fiction by kevin finnerty

Mindfulness

With the benefit of hindsight, J.J. could identify his modest fifty-first birthday celebration with his daughter and her boyfriend as a significant event in his transformation, but he was never sure if it was the spark or the fuse. In the end, he knew it didn’t matter; it was all one.

Alexi and Woon lived in a modest apartment north of the city. They’d become cohabitants six months earlier, having dated for three years. The gray wood exterior of the complex seemed fitting for the part of the country where clouds were the norm and for a couple of young adults who frequently exuded a sense of gloom.  

Alexi surprised her father by greeting him with a smile and a kiss on the cheek at the door, and Woon abandoned whatever preoccupation he had to come over and shake J.J.’s hand. After five minutes of pleasant conversation, J.J. turned around to make sure he’d entered the right unit.   

When his hosts returned to the small kitchen area to finish the meal’s preparation, J.J. realized he hardly recognized the place. No longer were there clothes on the floor, worthless trinkets scattered about. No books atop the television, no glasses half-filled with liquid sitting on shelves.

The place was still tiny in comparison to the home in which Alexi had grown, but J.J. no longer felt claustrophobic. There was some flow without the chaos, seemingly a purpose designed for living, not mere storage.  

“We’re ready for you now.” 

Woon caught J.J. staring at the bedroom door that had been left halfway open such that J.J. could see a portion of the room, enough to know that the couple had not merely dumped the contents of the living area in the bedroom. Unless they had strategically placed everything in the opposite corner.

“What are we having?”

“It’s a simple meal but something we’re proud to serve.”

J.J. liked to think of himself as quick on his feet, ever ready for verbal banter, but Woon’s use of language, turn of a phrase, still sometimes caught him unprepared. J.J followed his host to the table for two around which his daughter and boyfriend had squeezed a folding chair so they all could sit together. There was barely enough room for the plates, utensils, and water glasses, so the salad had been pre-served for everyone’s benefit. The bowl from which it came sat on the sill that separated the kitchen and eating areas.

“You have chicken salad,” Alexi said.

“You don’t?”

“We don’t eat meat anymore.”

“Then you didn’t have to make any for me.”

Woon reached out and touched J.J.’s wrist. “It’s not our place to impose our practices on anyone else.”

Woon’s long hair was still wet, which J.J. considered a good thing because there had been times in the past when he wondered how often his daughter’s boyfriend bathed. His facial hair had been trimmed and styled since the last time J.J. saw him as well. In short, Woon appeared less wild, more presentable, than J.J. could ever recall.

“But I do have something to give you later.”

J.J. stared at Woon’s hand to force it to be moved before turning to his daughter. “What’s that?”

“A birthday present.”

“No need for that.”

“It’s something we think might help,” Woon said.

J.J. looked to his daughter for an explanation as to why she—who until very recently had frequently borrowed money from her father (and presumably his ex-wife as well)—would think he needed help with anything.

“Let’s eat first.” Alexi wore a long, baggy sundress. She still favored loose-fitting clothes that J.J. thought didn’t do justice to her fit, formerly athletic frame. She had cut her hair so that it was about two-thirds its length a month prior. She also apparently had stopped dyeing it blond. Her brown roots now chased away the former color.

“Sesame seeds?” Woon held out a bag to J.J.

“To sprinkle on top,” Alexi explained. “They’re high in calcium.”

“I’m surprised anything else is needed.” J.J. inspected his salad and saw it contained two types of lettuce, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, beets, celery, radish, and chicken.

“A little better than last time you were here, right?”

Woon offered J.J. a knowing glance, and J.J. recalled having a couple of slices of pizza and eating in near silence because Alexi and Woon had been fighting immediately prior to his arrival.  

“Well, change can be good.”

“We needed change. I wasn’t happy. We weren’t happy.” Alexi adjusted in her seat and sat up straight as if consciously seeking to improve her posture. “But things are a lot better now.”

“It’s all connected. Our place, our food, our appearances, our outlook, our plans.”

“Plans?”

“I’ll tell you about that later, Dad. Just enjoy your meal. Have seconds.”

“Thirds if you like. We made a ton. You can eat as much veggies as you like guilt-free.”

*

J.J. had expected to go for a walk after dinner. The best feature of Alexi’s place was its sliding glass door that led to a small, concrete patio that was less than a hundred feet from the woods. In a few minutes’ time, one could be surrounded by, even if not one with, nature.  

Walking in the woods offered father and daughter a chance to talk. To say what they could not inside the 800 square-foot apartment with the person about whom they wanted to converse present. Even under the best of circumstances, J.J. found he tended to have better conversations with his daughter while moving about, rather than sitting at a table facing one another.

“I’m impressed.”

“Sh!”

