Grandmother, parts 2296 - 2299

 2296. All of the articles seemed to have a structure of being composed of an excessive number of qualifying words, leading inevitably to contradictions and unanswered questions. Regardless of how confusing these articles were, he noticed right away that the guests of the resort, especially the Americans, were quite interested in these articles. 

 2297. The topics dealt with in the pages of the Sunday Times made up the majority of the content of the guests conversations, especially at dinner Sunday evening, and at breakfast on Monday morning. It was not all conversation however. Some of the guests were obsessed  with the crossword puzzle, and Coromo noticed that the puzzle, all by itself, represented an entire area of involvement practically equal to the sports section in its ability to hold the guests in its thrall.

 2298.  And so the reading of the Times became a peculiar pastime of our friend Coromo. During his time off and his breaks from work he would read through entire articles never having the slightest notion of what they were about. To understand this behavior you might picture a person attempting to learn a foreign language by reading books and never understanding even the pronunciation of the strange words, but confident that in time some insight would emerge.

 2299. Added to this reading of the Times was the practice of overhearing the conversation of the guests when they sometimes engaged in discussions of the articles he had tried to read. The combination of these two activities bore an odd sort of fruit and it happened that he would have rare moments of insight into what the news articles were about.

Grandmother, parts 2292 - 2295

 2292. The object, The Sunday Times that is, always struck him as a strange and mysterious object. Coromo could read and speak English fairly well because of his experience of working at the resort, but French was his native tongue. When he looked at the Times he felt that it would take him many weeks to get through one complete copy.

 2293. The headlines however made no sense to him what-so-ever. He would read a set of six or seven words that seemed to combine politics, economics, and sociology all in one phrase and only come away with the conviction that it was about something happening in Australia. Later he would read the first paragraph of the same article and realize that it was probably about something that happened in Australia fifty years ago.

 2294. The next day, just out of curiosity, he would read the second paragraph and think that perhaps something had happened in Australia fifty years ago, and had been talked about in a certain way back then, and now lo-and-behold, people were realizing that what they thought back then was entirely wrong.

2295. Upon reading further, he would ascertain that this new attitude about what happened in Australia was not held by everyone now, but only by a select few individuals, and their view was being vigorously contested by others who still espoused the previous notions. And yet, through all of it, Coromo could not ascertain what exactly had happened fifty years ago in Australia, and why people were still arguing about it.

Grandmother, parts 2288 - 2291

 2288. Needless to say, there were numerous cars Coromo wanted to buy, but his credit card would not have paid for the rental of one of them for even two months. But like a teenager he returned to these glossy advertisement frequently. Unlike the clothing advertisements he could not imagine any path that could lead from where he was to the driver seat of one of those cars. The clothing, on the other had could all be purchased in a matter of moments, and delivered in a few weeks. 

 2289. Nevertheless, Coromo purchased nothing, and his credit card balance remained at zero, and then came the inheritance of his Grandmothers fortune, and her injunction to “See the world” and suddenly the equilibrium of Coromo’s world was entirely disrupted. 

 2290. It was the Sunday New York Times that did it, It was the Times travel section that tore a hole in the balanced forces holding Coromo’s life in place. Long before his conversation with his Grandmother he found himself drawn to the travel section of the Times. 

2291. This is how it came about. He could have gone his entire life without reading anything in the New York Times except the headlines of the front page when he noticed it on his way into the visitors reading room. On Sunday there were several copies of the Times and until the late afternoon all the parts were in use. But late in the day it was Coromo’s job to assemble all the sections back in their proper order and put them back on the periodical shelf. It was this small task which acted as an incubation.

Grandmother, parts 2284 - 2287

 2284. The world he lived in consisting of his small village and the resort did not offer much of a stimulus to his imagination as a place to expend his imaginary two thousand dollars, and the internet he looked at in the lounge of the resort was not a factor either. It was the newspapers and magazines in the resort lounge that were the source of what now became a kind of shopper’s  obsession for him.

 2285. In the resort lounge were about a dozen magazines of the sort which are 99% advertisements for cars, expensive clothing, women’s shoes, and marvelous kitchen appliances set in kitchens the size of football fields in which it would be possible to prepare meals for the fans of a football game. Many of these magazines had advertisement with dogeared pages, marked for reference.

