“Are you reading the Bible I gave you every day at home?” Mr. Muller asked the boy.
They read a lot of Bible passages and talked about them. Mr. Muller gave the boy extra nickels for knowing Bible quotes, King James style, including book, chapter, and verse. The boy went home and underlined them, including the words of the prophets and Jesus and St. Paul, and that explains a little why he was attracted to St. Paul’s School, and why he knew the blue angel dream was more than a reaction to dyspepsia.
Mr. Muller taught him a lot of other things, including, “Don’t expect gratitude for helping people out, don’t expect people to clap for you.”
He also taught that “God loves a cheerful giver.”15 They burned that passage into a piece of wood, did the varnishing in the garage, and up it went on an oak tree along the driveway.
“It’s good to give, and don’t ever be sad about giving,” Mr. Muller told him. “If you can’t be cheerful about helping your neighbor, then the spirit isn’t in it. When it is, you give and you glow.”
Mrs. Muller was always kind. The boy never heard from her that loud, annoying, out-of-control kind of talk that he considered pointless and had learned to dislike a lot. The Mullers never screamed. Mrs. Muller wanted him to be prayerful and peaceful in his mind all the time. “The Bible says ‘pray without ceasing,’ ” she reminded him, and the three of them burned that into a plank as well and nailed it to a tree down the street, right next to his mailbox.
The boy’s favorite afternoons were when Mr. and Mrs. Muller had him in for clam chowder and warm, homemade bread, especially in winter after shoveling snow from their steps and the long gravel driveway. The three held hands and Mr. or Mrs. Muller said grace in a sincere and beautiful way. How different this was from his home, where there was no everyday spirituality, although he and his family did make it to church some Sundays. The Mullers were deeply spiritual people, so they did not need to get rowdy or out of control. They practiced temperance and were joyfully close to God. The boy felt peaceful with them.
“Don’t expect people to come to your funeral, I don’t expect them to come to mine,” Mr. Muller told him. “But you should come.”
“Okay, I will,” the boy promised. And a few years later, he did.
Looking back on Oak Neck Lane, it seems that the Mullers were the perfect people in the right place at the right time to be the boy’s spiritual mentors. It seems as though they were put there to shape the boy’s youth. This is what it means when people say that sometimes we only recognize synchronicity when we look backward and connect the dots.
But then came the big move, and the boy and his family landed at 42 Dorset Lane in Babylon, on a creek so Dad could keep his boat in the backyard, and there were more kids around.
The downside was losing Mr. Muller, who was now about ten miles away. The boy rode his bike over there to say hello every once in a while, but Mr. Muller died not too long after the move. The boy was nine when he rode his bike all the way back to the old street one afternoon in summer and Mrs. Muller said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Muller passed away the other day. He died of lung cancer.” They said a pretty emotional prayer for him, and the boy cleaned some junk out of the garage, for old time’s sake.
The boy went into the Mullers’ old tool shed, where he sawed a big pine plank and burned a passage across it before he varnished it and nailed it to a tree: “Thank God for Mr. Muller.”
Mom took the boy to Mr. Muller’s memorial service—his funeral, which the boy just had to attend. There were maybe two dozen people there from Mr. Muller’s church, and Mrs. Muller. The boy said a few words.
“Mr. Muller taught me the Bible and we prayed and we clammed, and he taught me how to use tools. He was always there, and he taught me to save my nickels. He taught me to be realistic about people and not to expect a lot, but he believed that God could still inspire them to do good.”
At age twelve, the boy got his first job in Dave Southard’s Boat Yard, building small wooden-hulled sailboats. That too was thanks to Mr. Muller, who made the boy into a carpenter. When the older guys at Southard’s would ask the boy where he learned how to use all the tools, he always answered, “Good old Mr. Muller.” But his dad was an excellent carpenter too and a hard worker, so the boy learned from him as well.
Synchronicity as Protection—A Risky Moment in Mexico
Things happen that you don’t control, like your parents’ car accident on the LIE or the Mercedes breaking down on Route 80, and all that remains is the journey forward. Truth be told, though, in general following dreams on Route 80 can be quite dangerous for a boy. Maybe the Mercedes could have died lightless right in the middle of 80 and gotten plowed into by Gary’s truck with the boy inside, or maybe he could have been hit trying to walk over to the shoulder. But the car had just enough to make it over to the side before it went completely dead. But the boy had always been protected by God, like when he was hitching through Mexico at age thirteen.
The summer of his Third Form year at St. Paul’s (ninth grade), the boy took an Areonaves de Mexico flight with a one-day stopover in Mexico City, en route to a school in Saltillo to study Spanish and guitar. After landing, he walked for most of the evening and spent the night in Chapultepec Forest, Mexico City’s large and very dangerous park where people got robbed, kidnapped, and killed a lot. The next night he spent in a small motel called Agua Caliente, “The Hot Water Motel.” They did have a hot shower and he took one, but he slept in his jeans because the sheets looked pretty well used. The next day he flew from Mexico City to Monterrey and hopped on a bus to downtown Saltillo, where there is a beautiful plaza, a nice but not magnificent cathedral, and an okay university.
It took five minutes to walk from the university to the family home, where he shared rooms with two college students from Florida who were studying Spanish literature. He liked the family, ate meals with them, and went to the outdoor market for shopping, where he learned a lot of Spanish about the physiology of the bull. All over the city, radios blared music by The Kinks or The Animals, contemporary ‘60s rock bands that were taking the US by storm. He frequented a movie theater downtown that showed mostly old black-and-white films, dropping coins into the palms of the native Mexican Indians sitting around in large groups out in front, begging in the shade.
It was a productive summer. The boy played music on his guitar and received a Spanish Language Certificate from La Universidad de Jaime Balmes, which made him quite proud.
But when the time came to depart for home, the boy screwed up. The young male mind is not worth much when it comes to advance planning; it is a disorganized mind at best. He woke up that August morning around ten o’clock, packed for the flight home, and only then did it dawn on him that he had forgotten something crucial—he needed to catch the Saltillo bus to get to Monterrey airport, about ninety minutes away, but he had just missed it!
“Whoa!” he thought. “The flight for New York leaves at noon!”
He quickly picked up his little tan suitcase, grabbed his guitar case, said goodbye to his host family, and ran a couple of miles until he reached the edge of town and the two-lane highway. He had been warned that it was a dangerous place, though, and as he stood there two really big, bad-looking guys with bats started walking his way. Quickly the boy stuck out his thumb and prayed. Behold the miracle: An immediate act of divine synchronicity! A nice old farmer wearing a straw hat pulled over in his rusty, greenish old truck filled with chickens in crowded cages. Now the two bad hombres started running toward him, so this had to be quick.
The farmer asked the boy where he was headed, and the boy told him, “Monterrey Aeropuerto, por favor, y muy rapido! Veinte dolares para usted!”
Then he jumped into the back of the truck and the farmer took off as fast as that old truck would go, with