J.J. glanced at his daughter and thought her eyes were closed. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Please be quiet for a while. Just breathe. Walk and breathe.”

J.J. worried his daughter was keeping something from him, had some difficult message to convey, but was waiting to be further from her home. He was amazed she could walk with her eyes closed without falling. True, the ground was level with few obstacles, and surely she’d traversed this path hundreds of times, but still. J.J. looked up, down, left and right, before he could relax. He breathed deeply and exhaled.

“Good,” he thought he heard his daughter whisper.

He took another deep breath, though not as big as the first one.  

“Yes.”

J.J. saw a slight smile on his daughter’s lips. He closed his own eyes but opened them after only a couple of seconds. After a few more steps, he became conscious of his breathing. It seemed to be in sync with his movement, the steps he took.  

Maybe he had closed his eyes at some point without being aware. Maybe they were open but focused elsewhere. Whatever the case, they refocused when Alexi gently touched his arm.

“Okay.”

“What?”

“We can go back now.”

J.J. was disappointed to hear this. He wanted to continue where he had been even though he had no idea where that was or where they were headed. He looked at his daughter and she smiled once more. Bigger this time.

“You can come back.”

The first drops of rain hit J.J. the same time his daughter’s words did.

Like good Northwesterners, they were ready. They’d brought rain jackets with hoods, and the trees above caught much of what fell anyway.  

*

Woon tossed J.J. a towel when he returned to the apartment.

“It’s clean.” Woon displayed the one he was using to dry the dishes before J.J. patted his bald skull, wiping away more sweat than rain.

Alexi emerged from her bedroom with a card. “Happy birthday, Daddy.”

J.J. opened the envelope. The card’s cover depicted a man and a young girl on a dock. The girl leaned her head into the man’s shoulder. Inside Alexi had written “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” over the five-sentence message that the maker of the card had imprinted.  

“I liked the photograph better than the words,” Alexi said.

Woon leaned over J.J.’s shoulder and closed the card. “It is a nice photo.”

Alexi handed J.J. a smaller envelope. He opened it and saw it contained a gift card to a place called The Mystic.

“It’s a yoga studio.”

“All right.”

“You can go on your own or sometime when Alexi and I are going.”  

J.J. involuntarily shuddered when Woon’s breath hit the back of his neck. “I’ve never been.”

“I know. That’s why we got it for you. Because I figured you wouldn’t go on your own.”  Alexi placed her hand on her father’s hip. “You’re going to like it more than you think.”

“Trust us.”
J.J. looked at the man he thought for the first time might actually become his son-in-law and then at his only child. He hadn’t had much reason to trust either of them about anything over the years, but this time he did. A little.  

*

J.J. liked to think of himself as open-minded. He often tried new restaurants and food. He listened to the local radio station that played current songs in addition to the ones of his youth and young adulthood. At the same time, he thought he’d learned a thing or two about life after a half century and believed one didn’t jettison all acquired wisdom in the name of experimentation.

He’d been what teachers and school administrators called a good student. A very good student. He was so good at learning what he’d been asked to learn, of internalizing their messages, that it wasn’t until he was more than fifty years old that he considered whether he needed to forget a lot of what he’d been taught to try to learn things that no one had bothered to teach him. He was still imagining reaching some sort of balance when Alexi called and asked him to go to yoga with her three weeks after his birthday.

“I’m not sure what to wear,” he said.

“Yoga pants.”

“I don’t have any.”

“You have a lot of money. Buy some.”

J.J. purchased two pair of yoga pants and wore the navy ones with a gray wicking shirt to the yoga session. Woon was similarly attired when he and Alexi met him at the entrance to the studio.  

“See, you fit right in,” his daughter said.

“Until I try the poses.”

“Everyone is a beginner at everything at some point in their lives.”

J.J. thought Woon’s words could have been put on a placard on the door.  He’d seen a couple of studios as he moved about the city. Whenever he peered inside, he thought that the participants looked like former dancers or cheerleaders. Mostly attractive, thin, young women.

The Mystic did not give the same vibe. Located ten minutes from Alexi’s place, the studio sat at the end of a row of former warehouses which included a semi-popular taproom at the opposite end and a series of self-storage units in between. Its participants did not wear the latest designer yoga attire like those J.J. had seen in the city. Most at The Mystic wore baggy off-the-rack sweats and T-shirts. Their bodies much more accurately represented the community with all types present—short and tall, svelte and overweight, young and old alike.

“Take off your shoes and socks and go introduce yourself to Lydia. You’ll need a mat.” Alexi left J.J. to stretch with Woon when their instructor entered the room.  

“Hi, I’m J.J. I’m new.”

Lydia put her palms together near her heart and bowed. “Namaste.”

J.J. awkwardly bowed in response.

“Welcome, I take it you have never practiced hatha yoga before.”

