Kiddo

Originally written Wednesday, December 14, 2005

The phone woke me up this morning. It was Patrick. He’s been reading the blog and getting caught up, and he wanted to share his thoughts with me. I knew I’d chosen to work with this young man for a reason: he had more presence of mind today than I’ve apparently had since the end of Saturday evening. I met him for a late brunch at a vegetarian restaurant near his home. It boasts being the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the area (out of three—not the most stellar claim), and its menu reflects it. I don’t mean that as a compliment. The other two have discovered what a joy good vegetarian food can be—in the case of one, pricey but innovative, offering experimental combinations of ingredients both commonplace and rare, and in the case of the other, homey and warm, with the coziest of soups, salads, and sandwiches—but the one near Patrick’s house still seems stuck in the mold of dietary masochism that characterized 1970s vegetarianism. For someone like me who can remember when a meat-free palate wasn’t considered a fad for bohemian poseurs (a much longer time ago than most realize), that era was the only time I ever felt as if I were suffering from a lack of animal sacrifice. I was aware that it wasn’t actually from what I was or was not eating—after all, I could and did do most of my own cooking—but from how the natural foods culture made me feel about it, and I was aware that history changes rapidly… and so it did. Thank goodness.

So anyway, Patrick and I met for brunch, and immediately he asked for the charm. I took it off and handed it to him thinking he just wanted to take a look, but he bundled it away in his backpack with barely a glance.

“What are you doing?” I asked, confused.

“What were you doing the other night? With that?”

For a moment I was even more perplexed, but the moment I began to review the events, I felt my mind readjust its focus so subtly, so minutely, that a less well-attuned individual probably wouldn’t have noticed it happening at all. But as I went back over the course of the conversation, the use of the charm, I now came to realize that Moshe and Trudy were not the only ones who hadn’t entirely been in control of themselves once I’d set the charm in motion. “How did you know there was something wrong?” I quietly yet proudly asked my prodigy.

“Free will,” he replied. “I didn’t know for sure if there was something wrong, but when I read the part about you controlling them both and not caring, I thought I’d better check. So… I was right?”

“I think so. I mean, the difference is so fine that it could be my imagination.” It’s not like I felt like a power fiend with them under Bella’s spell, but “experimenting,” or whatever I called it that night wouldn’t normally have been an option for me. Only moments ago I had felt justified in my actions, and now I felt embarrassed. Of course, most of the embarrassment was for not figuring out what Patrick had deduced. “Wow, kiddo, you’re good.”

“And that thing must be powerful. It could have an agenda of its own.”

The reason Patrick used the concept of free will to reach his conclusion was that he knows how seriously I take others’ right to self-determination. I was gifted with the dearest kind of free will anyone could receive: the will to live and the will to die. While I do recognize that no one has full autonomy over everything in his or her life, including myself, and while I don’t believe that fate and free will can be as readily dichotomized as most philosophies suggest, I nonetheless value others’ agency to the point where even if I did have occasion and reason to use a magical voodoo charm to control the actions of others, I certainly wouldn’t take it for granted. I at least wouldn’t ordinarily be as casual about it as I was last night.

Patrick continued, “It was even controlling you. Or someone was, through it. How did it feel? How was it working?”

The events of this day to be continued...