The Word in the Bowl

     Cousin Saul had stories.

     Like me, he too seemed to be collecting them.  Maybe he was searching for an oytser as well.  But if he was, it was a lofty one, some kind of spiritual treasure.  Saul was a bit of a wannabe rabbi; a kind of rabbish.  I, on the other hand, was hoping for a big fat pot of gold.

     But after months of investigation, I was no closer to finding it and I was getting desperate.  Frankly, I had nothing else going on.  So there I was at his apartment again, to see if he had any other family photos that might contain secrets.  But I must have caught him on a bad day because he seemed distracted.  He kept staring out the window in silence, thinking thoughts that drifted like smoke into the afternoon air.  I was going to thank him for the tea and leave when he suddenly perked up and snapped his fingers.

     “That’s what I’ve been trying to remember,” he said.  “The Word in the Bowl!”

     “Which word in what bowl?”

     “Exactly!  You couldn’t be more right about that.”

     “Great,” I said although I had no idea what he was talking about.  “Is it a book?  A memoir or something?”

     “No, this was an actual experience.  It happened to our cousin Bobbie.  You know her, right?”

     “Never met her.”
     “She was your Aunt Betty’s niece’s daughter.  Or something like that.”

     Saul began searching through the leaves of a thick album he kept with mementos, pages and pages of them.  His own bar mitzvah invitation with silvery letters, a locket of his late wife’s auburn hair, an award with a crest from someone for something.

     “The word in the bowl,” he murmured.  “She saw it one day.”

     “In a soup bowl?”

     “Not that kind of bowl, if you get my drift.”

     “Not exactly.”

     “Like most people she sometimes checked the…you know…”

     Saul looked up from the album and tilted his gaze towards the floor, passing his tushe on the way down.

     “Oh.  You mean she looked in the bowl.”

     “Yes and what she saw there astonished her.”

     “I’ve had corn nibblets show up.  I guess I’m a nervous chewer,” I said, giggling like a ninny.

     “No.  I mean in the shapes.  The pieces seemed to float together in a way that clearly, in her mind at least, formed a pair of letters.  A familiar word.”

     “And she told you about this?”

     “Well, you know Bobbie.”

     “I’m starting to form a picture.”

     “At first she just dismissed it as, you know, a coincidence.  But it happened for several days in a row.  It seemed ridiculous of course.  But by the fifth day, the evidence was clear and unmistakable.  Two well-formed letters that meant something.”

     “B and M?” I asked, taking a stab.

     “Here it is,” he said, taking a small scrap of paper from the album and handing it to me.

     I cannot tell how relieved I was to find that this was not a photograph but a drawing.  Saul studied me as I studied it, with a look of anticipation on his face.  I did not want to disappoint him, but since I had no idea what the shapes were supposed to be, he might just as well have been showing Proust to a prune.  My expression said as much.

     “Sorry,” I apologized, “my own messages are always crap.”

     “Don’t you see?  This is a digrammaton, a two-letter word for the name of God.  It is called yah, as in Yahweh or the word halleluyah.  You see it in the Tanakh, the canon of the   Hebrew bible.  Very mystical stuff.”

     Saul lightly traced the letters with his finger. 

     “Okay,” I said in the singsong equivalent of tiptoeing backwards out of a psycho ward.

     “So you see, she had quite a problem to deal with.  This is not an everyday event.  She was frightened, trembling before, well…who knows what?  She tried to deal with it in any way she could…”

     “Like not giving a sh…”

     “Exactly.  But, of course, that can only go on for so long.  And eventually, the letters appeared again.  For a whole week.  That’s when she asked me for my advice.”

     “Why did she ask you?”

     “Who would one see about something like this?  A gastroenterologist?  They would only want to poke something up there to see what was what.  Suppose they found a couple of polyps…how would that help?  A nutritionist perhaps.  Sure, change your diet.  But to what?”

     “Buttered scrolls,” I offered.

     It was a stupid joke, I knew that, but the whole thing was getting to me.  And Saul, an otherwise sensible man, seemed to have taken it very seriously.

     “What about a rabbi?” Saul said.  “That seemed reasonable.  But you know Bobbie, not a religious Jew at all.  The thought of having some beardy Talmudist explain what the hand of God was doing up her wazoo was not appealing in the least.”

     I wondered at that moment if the Baal Shem Tov ever read stool samples, that is how far gone I was.  I don’t even who the Baal Shem Tov was, yet this occurred to me.  But I kept that little query to myself and just nodded my head politely.

     “So what did we do?” Saul asked no one in particular.  “We sought out a philosopher.  A philosopher, yes!  A smart guy I knew named Professor David Saunders who taught philosophy at Columbia.  This after all was a philosophical question.  A question of ontology, perhaps, or epistemology. What does one do with such a message?  What is the right course of action?  What is the universe trying to say to us?  Who are we?”

     Saul’s voice trailed off with that last question as his eyes slowly slipped towards the scene outside the window again.  A long time passed during which I fell asleep and dreamed of being on a ship steaming across the cold Atlantic.  It was September of 1937, I recall, and the elderly woman in the deck chair next to me was asking me where the lavatory was when suddenly…

     “Well!” Saul said, jolting both of us out of our reveries.  “Where was I?  Oh yes, philosophy.  We both went to see him.  I knew him from my own days at Columbia.  Did you know that I was a professor there myself?” 

     “I feel like I am sitting through one of your lectures.”

     “Nice of you to say.  In any case, his idea of philosophy was to know the world in all its full richness, so he studied everything.  He was a polymath before every jackass online was.  He listened carefully to Bobbie’s explanation.  Like a good phenomenologist, he accepted it at face value.  It was, after all, at the very least an experiential truth.  David asked some questions, had her repeat a few key points, furrowed those furry brows of his, tapped his fingers together, thought deeply.  Great, right?  Like an existential detective working the clues to a cosmic mystery.”

     “Colonic mystery,” I corrected.

     “So how do we understand this?  David went through the possibilities with us.  The semiotics of visual signs; Platonic questions of pure form; quantum action at a distance.  Heidegger, Thomas Aquinas, you name it.”

     “God’s little joke,” I suggested.

     “No.  One thing was clear.  He did not think that this was a message from God, but rather the other way around.”

     “Sorry?”

     “It was all coming from her, so to speak.  Something that Bobbie needed to see and therefore saw, because life is overwhelming and our desire to live it so frail.”

     “Needed to see?  But why?  For what purpose?”
     “To have the world matter.”

     “A secret message in her poo makes the world matter?”

     “An unexpected word appears that transcends the ordinary.  No matter how or where.  A meaning that elevates.  A reason to wonder what there is.  We all need that.  Otherwise life, as someone said, is just one damn thing after another.  You see?”

     “Sort of, guess so, not really.”

     “Listen, if I were you, I would start checking the bowl for it.  I know I am.  If I find anything, I’ll be in touch.”

     I did not shake his hand as usual when I left, but instead gave him a thumbs up from a short healthy distance.

     Oh yes and…FYI?  Nothing so far.