Napa
Dimensions
Seth turned west on a rural highway connecting Napa to Sonoma, right into a train of traffic that typically lasted all the way. He only needed the first couple of miles, but the Friday traffic kept him under fifteen miles per hour.
After a few taps on the steering wheel he took a deep breath, accepting his fate. “I knew I should have gone the back way… At least it’s a nice day.” He opened the windows, and with the tip of his finger, he rolled the radio dial to turn it up.
The Oak Barrel café came in sight up ahead on the right, but at this pace it would be the end of happy hour before Seth could order his first beer. He only has a couple, but these days the difference between a three-dollar beer and the same beer at five-dollars is a lot to him. Even so, it wasn’t the low price of beer that kept him coming. It was chatting up with the regulars.
He made it to the edge of the property. A gray and white maintenance building stood on the corner. It rose twice as tall as the sound wall, which carried the same color all the way to the Oak Barrel, where a grape purple took over.
The sign on the café looked fancy, but the letters were too hard to read, and worse at night because there is always at least one light out. Seth shook his head and thought how a person could drive right by and not even notice the place, but in this ridiculous traffic the same person could see details all the way down to the grain in the wood.
Halfway between the maintenance building and the café Seth lost patience and pulled on to the shoulder where he passed twelve cars before turning into the hotel property. Inside he made another quick right, and passed the covered porch entrance to the Oak Barrel Cafe. A series of full-glass doors ran along the entire front, reflecting like a mirror as he passed.
Seth backed into his normal parking spot against the sound wall, and gave a little rev to hear his exhaust echo before turning off the engine. “Two past six… missed it! Oh well, no hurry now.” He opened his binder to look at a few notes he prepared for Rodger, and had a quick smoke to shake the frustration of Friday traffic.
A few minutes later, he locked up and walked toward the porch. Along the way, he noticed a bluish/green F-150 Ford truck. It brought a smile to his face because he knew Angela and Bert must be inside at the bar. They are long time Napa locals who commute this way, and often stop to grab a bite on the way home. They prefer to sit at the bar because the whole table service process can take awhile.
The first door is really just an exit, but always ajar just enough to grab it with your fingertips and pull it open. It isn’t very easy, because there are no handles on the outside. Not until the very last door, which is the main entrance. Seth pulled the door open anyway. He’d rather struggle a second trying to get a grip than face the awkwardness of walking past glass on full display. There is something voyeuristic for those on the inside, intended or not… It’s just weird for him. As if to prove the point, as soon as he walked inside Jovel already placed his beer on the bar.
“Hi Angela.” Seth made eye contact with Jovel to thank him for the beer. Jovel reached across the bar, and they did their band handshake.
Angela shook her head without looking up. “What are you two doing? Are you in a gang now?”
Seth laughed. “Naaaa. We’re just band mates. Where’s Captain Bert?”
Angela gingerly cut her hamburger patty. “He’s getting something from the truck for me?”
Seth turned and looked out the window. “I didn’t even see him.”
“Maybe that’s because you see what ‘you’ want to see?” This time Angela looked up just enough to make eye contact with Seth, but before he could reply, she turned to Jovel. “Can I have a box for this Shepherd’s Pie? It’s for Bert’s lunch tomorrow. I have to tell you, this tastes so much better the next day.”
“Sure.” Jovel tapped on the bar. “Would you like a refill on your martini?”
She looked back down to her plate. “Yes, I might as well. I’ve already had one, so I can’t take any pain medication later. I’ll need a second so I can get to sleep. At my age and size it only takes two you know?”
Seth asked Angela. “How’s your hand?”
Angela lightly rubbed her wrist. “I’m getting better, but most of this pain is because a doctor prescribed me medicine that has inflammation as a side effect. I should have switched medications a long time ago.”
Seth picked up his Racer to take a sip when someone tapped on his back. He turned to catch Bert walk behind him. “Hey, Captain Bert.”
“Hi Seth.” Bert sat on the other side of Angela and handed her an envelope. “Is this it?”
“That’s it.” She set the envelope on the bar by Seth. “These are some things we need done. Take a look and let me know what you think.”
Seth slipped the envelop inside his back pocket. “Great. I appreciate it. Hey, Angela, did you hear Pastor Flynn’s comments during the question and answer period today? He didn’t name any names, but he made it clear people are getting awfully rich off the global warming scam.”
“No.” Angela lightly elbowed Bert. “We’ve been having problems with our signal. I haven’t seen a full class for over two months.”
Jovel turned around, grabbed a cold glass, and started pouring another Racer. Seth noticed the beers on the bar were still full, so he turned to look outside and saw Rodger’s car pull into a parking spot. He sat up in his chair and straightened the binder, his smile harder to hold back.
