Fred

In the general period in which I inherited Bobbin, I also acquired a canary. I don’t remember the circumstances at all, but I think if my mental body memory is working well, which it often is these days as it substitutes more and more for the slowing physical body memory, I recall that one of my male friends had a girl friend who owned a canary, and the girl friend moved her home to another city. For some reason even more obscure, it turned out that she could not take her canary with her, nor could her boy friend take it either. So in this period I not only fractured my devotion to dogs with a cat; but at almost the same time took on a bird as well.
I felt no qualms about the canary, as my break-down from being devoted to dogs felt no further crisis in adopting this much smaller bit of living matter clothed in yellow feathers
I do feel a bit shame-faced though about the origin of the bird’s name; which rests without further details as being Fred. His upkeep was very simple and feeding costs frugal in the extreme, certainly in comparison to a dog, or even a cat. We seemed to take to each other without the least ripple of adjustment needed. I was early to bed and Fred apparently even earlier. In fact, I never did try to understand when he was asleep or awake, as his eyes seemed always open when I passed by, even when I returned late at night. Maybe they don’t sleep. I had never thought of that, but that would be very strange indeed considering that they live and breathe.
Fred seemed to thrive on whatever passed his way, but gradually I thought I ought to make a bit of effort to extend the hand of friendship to this very intelligent and good-mannered bit of fluff. I tried to compose a few words of greeting and welcome, hoping that in some way the gist of my sentiments would give him pleasure, and tried not to think of whether I was getting a bit dotty in the absence of any other human habitant in my small apartment.
Those were the days of the hippies, and San Francisco, where I was living, contained as far as I knew the mecca of all hippiedom, the Haight Ashbury district. As one of my closest esoteric friends lived in that sainted domain, I had actually seen one or two of what I suspected were hippies while calling on my friend there. She was invalided at the time, and died not too long after I inherited Fred. I missed her greatly as she had been about the first person initiated into the Chistia Order of Sufis by the great musician and poet, Inayat Khan, when he first landed in San Francisco in response to his Chistia master’s command to go to the West from India and take with him the principles of Sufism and its great love of music and the arts.
Getting back to Fred, I put him in the second spare bedroom and there he reigned unchallenged in the alternating fogs and sunny spells so natural to the Bay Area.
We got along very well together as far as I could tell. Then a small band of hippies attracted by the poetry of Inayat Khan started the train of events which altered completely Fred’s simple life routine, and added a truly unique and very special chapter to my own collection of completely incredible events, which rapidly gathered speed from that time on. In fact, I would make a guess that Bobbin and Fred should have alerted me to the fact that my own life was moving into a sphere of reality which was so far divorced from mathematics and science in which I had specialized, that it has always been a wonder to both me and my friends that the two areas could possibly exist side by side for so many years in intense living and in equally intense harmony with each other. This marked the beginning of deep and constant experiencing of events in daily life and human relationship involving the finest essences of science and mysticism.
One day my telephone rang and the new head of the little mystic group in which I participated was on the line with an unexpected request to make of me. It seems she had been in the office of the little group when a knock at the door introduced four bedraggled young men whom she correctly sized up as hippies, of whose unexpected visit this was her first experience. It seems they had been caught by the beauty of the poetry of Inayat Khan which they had been reading. A bit of research in the San Francisco telephone book had turned up a name which included the magic word Sufi, and an address which was obviously an office of something to do with the Sufis. They went baying at once on the trail, and wanted to know if there were some more books of poetry around written by Inayat Khan.
Next thing I knew my name and address had been given to them with the advice that this would be as close as they could get to their goal if they could make an appointment with me for a conversation.
We duly met, and when I saw what had arrived at my front door I just hoped that my landlord was not around to see what was being admitted into his well-kept and very bourgeois building. After I had gotten over the shock of a close-up view of these four classic examples of hippie dress and care of body and clothing, I wondered how I was going to get out of this gracefully without losing my apartment lease.
So be it. I have never changed an opinion on human nature as fast in all my life as I did in the next few minutes. After a short word of explanation from the fellow who was the obvious leader of the foursome, one of them asked me a question about Inayat Khan. Fortunately I knew the answer, and abandoned immediately my census of their clothes and hairdo. It was something such as I had never witnessed. I wondered if free water had ever run over any part of their bodies or clothing. I would swear that it was very improbable.
Then a second question came from another boy. I can’t remember what he asked, but it had something to do with the formation of Inayat Khan while he studied in the Chistia group in Ajmer. It woke me up with a start, and I forgot all about clothes and unwashed skin and clothing. I never got back to that. We shortly made a date for another meeting the following Saturday. The long and the short of it was that I found myself volunteering to meet with them and several of their friends once a week to take a careful look at the roots of mysticism; about which I knew nothing, but hoped I could bone up during each intervening six days.
I had to limit that group to 35 persons maximum, and after three months went over the same newly minted ground with a second group, and then another , and continued on for a total of three years of the most intense pleasure and very special human functioning I have ever experienced. And during all this was when Fred quite literally made his debut.
One Saturday I was having a private interview with one of the charter members of the first hippie group, who had become a fast and deeply value friend. As Bob asked me another bit of advice on a very puzzling human situation in which he had become involved, I thought I heard a strange sound coming from the spare bedroom in which Fred was housed. As Bob’s conversation was intense and important I dismissed the strange sound from Fred’s room and continued. Then, suddenly, Bob stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at me.
“Do you hear what I do?” he asked.
Then I did listen, and what I heard was unbelievable. It was Fred whistling the solo part of what I swear was a violin concerto that the good music station of San Francisco had been playing repeatedly for several days. I recognized it, although I had not known that particular violin concerto until it had become a favorite of that radio program. We both listened in amazement while Fred went faultlessly over the theme, again and again.
Not terribly long after that Fred and I moved to London and Fred took up his solo concertizing in South Kensington and of course became famous in a small intimate circle of mystics strangely resembling the ones in which Fred first became the reigning soloist.
But sad. In London I had to hire a new house cleaner, and once when I was away on a business trip she forgot to water Fred. When I returned Fred lay dead in the bottom of his cage.
I was heart-broken, as were several of the London hippies. But Fred established unquestionably one great fact for me. All of animaldom and dogdom and canarydom had had some sort of an evolutionary push that was so general and clear that it witnessed a push in creation that had certainly occurred only recently. Thus I was prepared to accept and build on evidence presented to me much later, which Fred had so neatly provided to me years before.
Dear Fred, I am sure you are now a great leader of orchestras and bewitch the musicians into a harmony such as you projected to Bob and me at my home in San Francisco near the royal domain of hippidom in the Haight Ashbury district.