Four Months After The Fall - #4

 The really, really cute neurosurgeon (the one wearing heels) (O.K., O.K., so I have a little crush on my neurosurgeon. What about it?) She said the brain injury was healing remarkably well, surprisingly well. Hematoma down 50%. No need for more brain tests. No need to drill and drain. No need to see me again. I admit to mixed feelings on that one. I did not dodge a bullet. I dodged a nuclear bomb. Six months to normal I'm told. Assured. Maybe all those push-ups finally paid off. Uh, wait a minute. I didn't know I was normal when I was normal, so what are we looking at here? The "normal" normal or a New Normal? Do I really want to go back to the same old thing? And, if it's new, how can it be normal? This "new normal" business is like calling a used car pre-owned, pretending it isn't what it really is. 

"Mendacity", rails Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams', Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. "Mendacity!"

Lying there all those hours and days and nights, tended to and cared for by nurses, aides, technicians, cleaning staff, physical therapists, EMT's, kitchen workers, maintenance workers, clericals, and, yes, of course, doctors, too - more of them persons of color than not, so many immigrants or children of immigrants. Isn't it ironic that those very people - the ones we don't want as neighbors - those very people will be the ones caring for us at the time of our death?

The care was great. The food was hot. I'm getting better faster. I can almost remember my name and where I live.This crush I have on my neurosurgeon is not enough for me to make a special appointment to drain the blood from my brain, which we all agreed was unnecessary, anyway. Some balance issues but physical therapist teaching me how to train the muscles in my feet, so if I fall, I fall forward not backward. Neat trick. I keep forgetting where I left my cane, but I still remember the names of my children (at least, I did this morning), do not drool, and do not lurch when I walk. Wave when you go by.

More to come.

I hope.

Four Months After The Fall - #3

As he was dying,  Bob Lemond, my wife's manager, told me, "It's who you love that matters, not who loves you."  You can't (at least, I can't) spend a week in the hospital with a brain injury without thinking about "things". I couldn't walk without falling, so what else was there to do? So, I thought. I doubt I discovered anything new, but I did go deeper into a lifetime of wondering what everything was all about, why I'm here, why you're here, what happens when we're not here, what do I want my final thought to be? My idea of Hell is when, at your last breath, you are bitter, angry, resentful, carrying a grudge with you as you fade to black and enter whatever eternity is. When I awakened in that hospital bed, I had no idea how I got there or what I was doing there. Something surely had happened, but what? I was told I could have died. "You didn't see yourself," my wife and children told me, "It was horrible" -  a wake-up call, yes, but really one for me. I know I was late on the electric bill that month, but customer service couldn't have pulled this off in revenge. They have payment plans, for Pete's sake. I could not wrap my mind around what happened. I didn't believe it happened, could ever happen, To Me? Are you sure you've got the right guy? Wake up, boychik, it really really did. There were witnesses. I remember very little, hardly anything, and so I figured what could have happened? What could be so bad? Why am I on a stretcher being loaded onto an EMT truck? What I do remember, a snippet, I swear, was being in the emergency room with the neurosurgeon staring down. At me. She was tiny, wearing a white lab coat, and heels. I wouldn't lie. What the hell does it say about me when that's all I remember? My final thought is a cute neurosurgeon in heels? I need to do better than that. Much better.

Einstein claimed God was in the details. I thought about that and came to disagree. Nothing deep. I don't believe in any supernatural entity who keeps an eye on me. What I thought was,"Life is in the details." Look closely. Stay awhile. Inspect, examine, dawdle, wonder. My theory is if you stop and watch and wait and wonder, life is longer than when you rush through it. It goes by more slowly, and it's chock full. Take your time. Give yourself over. Examine the tiniest thing. Lose yourself. Yes, lose yourself. These things take time, and isn't that what we want? Time! "Be here now." Not my original idea at all. Many saints and sinners eons before me have said the same thing in their own way. Right this instant, out my window, I am watching summer turn to fall. Different bird songs. Pumpkins. Crisper air. What am I watching? Nothing changes except me. I slow down and search for color. It will be there whether it is now or not. 

There are people I love, people I have loved, people I may come to love, people I will never love. Those are the ones I banish. Those who have loved me are fun to play with. I enjoyed myself with many of them. Sometimes I even enjoyed them a lot, but what stayed me as I lay in that hospital bed were the people I have truly, deeply loved. Not too many. A few. What would I have done without them? Who else would tolerate my quirks and foibles, my corny jokes, my mistakes? Who else would truly cheer my victories? No ulterior motive other than sharing the pleasure of life at that moment in time.