Jovel pointed to the binder. “What’s that?”
Seth opened the binder and flipped a few pages. “This is a collection of notes and stuff that I’m putting together. I wanted to show Rodger there is tangible UFO evidence if we know what to look for.”
Angela set her knife down and rubbed her wrist. “Seth, you can’t make a person see something they don’t want to see.”
Jovel added. “He’s a real nuts and bolts kind of guy. Not much for the X Files.” He placed Rodger’s beer on a napkin in his normal spot.
Rodger came in and sat in the last seat near the back door. “Hi Guys!”
Seth toasted toward Roger. “We were just talking about UFO stuff.”
Rodger cleared his throat. “Why don’t you focus your creativity on serious problems, like climate issues?”
Seth grinned at Angela. “Funny, I just mentioned something about that to Angela.” He turned back to Rodger. “Besides, I do think I am taking on most serious modern problems, including climate change. I’m just addressing it from a different angle than most.”
Rodger asked. “You have to prove UFOs even exist first. Then you have to come up with a plan to deal with it.”
“For me the archeological findings about these things is enough evidence, and in the Bible there is a plan to deal with it.”
“If these things you chase ever become tangible, religion isn’t going to help you.”
Seth closed his binder and put both hands on it. “Rodger, I agree that manmade religion is what fuels most of the world’s problems. But that can’t be a blanket statement. The problem isn’t the existence of God, it’s the people who don’t know who He is, or are confused enough to do what they do. Man twists God’s words. Denominationalism is the root of disbelief.”
“It’s all the same Seth. Take away the gods and religion can’t drive any wars.”
“That won’t stop war, because man is still man. Genghis Khan was completely tolerant of different religions, but that didn’t stop him from killing up tens of millions, up to forty I believe. Take away religion and mankind will still find another reason to war against each other. Yet most religions give recognition to these UFOs, and regardless of their differences, they provide very similar details.”
Rodger tilted his head down and looked at Seth over the rim of his reading glasses. “That sounds very calculated, but how do you know which one is right? How do you know your religion is right?”
“I don’t have a ‘religion’. I’m a student of the word. Being a student first means I can be wrong about some things. Besides, it’s not just me. There are plenty who are in agreement with my positions.” Seth took another sip and motioned for a refill. “My confidence comes from the scientific evidence that supports the concepts I teach, whereas most people rely only on the religious aspects of their education to support a theory. I like to leverage science and scripture. They go hand in hand if you know how, and they can both throw you way off track if you misread the data.”
“Science to back the Bible, or science to explain how things could have happened naturally?”
“Does it matter? Our science isn’t perfect either. It wasn’t long ago that our best science taught the earth was flat, and there are people who are trying to prove it is to this very day. Everyone knows there is technology beyond what we have today. It just hasn’t been made yet, so we only see what we can grasp for now. It would be stupid to assume our current understanding accurately represents the total of what is real. I will say this though, science and scripture should never defy each other.”
Jovel asked. “Are you talking about Scientology?”
Seth leaned back. “Heck no. There’s no science there dude. I’m talking about things like earth science. We have a lot of evidence that has always been here but we weren’t able to see it at the time. From plate tectonics to things like DNA for example. These things have been here as long as life, but we didn’t know it for how many thousands of years? As new discoveries come to light they only verify the things I write about.”
Jovel laughed. “What does DNA have to do with the Bible?”
Seth turned to Jovel. “Easy. You’re Catholic. How long has your denomination taught that God took Adam’s rib to make Eve?”
“I don’t know…forever?”
“Right. But the Hebrew word used in the scriptures is curve. Since the rib is our most obvious curved bone the ‘curve’ got translated to ‘rib’. Until recently we didn’t know about the existence of the Helix Curve, even though it was always there. Now that doesn’t change the fact or results of God taking from Adam to create Eve, but it does give deeper scientific credibility to the scriptures in that taking his DNA to make his partner is much more conceivable than taking a bone, and you have to consider that writing about something six thousand years before it’s known existence gives credibility that the word was indeed inspired by a higher intelligence.”
Rodger smiled. “That’s an interesting point, and a promising position to take when looking for support with your ideas. How do you know it wasn’t a rib?”
Seth turned to Rodger. “Have you ever read the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott?”
“It was a long time ago.”
Angela asked. “What’s Flatland?”
Seth picked up a napkin. “Flatland is a story about a flat world, like this napkin. The inhabitants are different shapes. A female might be a long acute triangle, a child might be a square, or a wise old man might be a circle. But on a flat surface in a two dimensional world you can’t see those shapes because they are all on the same plane. Everyone looks like a line.”
