While having breakfast, I watch a child upon the shore...dancing
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I look out of the window and can see from my home high on the bluff the raggedness of the shoreline. I was not good at city life, it frightened me. People being too close, buildings touching, noise, fumes, stop signs... you know what I mean. I’ve just put the kettle on, and of course, because I’m not at all surprising, brought out the jam for my toast. I’ll sit at the table, think about going to my study, and spend my breakfast time wondering what story I will write today.
I wonder if I will write a love story, or something inspirational. I like stories about inspiration because I need that. You all know this, right. I mean, having your eyes on my words is all the inspiration I need. My ego is set.
There’s the kettle, it’s an old swan neck, you know the kind, weighs a ton, takes an eternity to boil, and will be here when I am not. Hey, do you want a tour of my kitchen? It’s yellow, mostly. Not a bright yellow, more Lion colored. Subtle, I think. Warm, certainly. The Aga, which holds prominence, is black. I had a wood burning Aga till a few years ago, but wood burning was finally banned in California under a clean air policy. This one is oil fired. The truth is, I love it. Easier to use and performs beautifully and stays clean. When I was a kid, mum’s Aga was coal. It was the center of the household. Didn’t matter who came, it was a gathering place. Mum dried cheeses above it, hung clothes, dried shoes, and even did some cooking. So, you’re wondering, who’s is the baking apron with blue and red floral design doing hanging on a peg at the side. I think this would be taking my feminine side a stretch too far. No, it was mums. You know why it’s there. It tied behind her back at waist level, you know the kind, has matching blue bound edges and a cute little chef patch. I never found it until after she died. I touch it every day when I’m at home.
Ah, finally! The kettle is boiling.
I still warm the teapot. Americans know nothing of this custom. Bring the teapot to the kettle. Okay, so this is going to kill you, I still have Peter Rabbit tea cozy! I know…I know…agh…I love it to death. Oh God, I’m pathetic. Let me just get the toast going. The floor here is red tiling, it is cool in summer, warmed by the Aga in winter.
The cupboards are amber in color, it works well. Oh, there’s the toaster popping. I swear to you, I never ever had a toaster that brought up my toast perfect. My jam goes in a dish. Woe betide if dad ever saw me digging into the Robinson’s jar with a knife! Dad loved me, I want you to believe this after this next admission. Mum wasn’t great at cooking cabbage. She could kill it, I mean really kill it.
Murdered cabbage, I grew up on it.
Anyway, I digress, oops, toast! Saved it. Where was I? Okay, cabbage. I really had a hard time eating what had once been a perfect cabbage before mum did her thing. Dad would look at me, his eyes instructing me to eat it, no matter what. One time, I was twelve, I told dad I just couldn’t do it, I could not eat the cabbage. Dad left the table and returned with a shotgun! He looked at me, and said: “Eat the cabbage, or I’ll shoot the dog!” No, seriously, he said that. Dad was the best man on the planet. He was that beautiful a man till the day he died. It was his fun. His humor was wicked. I picked up my fork, looked at the dog, his name was Loki, and ate my cabbage very slowly, teasing Loki. The poor animal lay there with his paws over his ears. He always forgave me an hour later, when I took him into the field for some play.
This toast, trust me, it’s perfect. Hot, lathered in butter and jam. I’m a little overweight, never worked out why.
Wait, come over here. See there? See, there’s a child down on the shoreline. He’s alone. I swear, see how he is dancing at the edge of the ocean. From where? What if he has no beginning? I should go see him. I’ll tell you about him.
I left the door of my home wide open. I thought about the boy who danced at the edge of my ocean, will he be gone when I get down on the shore? As I walked toward him, I began to remember how much I loved the sea, its aloneness, wildness, hugeness, mystery, and how one day I knew I'd sink into it and learn more about it. Suddenly the boy I was walking toward was stood before me, and the first thing he said to me was laughter. He was glad to be alive and announced that by the very sounds he made. I must have laughed in turn, for his spirit was catching. He shoved out a wet, sandy, hand. I hesitated. He gestured impatiently for me to take hold of it.
“Com'on, friend, there isn't much time.” Such a boy, I thought, I would have liked to be.
Then, we were running hand in hand, headlong to where? When he finally stopped, my heart was beating up the inside of my chest. I gasped my question.
“Why is there so little time?” I asked.
He didn't answer, just run off hell for leather along the shore. When I caught him, we tumbled into the sand, boy, and man, playing. I pinned him down. He gasped, and as he did so, I leapt back and shook my head. It was me! I felt as though I'd been punched in the face by a friend.
“What do they call you, boy?” I asked, still out of breath and wild.
“Harry, sir,” he said.
“Okay, Harry. Let's do a bit of walking, I'm an old man, my legs won't carry me with you so fast.”
