The Parable of the Well-Off Man

8/6/2019 The Parable of the Well-Off Man

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The Parable of the Well-Off Man

By David Baez

It was one of those mornings that seem to bode poorly for the rest of the day: I

didn't sleep well the night before and woke up with a headache, this in spite of

having recently swapped my two-year-old Posterpedic for a mattress made by a

small family-owned company in Europe that spent 22 percent of its budget on hiring

sleep scientists as consultants and filled its product with duck feathers shorn when

the animals reached a particular age. I went to the bathroom and shook an extra-

strength painkiller into my hand, walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of water

from the spout on my refrigerator's door, and swallowed the pill. As I sat at the

kitchen's marble island with my head in my hands and waited for the pill to take

effect, one of my sons ran in and knocked the pitcher of fresh vegetable juice my

wife made in the juicer every morning off the table, spilling its contents onto the

maple hardwood floor. As I watched the growing puddle inch toward the Moroccan

throw rug my wife and I had purchased during a marvelous trip to Fez the previous

year, my wife walked in and threw up her hands. "Of course this would happen on

Maria's day off," she said, and began to quarrel with my son. "I'm gonna go grab the

Sunday Times," I said, and walked to the foyer. I snatched the keys to my BMW M3

off the hook above the end table and headed outside.

The familiar and comforting sound of the door's latch engaging as I shut it, the

feeling of the leather seat against my back as I adjusted the rear-view, and the first

notes of the Chopin concerto playing on public radio made me feel much better,

though I could still detect some pain in my frontal lobe. I grabbed the shifter in its

wrinkled leather sheath and nudged it into second, gave a quick silent thanks for

the vehicle's flawless gearing ratio, and headed down the gently curving road. As I

did so, I looked out the window at the freshly cut lawns of my neighbors and beyond

the lawns to the houses themselves, two-story homes, mostly wrought of sandstone

and limestone, with pleasing architectural features such as turrets, the homes all

set back at what seemed to me the appropriate distance from the road, not so far

as to appear as fortresses or uninviting to the other members of the community, yetfar enough to allow the eye of a passerby such as myself an expanse of calming

greenery to glide across, softening the observer's sensibility en route to the relative

complexity and rigidity of the man-made structure. "Soothing," is the word that

came to my mind. The Chopin concerto ended and the radio announcer's voice

came on naming the concerto and giving some information about the era in which

Chopin composed that I had not known before. I settled further back into my seat

and gently rolled my neck.



I turned off the road I live on onto a main road which, while providing excellent

access to the stores and restaurants in town, was never too congested. A couple of

blocks before I would have reached the bookstore where I planned to buy the paper,

I happened to notice the sign for a day spa. I thought for a moment, glanced in myrear-view and switched into the rightmost lane, then turned into the day spa's lot. I

parked the Beemer, hopped out, and walked into the spa. The attractive young

woman behind the counter asked me how she could help me, and I asked her if it

might not be possible to get a massage. "Of course!" she chirped. "How much is it

for a full body massage for an hour?" I asked. "Seventy dollars," she said. "Do you

take plastic?" I asked. "Of course!" she chirped. "Do you have anything soon," I

asked. She picked up a phone and spoke into it, and a minute later another young

woman, this one also attractive, walked out and extended her hand to me. "I'm

Lisa," she said, "follow me."

An hour later, I walked out of the spa feeling about 10 pounds lighter than when I

walked in, as limber as a teenager, and with not a trace of a headache. I also

noticed, as I got in my car and began driving, that I no longer held any resentment

toward my son for spilling the juice nor my wife for starting a fight while I had a

headache. "I love them," I thought. "I really love my wife and my children. I am a

lucky, lucky man." As I approached the bookstore, I realized that I didn't really have

any interest in reading the paper, that I had thought I did, but it was really just an

excuse to get out of the house. I executed a legal U-turn at the next light and

headed back toward home. Before I reached the street I live on, I noticed a flower

shop and turned into its lot. I walked in, as if completely out of instinct (that's how itfelt, there was no deliberation involved), and asked the attractive girl behind the

counter how much a dozen white roses would cost. "Eighty dollars," she told me. I

took my wallet out of the back pocket of my jeans and handed her my credit card.

"Oh," she said, "I'm sorry, we don't take that." "No problem," I said, and handed her

another. When she saw this one, she smiled and took it from me, instructing a

Mexican-looking man behind her to prepare a dozen white roses. I waited about ten

minutes, looking at the lovely flower displays in glass cases, and she handed me the

flowers wrapped in paper, along with a sheet of instructions on how to care for

them.

I got in the car, placed the flowers on the passenger's seat, and drove home. After

parking the car, I hopped out, grabbed the flowers in my right hand, and placed my

right hand behind my back. Rather than use the key to open the door, I rang the

doorbell. A couple of moments later, my wife opened the door, looking a bit out of

sorts and impatient, but I focused on the slightly damp lock of hair that had fallen



across her forehead. I waited a beat, watching her chest rising and falling, and

handed her the flowers. Immediately the look of frustration or anger that had been

on her face was replaced with one of surprise and gratitude. "Honey," she said, "you

haven't bought me flowers in ages!" She took the flowers from me, I walked past

her into the house, and saw my son sitting in front of the television in the living

room to the right of the foyer, calmly watching an educational cartoon. I was aboutto go to him when I felt my wife's hand on my waist and she whispered in my ear,

"let's go upstairs and make love."

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The Parable of the Well-Off Man