jumpingfish

Prelude

And then all eyes fell on me. 

“A joke or an embarrassing story about yourself,” was the rule.

An embarrassing story, fine, but you know as well as I that the unwritten expectation there was that it be an entertaining embarrassing story. My embarrassments are many, but their entertainment value is nil. So it remained for me to tell a joke. (Can you imagine?)

I explained to them that, as my wife and son well know, my joke buffer is only three jokes deep, and it filled up when I was six. So I warned them in advance, “My jokes are the jokes of a six year old.”

Joke #1

The first was a joke my brother told many, many years ago when we were very young and he had a big book (which he still has) of jokes and tricks. I wondered if anyone would get it.

I looked down the table to my left, and then I looked down the table to my right.

“What goes around a button?” I asked.

They sat in silence. No one tried to answer. 

I waited a moment.

“Well?” someone asked.

“A goat!” I said with a mock expectant smile on my face.

I got blank stares. Blank stares from every single person at that table, except for Bill down at the end who laughed out loud.

“A goat!?” the others asked. 

“Well, like an opera singer goes around a-singin'”, I said, “and a dog goes around a-barkin’, a goat goes around a-buttin’.”

There were groans. They guys from India were silent.

Joke #2

Unfulfilled by the first joke, they demanded another.

I looked down the table both ways and explained that this one was one my mother taught me when I was young. “She called it a shaggy dog story,” I said.

“Ok, so tell us this shaggy dog story.”

Which I proceeded to do.

“It goes like this,” I began. “Herman, Sherman and Kerman were twins,” I said, stopping to look at them all. “Except for Ralph, whose hair was,” and at this point I held up my hand with my thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Except for Ralph whose hair was this color.”

Silence, as you might imagine. 

“I don’t get it,” someone said.

“No, it’s a shaggy dog story,” I said. “They don’t make sense!”

And now my reputation is cemented.

1. Morning

On the way to work, I stopped to sit beside the pool. To watch the fish slowly circle and blow bubbles on the still surface of the water. I stopped to contemplate the Lily Pads. The white blossoms. The peach-colored blossoms.

I set my laptop case on the table. And my cucumber snack for later. It was muggy from the wonderful two days’ rain. Sweat was rolling down my chest, soaking my shirt.

I turned and sat on the bench and fixed my gaze on the Lily Pads and the circling fish and the dragon flies.

And then I saw a woman at the table over there. I hadn’t noticed her when I approached. She had a cigarette between her fingers and held a lighter in the other hand.

I gathered my things, stood up and walked away.

2. Evening

We sat outside, the dog and I. She was wining and pulling on her rope, because the fair and industrious Trudy had just disappeared down the street on a walk with Mr. Guinness, her rival.  

After a while, she returned to her bone, and the quiet returned.

In the distance, frogs were singing. And certainly somewhere nearby our toad must have been hopping in the muggy air thick from the wonderful three days’ rain. Screech Owls hooted in the back and somewhere in the distance a Lesser Goldfinch.

The sun was going down and setting the clouds aglow. The greens of the trees were deep. The browns of the mulch was golden. The white of our limestone walls had a pinkish hue.

Our trees in Austin, those that made it thru last year’s fearsome drought, have been saved by this rain. Three glorious inches over three days. Three inches in mid July. More than we could have dared ask for.

It was getting dark around me. The mosquitos were beginning to buzz.

I gathered my dog, stood up and walked into the house.

Bobby Jindal quoted in The National Review carrying the water for the haters:

I suspect that many in the Obama administration really don’t believe in private enterprise. At best, they see business as something to be endured so that that it can provide tax money for government programs. [Jindal, TNR]

Really. Is that so?

And I suspect that Jindal and many of his ilk really just want to eliminate taxes for the rich, eliminate public schools, eliminate public libraries, eliminate all social programs for the poor, eliminate all environmental protections, eliminate all financial regulations, eliminate all civil rights, eliminate all voting rights, eliminate the few remaining unions, deport all the brown people, privatize the police, privatize the Army, privatize the schools, privatize all public utilities, make English the legally-enforced official language of the state.

I suspect that Jindal and his ilk reject the Bill of Rights, that they reject separation of church and state, that they reject the notion of peaceable assembly, that they think protestors should be tased and beaten and locked up when they stray beyond the confines of the fenced-in free speech zones, that they would lock up the Japanese in internment camps again at the drop of a hat, and that we all must now carry our papers to prove to the storm trooper that we have a right to be out on the streets.

I suspect that they really just want to be safe: safe in their gated communities as far from the rif-raf as possible, safe to dump their oil in the ocean, safe to mine the mountains, safe to dump their waste in our streams, safe to enrich themselves by casino gambling on Wall Street, safe to make their millions in any dang way they choose, safe from the notions of public welfare, public health and public good.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an Obama cheerleader by any means. But I’m just saying. I have some suspicions myself.

I sat outside this evening after some yard work. A gentle breeze blew across the yard and cooled my face and arms. The sun had just gone down, and the clouds in the west were glowing pink.

There is something about sunsets, isn’t there? Sunsets and campfires, they mesmerize me.

Here’s a snapped picture of our first sunset on the Kona coast. The point-and-click camera didn’t do the scene justice, but the big camera was up in the room, so we snapped what we could.

We sat by the shore with the surf breaking over black rocks. The sun broke thru the cloud deck far out to sea and radiated golden beams of light down to the water setting distant waves ablaze. Then it burned cracks and crevices in the nearer clouds, lighting up the island behind us. And finally the clouds vanished and the sun set against a clear evening sky.

“Is that peach?” I asked.

“No,” Trudy said, hesitating briefly. “Maybe tangerine.”

Not tangerine, I thought to myself.

“Rose?” I asked.

“Not rose,” she said, “although there are roses that color.”

The sun kissed the surface of the sea, a bright peach-tangerine-rose orb balanced on the flatness of the Pacific.

And then we watched it sink below the horizon. It descended into the water, and we sat there silently until the last sliver of it disappeared.

I turned to Trudy. She turned to me. And we smiled.