…the adiest we are so intrigued by.”
      “And your brother Mike?”
      “I think he was starting to become an adiest himself.  But we’ll never know.”
      “What happened to him?”
      “On a whim, he called me and suggested that we go out to Coney Island that day.  Walk on the beach, talk.  It was a lovely day.  But on the way back we happened to be sitting next to a woman on the bus who told us that her son was in an accident and had to drop out of medical school which meant that he was living at home when the hurricane hit that year.  The tree in front of the house was knocked down and destroyed his car.”  
      “I’m not exactly following…”
      “Without the car he had to take the bus to work – this same bus we were on with his mother – when a man had a heart attack.  Her son jumped into action and saved the man’s life, which convinced him to buy a new car and go back to medical school.”
      “Did he?’
      “No idea.  By that time Mike and I realized that we had missed our stop.  So we got off and had to walk all the way back from Avenue M…”
      “I’m still connecting…”
      “…which just so happened to put Mike and me in front of a building at just the moment that something fell from the roof, missed me, and slammed Mike on the head, knocking him into a hydrant and killing him instantly.  A terrible shock as you can imagine.”
      “What fell?”
      “The dead pigeon.”

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