"Wait. All these people, we see them just a few minutes. once in a while there's a face in the crowd, some lovely star bright woman who makes me want to stay and say hello, just be still and not moving and talk for a while. But she flies with me ten minutes or she doesn't and she's gone and next day I'm off to Shelbyville and I never see her again. That's lonely. But I guess I can't find lasting friends when I'm an unlasting one myself."
He was quiet.
"Or can I?"
"May I talk now:"
"I think so, yes." The hamburgers in this place were wrapped half-over in thin oiled paper, and when you unwrapped them you got sesame seeds everywhere useless little things, but the hamburgers were good. He ate in silence for a time and so did I, wondering what he would say.
"Well, Richard, we're magnets, aren't we? Not magnets. We're iron, wrapped in copper wire, and whenever we want to magnetize ourselves we can. Pour our inner voltage through the wire, we can attract whatever we want to attract. A magnet is not anxious about how it works. It is itself, and by its nature it draws some things and leaves others untouched."
I ate a potato chip and frowned at him. "You left out one thing. How do I do it?"
"You don't do anything. Cosmic law, remember? Like attracts like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well."
"But that takes a lot of faith, and meanwhile you get pretty lonely."
He looked at me strangely over his hamburger "Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith What it takes is imagination.'' He swept the table between us clean, pushing salt and french fries out of the way, ketchup, forks and knives, so that I wondered what was going to happen, what would be materialized before my very eyes.
"If you have imagination as a grain of sesame seed," he said, herding an example seed to the middle of the clearing, "all things are possible to you.''
I looked at the sesame seed, and then at him. "Wish you Messiahs would get together and agree. I thought the thing was faith, when the world goes against me "
"No. I wanted to correct that, when I was working, but it was long uphill fight. Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers. Also, they didn't have sesame seeds."
I knew for a fact that they had sesame seeds, but I let this lie go past. "I'm supposed to imagine this magnetizing? I imagine some lovely wise mystical lady appearing in a hayfield crowd in Tarragon, Illinois? I can do that, but that's all that is, that's just my imagination."
He looked despairingly to heaven, represented for the moment by the tin-plate ceiling and cold lights of Em and Edna's Cafe. "Just your imagination? Of course it's your imagination! This world is your imagination, have you forgotten? Where your thinking is, there is your experience; As a man thinks, so is he; That which I feared is come upon me; Think and grow rich: Creative visualization for fun and profit; How to find friends by being who you are. Your imagining doesn't change the Is one whit, doesn't affect reality at all. But we are talking about Warner Brothers worlds, MGM lifetimes, and every second of those are illusions and imaginations. All dreams with the symbols we waking dreamers conjure for ourselves."
He lined his fork and knife as though he was building a bridge from his place to mine. "You wonder what your dreams say: Just as well you look at the things of your waking life and ask what they stand for. You with airplanes in your life, every time you turn around.''
"Well, Don, yes." I wished he would slow down, not pile this on me all at once; mile a minute is too fast for new ideas.
"If you dreamed about airplanes, what would that mean to you?"
"Well, freedom. Airplane dreams are escape and flight and setting myself free."
"How clear do you want it: The dream awake is the same: your will to be free of all things that tie you back--routine, authority, boredom, gravity. What you haven't realized is that you're already free, and you always have been. If you had half the sesame seeds of this . . . you're already supreme lord of your magician's life. Only imagination! What are you saying ?"
The waitress looked at him strangely from time to time, drying dishes, listening, puzzling over who this was.
"So you never get lonely, Don ?" I said.
"Unless I feel like it. I have friends on other dimensions that are around me from time to time. So do you. "
"No. I mean on this dimension, this imaginary world. Show me what you mean give me a little miracle of the magnet. . . I do want to learn this."
"You show me," he said. 'To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there. "
"Like what ? Like my lovely lady ?"
"Anything. Not your lady. Something small, at first. "
"I'm supposed to practice now?"
"yes"
"OK. . . . A blue feather."