And I love and have loved each one. The beauty of it is that each love carries its own feelings. Every season is the same and new. 

I don't want to look away. I want nothing more than to be here right this instant doing and seeing exactly what I'm doing and seeing.  

Four Months After The Fall - #2

Hey. folks, healing but not yet healed. I'm told it takes time. Believe me, I've had more fun. 

Stay tuned.

Four Months After The Fall - #1

 

Satchel Paige, the legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues, once said, ”Don’t look back. It might be gaining on you”. Never one to take good advice, I did look back, and it was gaining on me, and, finally, it did. It gained on me. And I went down, not quite out, although it could have been. Out. It’s three’clock in the morning. Full bladder. Gotta  go. Again. I’m a guy. A little older. You know the drill. I’m half asleep making for the bathroom in the dark - I don’t remember it happening, how it happened, why it happened or when. I don’t remember tripping or slipping or snagging or any trigger whatsoever. But I remember knowing I was falling to the floor and twisting a little so I’d hit my side and not my back, muscle memory from sixty years ago, Marine Corps. And I remember the instant my head hit the floor so hard I wondered if I would live. Yes, it hurt. Of course, it hurt, but I was conscious, nothing seemed broken. I lay there astonished this had happened. I wondered if I could get up? I could. My balance was intact. The bathroom was only a few feet away. What’re you gonna do? Stand there all night? Just remember to flush.

Back to bed.

Spent the next four months doing what I normally do. Annoying headache from time to time but nothing much. Life went on as usual month to month. After a while my balance seemed a little off - I tripped a couple of times - and I was having some trouble remembering what I was doing when I was doing it. I thought, “OK, Bub, you’re gettin’ older.” No big deal. Better that than the alternative. 

I had no clue, except there were clues - The balance? The memory? Some confusion like where the hell did I put my keys? - No big deal. Everybody loses their keys.

Right?

What I didn’t know was  inside my head, out of sight, I had been bleeding since my head hit the floor. Blood had been surreptitiously seeping into my brain, building pressure, doing damage. It took four months to pull the trigger.

Bang.

As a rule, I keep a package of chocolate covered shortbread cookies on my desk. Sugar-less. Actually, they’re pretty good. Now, it’s three a.m. and the power has gone out. Everyone is asleep. No electricity, just a blessed darkness that has me at peace.   I summon up my inner spa, lean back and just sit there, content with the way things are. My mother used to say, “Happiness is for idiots”. Right now I’m feeling like the biggest idiot in the universe, so I must be happy. I admit it. Even to myself.

Then Jamie, my wife, came to my office, flashlight in hand, because she had a yen for a chocolate covered shortbread cookie. She took one then went into the kitchen for a ginger beer. Not gone five minutes she came back to see me flailing like a crab,  arms and legs in spasm, guttural sounds in place of speech, eyes rolled back, rolling, unconscious. It must have been horrible for her, but she kept me from hitting my head when the chair to my desk fell backwards, pitching me to the floor. I remember being flat on the floor insisting I was standing up. 

It wasn’t a stroke. It was a seizure, actually, two of them.

I don’t remember much of anything else, snippets, whiffs, not much. I remember the ambulance but was surprised to find myself in a hospital bed. “Huh? What am I doin’ here?” Well, I was there for a week while every specialist in the neighborhood checked me out - neurologist, neurosurgeon, neuropsychiatrist, a vascular surgeon, a cardiologist - the whole megillah.  They all agreed: subdural hematoma. What’s a little brain damage between friends? I’ll tell you what: a royal pain in the ass. Can’t drive for a year. Can’t lift anything greater than five pounds. Can’t drink a beer. Can’t shower by myself. Carry a cane. I refuse to go anywhere near a walker. Physical therapy, some, not much. Above all, do not fall...again! Thanks. I’ll see what I can do next time. Oh, yeah, excuse me, there’s not supposed to be a next time.

Right?

And that’s why you haven’t heard from me for a while. You can see I’ve been busy. 

Best be on your toes, Bub.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Further Annals of A Social Worker - Miz Homewood, for starters

Wanna know what a typical day in the life of a social worker is like? At least, way back when?  Trigger warning. This is not for the meek, the weak, or those easily offended by reality. Certain words may be used, for example, quite possibly, one beginning with the letter "F".