“No yoga whatsoever. So go easy on me.”

“It’s not about me going easy or hard. It’s about achieving mindfulness.”

Small in stature, Lydia was a woman of Asian descent with only the slightest hint that English was not her first language. J.J. thought she might have been somewhere between 30 and 50 years old.

“I think I need a mat.”

“You know you need a mat.”

J.J. smiled. “That’s good. I’m a lawyer. I’m usually more precise with my words.”

“Lawyers can practice hatha yoga too.”

J.J. joined Alexi and Woon in the second of three rows facing their instructor after he received a mat. Lydia greeted everyone as she had J.J., then proceeded to lead the class through various poses named Downward Dog, Upward Dog, Warrior, and others that J.J. could not remember or perform at a level he considered satisfactory, despite studying his instructor, daughter, and her boyfriend. 

Throughout the session, Lydia repeatedly encouraged the class to breathe properly. J.J. thought he might have been more successful with this aspect of the class until Lydia moved beside him.

“May I touch you?”

“Sure.”

Lydia placed her hands on his chest. “Breathe in deeply. Hold it. Exhale. Breathe in. Hold. Exhale. Breathe. Exhale. Good. Pranayama good for lawyers too.”

Lydia next moved one of J.J.’s legs and hips to better achieve the desired position. “You’re doing well.”  

“For a first-timer?”

“There’s only this time.”

J.J. knew this time he was the worst performer in the room and wondered how many sessions he would need to improve his standing.

Lydia released him but remained standing nearby. “A single step in the direction you wish to go is progress.”

J.J. most enjoyed the Corpse pose at the end of the class. He lay flat on his back with his eyes closed and thought he focused better on his breathing and nothing else.

*

J.J. invited his daughter and Woon for coffee after yoga. They both ordered green tea.

“How do you feel?” Alexi held her mug with two hands and blew over the top of it.

“A little sore but not too bad.”

“That’s not what I meant, Dad.”

“Was I supposed to have a spiritual awakening?”

When his daughter looked away, J.J. turned to Woon. “You’re really good at this.”

“For the first time in my life, things come easy to me.”

“How about you?”

“She’s making a lot of progress.”

Alexi furrowed her brow. “I start from a different place. It was natural for Woon, but I have more to free myself from.”

J.J. sipped his coffee and looked around the room. There were a few people sitting alone, looking at their laptops or smart phones. Far fewer groups of people networking or talking shop than he was used to seeing at his usual haunts in the city.

“I get that you might want to live differently than your Mom and me, but I don’t think the life we gave you was so horrible you need to escape from it completely.”

“I never said that.”

“It’s not you or Deborah. It’s not even the culture in which we mostly exist, though that’s a bigger part. It’s everything that seeks to prevent us from knowing our true selves and how we are one with the collective.”

J.J. studied Woon, uncertain if he were an individual with incredible insight or a person who’d developed a talent to compose sentences that suggested more substance than was actually present. His physical appearance notwithstanding, Woon suddenly reminded J.J. of a number of corporate executives with whom he worked. Supremely focused, supremely confident.

“Would you like it better if I practiced environmental law instead of litigating?”

“Why do you have to practice law at all? Why must you engage in that human construct?”

“I’m human.”

“Yeah, and you’re a good human, Dad.”

“You say that with a certain level of condescension.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean that. I meant it as a compliment.”

“What else could it be?” Woon said.

J.J. breathed deeply and exhaled vigorously, only conscious of his act halfway through the release.

“You invite your mother to one of these classes yet?”

“That would be a waste of time.”

“We can always ask, Lex.”

“No, she would just tell me I’m stupid and not even try.”

*

Despite having long passed the period of joint parenting, J.J. and Deborah continued to get together once a month. They did so to update each other on their business activities and to send one another potential leads. As he waited for her at the entrance of their favorite lunch spot, J.J. wondered if it had always been a business relationship.

They met in law school and pushed one another so that they finished as the top two students—she being number one—when they graduated. They moved to the same city and joined competing firms but worked to advance each other’s career—hers in mergers and acquisitions, his as a litigator.

“Am I on time?” Deborah shed her red rain jacket upon entering the restaurant on Third Avenue.

“As always.” J.J. didn’t check his phone but knew his ex would arrive within seconds of their lunch date.

“The usual, Ethan.” Deborah waved the menu away that the server held towards her. J.J. wanted a moment or two to consider three favorite items but sensed his former spouse was in a hurry.

“The sea bass. And iced tea.”

“And coffee for Madam?”

“Of course.”

“So are you as busy as I am?” Deborah quickly scrolled through her smart phone before placing it on the table face-down.

“I’m okay. I’m trying to develop a sense of balance.”

