“So what do you do, Harry?” I asked him the next time I saw him, once again at Murphy’s. It was a Sunday evening, several weeks later.
“A number of things,” he answered evasively, smiling as usual. Harry smiled a lot.
“Such as?” I prodded.
“Oh, whatever the moment calls for, I suppose.”
Harry was reading when I came in this time. Our previous meeting had been a fluke - he’s not a video poker junkie. Every other time I found him at Murphy’s, he was reading. Rarely talking. Except to me.
I wondered if perhaps he would prefer to keep reading whatever it was he was reading, so I just offered a quiet laugh, nodded, and let it go at that. Much to my surprise, however, Harry continued.
“I used to teach,” he said.
“Really? Teach what?” I asked.
“Science. Eighth grade,” he said.
“Ah, science! My favorite subject,” I said, glad that we had a common interest.
“Well, I said I used to,” Harry continued. “I don’t anymore.”
I wondered why not, but I didn’t want to ask. “So what now?”
Harry shrugged. “As odd as it may sound, I don’t really know.”
I laughed. “Doesn’t sound odd to me. I’m sitting here talking to you because I took a job that I didn’t really want, in a town I’d never even heard of. So I don’t really know what I’m doing, either.”
Harry thought for a moment. “I’m not sure which one of us has it worse. I suspect you do!”
“Yeah,” I said, “I vote for me. At least you’re not spending your afternoons drinking stale coffee to stay awake and trying to figure out how to make the time go by faster.”
“No, I’m not,” Harry concurred.
“So what do you do? You don’t work at all? A rich ex-teacher? What, did you win the lottery or something?” I asked, smiling.
“Something like that,” Harry laughed. “I actually do feel like I’ve hit the lottery, in a way. But rather than sitting on huge amounts of money, I’ve got a vast new ocean of potential.”
“A vast new ocean of potential? Sounds good to me. Where can I get one of those?” I asked with a smirk.
“You already have one, at your disposal,” Harry answered. “You just have to decide that it’s there.”
I sat pondering what Harry had just said. There was an ocean of potential at my disposal, and I simply had to decide that it was there. “And once I decide that it’s there, I have access to it?” I asked.
“Well, you’ve always had access to it. You’ve been drawing upon it all along. But if you know it’s there, then it feels like you’ve won the lottery. An ocean of potential. Unlimited.”
Now, I had no idea, really, what Harry was talking about. But the words he was using were very clear to me, like I understood what he was saying far better than I should have. I’d never studied philosophy, religion, or any of those things. No interest. I never got anything out of it, and I always found that stuff boring.
I was definitely not a spiritual person, and the words he was using, such as “ocean of potential”, would have turned me off under normal circumstances. But for whatever reason, I was comprehending completely what he was saying. The idea of an ocean of potential, feeling like winning the lottery, was very clear to me. I could feel it, and I knew exactly what he meant. It was a weird sensation, easily comprehending something that, at face value, should have meant little or nothing to me.
That was the first time I noticed that I’m a different person in Harry’s presence. My mind seems to work better. Whether talking or listening, I find it easier to find or interpret words and ideas during my conversations with him. It’s like there is an extra current of intelligence running through my brain or something. I would notice it again and again in the years to come. And I would later realize that I had been permanently affected by the interactions I had with Harry.
Now, Harry would insist that he was not the “cause” of such effects, but only perhaps a “catalyst” for them. He would insist that I had chosen to place him in my reality to tell me what I already knew. And he would, of course, be right.
Harry gave me a crash course during the five months I lived in Ohio. Not that I asked for it, and he certainly didn’t view it that way. But just by being around him, you learned things. You were taught by his approach to life, his way of handling things, his way of questioning things. And of course his near-incessant observation of the meaning behinds things, the reason for things to be the way they are, the beliefs we are expressing at any given moment.
Harry was a walking assessment of reality, and he spewed his ideas and observations like an old fountain with no shutoff valve. He was full of it, alright. And it flowed.
And thank God it did, because I learned a lot from Harry during those five months. Just as anyone who spends time around Harry does. It can’t be helped. He seems to exist to do just that: express himself, and in particular share his understanding of things with the rest of us.
It would take many years for me to fully appreciate the gift he gave me, just by being himself. He didn’t set out to teach me anything. But I believe he intended to be helpful. He told me on a number of occasions that this was his underlying intent, even if his enthusiasm often led him well off the path of helpfulness. But Harry, and his view of things, awakened a seed in me that would later bloom into something beyond anything I could have imagined.
Something that would eventually spread to the minds and hearts of people all over the globe.
Sound farfetched?
A little “over the top”?
I would have thought so, too.
But tiny seeds can grow into very big trees. And the one that Harry awakened in me would grow to be a very large tree indeed.
I often saw Harry as an old, weather-worn gardener, hunched over in his overalls, watering can in hand. Harry watered seeds, and sent them on their way. He returned from time to time to check on our progress (or, more precisely, we checked in with Harry to see how we were doing).
Other than that, Harry was just who he was.
And he helped me to be who I am.
That’s just what Harry does.
He is a gardener.
