jumpingfish

1.

Manny stopped by my desk on his way out of the building. It was Friday. Not many people were left.

“I remember the interview,” he said. Manny told me that he had wondered if the guy was for real. “Could anyone really be that chipper, that optimistic, energetic? He talked non-stop!”

I was tempted to confess being on the other end of the spectrum. But then, he surely knows that.

Eeyore comes to mind, perhaps? My mother called me loose lip. Let’s just say that I lost my rosy glasses.

2.

I’m sitting in the study on a dark and rainy night. The fair and industrious Trudy is far away. It’s very quiet here.

iTunes helps. Bob Schneider, The World Exploded into Love. Bryan Ferry, Love is the Drug. And now there’s another Bob Schneider song. And Mr. Guinness is staring around the corner, alternately sitting and standing wagging his tail. And Miss Izzy is curled up cozy in her bed.

I take out a pen and scribble a little something. Some green. Scribble. Some yellow. Scrabble. Some more green. A little orange. A crooked line around the periphery. Some initials. And… Send!

Within minutes an email hits my in box.

Like! says Trudy.

Wink! I reply.

And oh look, I think I have found those rosy glasses.

Ursula Le Guin stands at the podium to accept her award. 

“We live in Capitalism,” she says.  

She looks out at the audience and raises her eyebrows and shrugs just a little.

“Its powers seem inescapable.”

Here she pauses a moment and looks up again folding her arms on the podium. She leans forward.

“So did the Divine Right of Kings.”

And here she stops for just a moment to let her words sink in.

Watch her.

Look hard. Do you see it? Over there behind the fungus peeking up from the mould at the base of that tree. Do you see it? Look harder. Squint your eyes. Do you see it? There’s a forest in those trees.

photo: david hasan | central michigan | summer 2014

4.

As the old man spoke of the dying of the crew, the young man’s face turned white.  He jumped up and tried to step away. But the old man stayed him with a hand on his shoulder. Bony and gnarled and cold it seemed, the hand of a ghost returned from the sea.

The young man shouted. Get away! Go back!

Relax, the old man said. I am just a sailor with a story to tell.

The young man sat down. And the old man continued…

Death left me alive with them. My dead crewmates and I floated in that forsaken sea. And as I looked at those dead men, the living things of the sea swirled and jumped in the waters around the ship.

I looked out on those living things and back at the dead around me. And I looked up to heaven and tried to pray, but the sky and the sea… 

Oh the sea and the sky and those poor dead men cursed me where I stood. And no prayer came to my lips while the eyes of the fallen stared up at me.

Up came the sun and down it went for seven days and seven nights. Yet there I was alone alive out in that forsaken place.

Up came the moon and down it went for seven nights and seven days. Out in the water the sea things swirled and jumped. They were blue and black and glossy green and they swam in circles of foaming white and silver-gold. And I watched them dancing on the waves.

Oh, happy living things. Oh, beautiful things. As I stood there marvelling, the world exploded in love all around me. And in that very moment heaven took pity on me, and the Albatross fell from my neck and sunk down into the sea.