“I don’t follow.”
Seth wrote two letters on the napkin. “Here’s an ‘I’ and an ‘O’, easy to see looking down on it, but if you hold the napkin flat and rotate it the ‘O’ always looks like a line that never changes. The ‘I’ looks like a long line if you look from the side, just like the ‘O’, but gets smaller as you rotate the napkin, until finally it is a very dangerous point. It could pierce the ‘O’. That’s why triangles are deceptive… they look wide but have sharp points.”
Jovel grabbed the pen. “I see, so a ‘P’ looks the same as a ‘D’ from the side, but has drastically different affects if you bump into them from the bottom.”
“Exactly!”
Angela shook her head. “Why in the world did someone write a book about that?”
Seth shrugged his shoulders. “Because the inhabitants of this two dimensional flat land encountered math that was beyond them, yet they were experiencing it so they knew something was real. You see one day a cone came along. The flatlanders could only see the slice of the cone on their plane at the time. As the cone moved up the base grew, which is what they saw, but the cone could look down from above and see all the Flatlanders spread across their world. Up until the cone’s visit there was no such thing as a bird’s eye view.”
“And what does this have to do with the Bible?” Angela asked.
Seth motioned to Jovel for another beer. “The biggest example is the book of Revelation, and Daniel’s seventieth week. They have been a cone to the religious ‘experts’ for some time now. Even though they have had the words for a couple of thousand years, the information wasn’t for the time of those throughout history. The content is much more 3- D than 2- D.”
Angela paused. “I’d agree that Revelation is a cone giving us a bird’s eye view of the scriptures. Any good student knows that.”
“Not so. There are denominations that will still tell you that Revelation is not for us to understand, but let’s go a little deeper than the cone. The lesson from Flatland is how the same math enabling the cone to exist must be consistent with the math where the two dimensional people exist, because they share portions of the same greater formula.”
Bert folded his newspaper and slid it aside. Angela noticed and started to slide her chair back. “So?”
“Sooooo. . .” Seth paused. “Whatever math is behind the objects in the sky has to fit within the same rules of science as everything we’ve ever known. The formation of crafts that appeared over our capital represent a technological cone. Rodger is a Flatlander. Did Ezekiel, Elisha, or Job have some fantasy, or did they experience a cone from the heavenly dimension that came into the earthly dimension? Something clearly has the ability to come in and out of our realm.”
Bert picked up his leftover box. “Are you two going at it again?”
Angela and Seth answered in unison. “No.”
Bert and Angela got up and started saying their good-byes to everyone. Seth noticed the time on Bert’s watch when he patted him on the shoulder. “Oh man, it’s already after seven. I’m supposed to be grilling. I got to go… Jovel, check me out too.”
Seth slid his binder to Rodger. “I thought we’d have time to talk about this, but I can leave it with you until next time if you want to see where I’m heading with all this.”
“I’ll glance through it, but no promises…”
Seth raced the back roads home. He grabbed a glass of wine and went out back to join Megumi. She faced away from him, tending the grill in flip-flops, white shorts and a light blue tee shirt. Seth walked up behind her and gave her a hug. “I had a drink with Rodger. Aren’t you cold?”
Megumi turned around, but before she could say anything Seth noticed the pink logo on her shirt. “Hey, Shake Shack. When are we going to New York again?”
Megumi looked at her shirt. “That was a fun trip.” She handed Seth the tongs.
“I still can’t believe we went all that way to see Matsui play baseball, and he had a broken hand. At least we got to see the Yankees and Red Sox in the old Yankee stadium.”
Seth turned the strips of beef revealing perfect marks. The dripping juices sent a wave of sizzle, smoke, and scent into air. “I also ran into Bert and Angela.”
Megumi opened the little gate to let Aizu play on the grass, but Aizu stayed focused on the grill and didn’t move. “Did you guys get into it?”
“Of course not.”
Aizu sat drooling by the grill. She didn’t even flinch when Megumi called her. “Aizu, come on. Aizu!”
Seth laughed. “Oh well? I guess we’re sharing our steak tonight?” He took a sip of wine. “You know, Angela and I never argue. Not like people think. We have similar beliefs. I let loose with her a little more than most because she occasionally watches Pastor Flynn. That puts us in the same school. You could even say with common doctrine. So when people hear us banter back and forth, what they’re really hearing is a couple of students pushing each other through the curriculum. That’s it. No different than when we watch Kornheiser and Wilbon go at it on PTI.”
“That’s it?” She asked.
He nodded and smiled. “Ask her yourself. I know she’ll say the same thing. Maybe not the PTI part. She doesn’t like sports or TV.”