“As a litigator? Yeah, right. Always too busy or desperately looking for the next big case. I’m sure you heard about the latest with Softy?”

J.J. had. A few years ago, he would have pursued it, despite knowing which firm was likely to get it. This time he’d chosen to pass and permit a younger partner at his firm the chance to grovel.

“How about you?”

“You know it’s a good M&A period so I’m striking while the iron is hot.”

“Can you delegate much these days?”

“I have one good associate who’s coming up for partner. I’m not sure I trust the younger ones yet, so I do a lot of looking over their shoulders.”

Deborah waved at a couple of Amazon executives across the room. J.J. nodded toward the one he’d met while Ethan placed the beverages on the table.  

“You going to get away this year?”

“Hawaii. In June. For a triathlon.”

Deborah had always run. In high school, in college. She introduced J.J. to distance running in law school, but he could never keep up with her. The shin splints he eventually developed gave him the excuse to stop and take up biking instead. Unwilling to let him race past her, Deborah soon added this to her workout routine and progressed from marathons to triathlons. As he gazed at her sunken cheekbones and frail forearms, J.J. wondered if she’d taken her training too far, though he knew what her response would be if he asked: not possible.   

“I hear you spent your birthday with our daughter.”

“And Woon.”

“Woon.” Deborah shook her head.

“Have you seen him lately? He’s cleaned up quite a bit.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“I think he and Alexi are finally having a positive influence on one another.”

“I hope that means she’ll improve herself enough that she’ll understand that she needs to look for a better long-term match.” 

Ethan waited with plates in hand for Deborah to finish her derisive comments before placing the meals on the table, taking a small bow, and departing.

“I don’t know, Deb.”

J.J. watched his ex lift her eyes but not her head from the plate, whose aroma she was trying to enjoy. He hardly ever used her shortened name since their divorce. It wasn’t in the papers the couple filed with the court, but J.J. understood the change was expected due to the circumstances.

“I went to yoga with them earlier this week.”

Deborah interlocked her fingers and stared. “And?”

“And it felt like another positive experience.”

“For you or for them?”

“For me, I’m not sure, I think so. For them, no doubt.”

“J.” He knew Deborah was evening the score. “I see bad things coming down the pike.”

“First?”

“First, you’re softening up. Your absolute best quality has always been your competitive drive. You pushed yourself, you pushed me. We both succeeded because we worked each other and didn’t accept excuses.”

“We can’t ever let up a bit?”

“Why would you want to?” 

“Second?”

“Second, they’re going to hit you up for money, if they haven’t already.”

“They haven’t.”

Deborah shook her head before attacking her sole as if it were still alive and needed to be subdued. “It’s coming.”

“Do you know what for?”

“Whatever they’ve gotten in their heads they think they want to do this time.”

“Open a restaurant?”

“Open a restaurant, become yoga instructors, who knows? I just know that our daughter can afford to bounce her way through life because she was born into a family of wealth and has us, you especially, as a backstop. You and I didn’t have that, did we? Our parents didn’t have an endless amount of cash to rescue us if we effed up even once. How many times has she done so already?”

“Effed up?”

“A lot. A lot is the answer. Why would you think now will be any different?”

*

Rain was taking place more severely than normal the next morning. Despite the weather and it being a Wednesday, J.J. chose to forego his suit and instead slipped into his hiking clothes, consisting of a long-sleeve wicking shirt, pants than could be separated into shorts, wool socks, boots that rose a couple of inches above the ankles, and a jacket with a hood. He called his assistant and told her he would not be coming into the office.

J.J. drove north through the storm and splashed through the accompanying puddles. Out of the city and into the land of tall evergreens. He wasn’t sure where he was headed but decided to park at a trailhead when the rain lessened.

He threw the hood over his head when he exited his hybrid SUV but realized he didn’t need it a couple of minutes into his hike. Rain was no more. Sun there was.

J.J. smiled and sought to push away all of his thoughts. When work intruded, he wondered if he should make an objection, then refocused his attention on his breathing.

He breathed deeply and exhaled slowly, seeking to find rhythm with his steps. It was easier to do when the hike when was more like a walk. Thoughts returned when he hit the switchbacks and the hike turned more into a climb. When his breathing changed, he heard Alexi, then Woon, and then Lydia.  

“Just breathe, Dad.”

“You’ve got this.”   

“Focus on the simple. That’s all there is.”

J.J. soon returned to the present, to the hike, to the mountain, to himself. He and they were one. For a moment or two, maybe more.

Something eventually interrupted. A thought breaking through or a movement in the external world. It took him out, but J.J. understood he could go back. With practice and patience, he would get back to the place of peace. And to that state Lydia called mindfulness. 

Kevin Finnerty holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago.  His stories have appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Newfound, Variety Pack, The Westchester Review, and other journals.