How was I going to tell him he was me all those years ago, or that I was him all these years later? Was I being shown my life, or was the boy playing with his destiny? We walked the shore, and that's all there was, the simplest thing of us upon that shore and the building of castles, the climbing the sand dunes, but mostly it was walking, our arms about each other as if we'd never be cut free by knife or lightning. I slept beside him, and we talked and laughed till dawn. As I lay by his side, I wondered if this was, in fact, his choice, that he wanted to know his destiny, the kind of man he would make? Did he know, and had known since that first moment we were in fact not strangers to each other?
If he knows I am his spirit grown older, then how well he is dealing with it.
This boy meeting his destiny and playing with me as though I am his best friend. Had he brought me to him knowing my mistakes? I bathed in his laughter as he bathed in mine, and our laughter and friendship and acceptance slaughtered the agony of it all. All day the weather was blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a breeze that smelled of apples, a boy’s wild breath.
Toward evening he slept, the sound of the sea in his ears.
I wondered how long the flesh might resist its death? Would he like the man he'd grown into?
A lifetime later he'd be stood on this shore looking at himself. Would he love the boy? Respect the man he would become? I'd never ask him, of course, scared of his honesty. Who would he tell, who could he tell, of his day on a beach with his destiny? A boy and a man together, the same heart, the same dreams, together on the shore walking tangled in one the other’s arms and lives.
I knew the woman he would love, the woman he was walking toward, the woman he would lose, the things he would tell her, the things he never did, the anger, the love, the complications, the lies, the laughter. The lies, that was the rub, the lies in our lives, those were the things, if I could change one thing for him it would be to make them true , how he had told her his life with her was as perfect as the letter 'O' and that they'd live forever and never die and be good friends.
Why had I dared to say such a thing when life might agonize, mad, and crazy wild.
Is it the parts left unsaid that make life so short? Have I just been given the magic seven days? Am I drunk? Am I dead? No, I must live, and the boy must grow old. I feel foolish. I want to change his destiny. But I'm dying for him, a cruel trick, to be his friend and not have made it better for him. To have loved the people he will love and not been there, ride the machines he will ride, see the things he will see, and when the time is right, leave him. Before then, I will take him, grudgingly, to that never returning time, through a life of detours, taken just for the hell of it, which is the best reason in the world to do anything when you're young. And for what, to bring him here, to this point, this shore, to die having lived for what?
And yet he sleeps. Is this it, God?
He's just a young boy on the beach, living the golden peace of innocence. Couldn't we make his death more reasonable? Couldn't we end it for him before other lives carve his heart open with their absence and then with their presence? I looked at the boy sleeping with his dreams becoming real in his head. Am I supposed to tell him how to handle a life of new starts, every beginning coming to an end? Is the word hello just a word before goodbye?
What about the secrets he'll never be able to let go, even long after midnight, because the sea would not let him because the boy would be here forever and the man hardly at all.
It is good to think of this boy stomping the sand like a raging bull, the taste of salt on his lips, yelling out of sheer joy, and daring the universe to put him down. It is everything to think of a world where a boy can love that hard. I know what the boy is dreaming, his life will go on just as far as the ocean goes, which is very far.
One day ahead this boy will be stood alone at the edge of the waves, the vastness of his absence, and needing just a little human talk, weeping. The heartache of a man who had never found the answers he knew were somewhere, so he slammed out his life regardless of consequences, and this boy will be stood here, grown older, muttering his own home made prayers.
“One day it will all come right for you,” I said to him, quietly.
Suddenly, it was as if the shore breeze had lifted him away. I was stood alone, the waves calling me and I heard the boy’s laughter echoing across the ocean.
Wow…what happened, when did I come to my study, did I finish my tea, my toast, and jam…? I don’t remember. I felt carried away on a breeze of an idea.
Forgive me.
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| Reviewed by Eva Pasco |
4/1/2017 |
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| You had a good talk with yourself. In hindsight, regrets, disappointments--they only loom large should one wallow there. |
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| Reviewed by Harry Hogg |
3/29/2017 |
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| Thanks again, Ron. I need to learn to make my writing leaner. Something to work at. Thank you. HH |
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| Reviewed by Ronald Hull |
3/29/2017 |
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You might say with this one that you were, "beside yourself." I followed all the psychologizing a bit offputting, but when I find myself alone in places wild I do a bit of soul-searching as well.
Like you, I like the wild places. I remember watching 30 or 40 dear and love play in the autumn and tried to imagine what that place was like 100 years or more earlier when buffalo may have roamed that place.
You made me recall the ToastMaster toaster my roommates bought at Goodwill when I first came to California. That toaster made perfect toast up until a few years ago when my helpers apparently gave up on it. I never did, fixing it every time it needed a little fixing.
You learn something new all the time. Last week I read about an aga and could only discern that it was some kind of fireplace or space heater. And now, today, I read about it in your story. I must confess, in all my years, I have never heard of anything called an aga before. ;-)
Ron |
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