by Scott G. Harvey
Creating pre-recorded lectures had become second nature to me, as the global pandemic raged into its ninth month. It felt all too normal to be dressed in sweatpants and a soup-stained hoodie sitting all alone in the basement speaking into a USB microphone. A cognitive leap had to be made to grasp that hundreds of students would ultimately hear the hopefully eloquent and informed utterances streaming from my mouth and into the empty room. Most would undoubtedly fast forward, tune out, or skip the lecture all together, but I still felt a sense of deep responsibility to instill some element of scientific literacy into the minds of college students who would one day govern me, teach my children, and/or sell me tacos.
The day’s lesson was focused on psychological research methods, and in particular, differentiating between anecdotal and empirical evidence. I sincerely hoped to challenge, and maybe even offend, my psychic believing, ghost fearing, god loving students with well-reasoned arguments regarding the unrivaled supremacy of the scientific enterprise and the nature of systematically-gathered, unbiased, replicable evidence. It was for these reasons that I was deeply unsettled, yet perversely comforted, when I did a simple mathematical calculation later that afternoon.
In a feeble attempt to add meaning to my life, and someday outlive my corporeal form, a few years back I’d commenced writing a novel. The recently completed and released book had been met with tepid reception at best, yet I was nonetheless proud of my creation. In an effort to spread word of my book baby, I had been running a 5-day free download promo of the eBook. Being new to the publishing world, I had no idea how many people, if any, would download my humble work. That afternoon, after teaching the dust bunnies in my basement about scientific reasoning, I added up the daily totals and was pleasantly surprised to see that the book had been downloaded one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two times. I was satisfied and hopeful that this newfound exposure would plant seeds that would permit my literary creation to spread far and wide.
The book had been dedicated to my father who had passed away exactly one month earlier after a 29 ½ year battle with multiple myeloma. My dad was a loving, intelligent, and wonderful man who fought long and hard for his family. A former physician, he was also an incredibly intelligent person and the most rational and logical guy you could ever hope to meet. He was the first person to read my completed manuscript in its entirety and was proud, and likely amazed, that this child of his, who used to begrudgingly do his homework, had now written a novel just for fun. Although long anticipated, my father’s death took an emotional toll on myself and our family. My wife was pleasantly surprised, and slightly unsettled, to find her typically anti-social and emotionally numb spouse teary eyed most days.
It was while walking my dog through the brisk December air later that afternoon that it struck me. One thousand nine hundred and fifty-two. 1952. The year of my father’s birth. Of all of the numbers that the downloads of my book could’ve accumulated to, it had to be this one. Having inherited my father’s skeptical disposition, I wanted to chalk it up to random chance, a selective abstraction, or some other biased cognitive grasp for meaning. On the other hand, a small part of me liked imagining, if only for a few moments with the cool breeze caressing my face, that my dad had found a way to signal to me from the other side. That there indeed was another side to speak of. And that he was okay. I was left with a profound sense of comfort at the beautiful absurdity of existence. Everything was as it was meant to be.
It wasn’t long before I chastised myself for entertaining thoughts based upon such anecdotal premises and was soon amazed at the clever neural firing of my left prefrontal cortex with its insatiable need to make sense of the cosmos.
SCOTT G. HARVEY teaches psychology at SUNY Buffalo State and resides in the Niagara Region of Ontario with an ever-changing mixture of humans, cats, dogs, and chickens. He is the author of the philosophically-infused bildungsroman Savagely Noble. His short-fiction has appeared in Short Story Avenue.