 2286. These dogeared pages had been put there by Coromo. He was interested in a certain pair of shoes that cost $125, and a shirt on sale for only $40 listed in a catalogue from a company called Land’s End. The Land’s End catalogue was two years old, so he was not sure if the shirt would be still on sale after all this time.

2287. An old J. Crew catalogue also interested him, and I have to say that if you looked at the thirty or forty pages he had marked there, you would have gotten the impression that Coromo had good and very expensive taste in clothing. As a matter of fact, it you could have dressed Coromo up in the various articles of clothing he liked and took a few pictures of him, he might have been a candidate for a job as a model.

Grandmother, parts 2280 - 2283

 2280. If a person is selling cars, then they also probably drive one, and if a person is selling bananas they probably also eat them. The seller can imagine being the buyer in each of those situations. Even a person who is selling jewelry he could never afford can still imagine being rich and buying the items they are trying to sell.

  2281.  But a person who is selling something they would never buy themselves, and can hardly even imagine anyone would want, can never develop confidence in their trade no matter how well they do. Each sale is an unexpected anomaly. Coromo would never have been tempted to purchase any paintings, not his own or anyone else’s. This was the reason he kept his credit card balance at zero, because he always thought his most recent sale would be his last.

  2282. But the credit card affected his imagination, let me give you an example. You remember how Coromo acquired a French landscape painter’s easel from the maintenance department dumpster shortly after seeing one for sale in the resort department store for $1800 dollars. Back then he was horrified and confused by the object and its price, but now if he were to see it he would have thought, “I could buy this right now, with my credit card.”

 2283. This was not an idle meaningless thought, and it was not rare or unusual. The phrase, “I can buy this if I want to,” was a recurring set of words that entered his thinking unbidden over and over again.

Grandmother, parts 2276 - 2279

 2276. Thinking such thoughts as he got home from his visit to his Grandmother, he took out from his shirt pocket the envelope and counted out his gift, the sum total was four hundred and eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents. “What does this mean?” he wondered, and even that thought was a good indication of how his Grandmother’s influence affected how he reasoned about things.

 2277. Ever since Coromo sent the application in and received his new credit card he had been troubled by obscure desires induced by the very card itself. His credit card offered him an available line of credit of two thousand dollars, as it was one of those “learner” credit cars of the sort offered to freshman college students. He had used it a few times but only to purchase art supplies and had been relieved to be able to pay the balance down to almost zero every month because of the sale of his paintings.

 
2278. Coromo did not like having any unpaid balance on the card, and the card itself seemed to him to radiate a kind of malignant danger. He was happy that he could pay off his balance without trouble, but he had no confidence in his picture selling income at all, and each sale seemed to him to be an extraordinary and unexpected coincidence.

  2279. After he sold a painting to a tourist he often thought that it was a lucky accident and it would never happen again for a hundred years, and even if the very next day he was to sell another it made no difference. There was something too unreal and inexplicable about it. I would have to explain it this way...

Grandmother, parts 2272 - 2275

 2272. Suddenly in front of you on a screen would be the route to take and the milage with everything highlighted in blue. But Coromo, even from childhood, would rather dispense with any maps and directions and head out into the unknown looked after by nobody, his location and destination unknown. He liked to be able to say to himself, “I am in a place I have never been in before, looking at things I have never seen, and nobody in the whole wide world even knows where I am, not even me.”

 2273. But how could he be in a place that he did not know, looking at things he had never seen, thinking thoughts he had never thought before, and feeling feelings he never knew existed, if all of it was being recorded, written down, memorized, and thought about by some Divine being who was keeping track of his every move, and passing judgment on his every thought.

 2274.Yes, it boiled down in the end to a question of free will: do we have it or not. And for Coromo, if life was just a situation like riding along on a bike, and never being able to remove the supernatural training wheels, what was the good of it, how could it even be considered interesting?

2275. But, like it or no, that was his situation. His Grandmother had planted the seeds of these ideas in his mind, and there was no getting rid of them. They could be ignored for a long period of time, but just let some disaster strike, and Coromo would rush like a frightened mouse, straight to the sheltering hole of his childhood beliefs, there was no escape from it.