Business

When I was very young I had a friend to whom I would tell outrageous lies, and she would listen to my lies and tell me lies of her own. Our unspoken agreement was that we would  never acknowledge we were lying or accuse each other of lying. She would say the floors of her house were covered in thousands of dollars in cash, and I would say I had walked to McDonald’s in the middle of the night and everyone there was a skeleton. We only lied to each other this way at lunchtime, one of us taking her turn to lie while the other took her turn to eat. Our business was to tell and hear lies, and when lunch was over, our business was done.

With some people our business is as simple as a shoe on a foot, and with other people our business is to build a house with wet spaghetti noodles. Having complicated business with someone can make you feel, wrongly, that you are a bad person, and having simple business with someone can make you feel, wrongly, that you are a good person. Sometimes you have been in business with someone through so many lifetimes that there is almost nothing left for you to do together, and you can just sit down. 

It can be tempting to try to engage in business with people that is not your real business. You may try to harden your heart against someone who has made a mess of things and find that you are instead writing out a long thank you card and spraying it with perfume. With my father I found that my only business with him was to love him, and every other feeling God scattered on the wind like play money. 

It takes a certain refinement of the senses to know when your business with someone is complete. In the park today I observed a man and a woman with a dog approached by an unaccompanied dog who seemed to have emerged from the brush. The two dogs went into the grass to play together, and the couple stood watching them for several minutes until the man said suddenly, “Alright, beat it!” Hearing this, the man’s own dog ran away and the strange dog came to lie at his feet.