It was a terrible neighborhood, mostly filled with desperate hill people who'd come north looking for work when the mines closed down. Clinging to honky tonk dreams, these folks were angry, rightly so, always on the verge of an explosion. A guy wearing a two piece suit could be a trigger. This morning began with a visit to Miz Esther Homewood, forty looking eighty (each line a crevice of deep disappointment), come north from Mudsuck, West Virginia (check it out) because there wasn't anything there to do except get drunk on applejack then get laid on the closest empty flatbed truck you could find. What I'm telling you, she told me. Mudsuck was so far below the poverty level that hard, cash money was as rare a sight as a polar bear walking down main street. You were wise not to flash it if you had it. As in so many Appalachian towns like this, big money mining corporations come in from out of state, squeeze the wealth out of the mountains, then take their wealth back home, out of state, anywhere but back where it came from. Black lung disease was not genetic, although damn near every man left behind had it. "Sixteen tons and wha'd'ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt."

Miz Homewood had three sons without a clue or care as to their fathers. When I got the case, two sons were in prison and a third, the youngest, was in reform school. She'd raised them all to be thieves, and incest was a big part of their upbringing. Her youngest was now up for release from reform school, and here I was, in a rickety hallway rejecting an aroma I could not recognize, knocking on her door, checking out his given address. 

        "Yeah? What?", she yelled angrily as the door flung open. 

 Nobody would ever have said about this woman that she was once beautiful. She wasn't. Right now, she was as ugly as she was angry. A man in dumpy drawers poured himself a cup of coffee from a tin percolator on the stove.       

            "What's'at, Mister?", she said ready for a fight.

         "Liam Homewood?"

            "What's he done now?"

            "He's up for release, and this is his given address."

            "Who give it to him?"

            "We assume you did."

Miz Homewood yelled, "Get the hell out!" at the man with the droopy drawers,  told him loud and clear, "Out!" He stumbled into his clothes.

            "You know where I am," she said to him as he brushed between us on his way out the door. 

            "Liam's coming home?", she turned to me with a grin on her face. "That boy can lift a gold tooth right outta your mouth and you'd never even know it."

            "You sound proud of that."

            "Can you do it? Uh, huh. How long?"

            "Two weeks."

            "He told you he was gonna live here?"

            "Will you take him in?"

            "Jesus Christ."

            "Is that a yes?"

She didn't want to take him but she would, so we talked about the logistics of re-entry - what to expect (She already knew that one); favorite foods; clean sheets. That's when she said to me she'd been taking care of Liam's pride and joy and how happy he'd be to see them. Pigeons. A flock of them. His. In a coop on the roof.

            "We lost a couple but tell him they're mostly tip top."

We made a follow-up appointment for the day before Liam's release. Check things out. I'd be there to help. 

That day came. Knock. Knockknock. Knockknockknock. Knockknockknockknock!!

The door swung open with a vengeance.

            "Who the hell are you?"

A burly, half-dressed man walked in from the next room.

            "Esther?" he offered.

            "No problem. Go way." She waved him away. Her pits looked like they’d grown billy goat beards. He shrugged and left the room.

            "Liam?" I said.

            "What about him?"

            "His discharge. Tomorrow. Are you ready for him?" 

            "Gimme a minute to think."

The place was filthy. Dirty dishes. Threadbare linoleum. You could've written your name in dust anywhere in the room.  

            "I been fixin' him a feast," she said with a toothless smile. "Smell that?"

I did.

            "Gonna be delicious. Gonna be even more delicious tomorrow. Come for dinner. Take a look." 

She opened the oven.

            "Crispy," she said. "Crack the bones for the marrow."

She slid out a tray with twelve little pigeon carcasses, plucked bare, sizzling away, feet up.

She'd cooked her son's pigeons.

            "Hunger's a bitch," she said - a statement not an apology.

Whatever I yelled I yelled loud enough for the burly guy to charge back into the room ready to start his day. She was laughing. I was not ready for this one. I was in the presence of madness.

            "Go on back," she waved the hulk away.

He scowled but did as she said. I was speechless and backed towards the door. 

            "Where you goin', Mr. Two Piece Suit?"

            "I'll have to talk to Liam to see where he wants to go."

            "I mean where you goin' now?"

            "Outta here, ma'am. We'll be in touch."

            "Yeah. In touch." She sidled up to me (oddly, her breath smelled like peppermint) and said,  "At least, they sent me a cute one this time. How 'bout you 'n' me? No charge."

I have no idea what I said or didn't say or thought or anything but getting the hell outta there. If this had been a movie, I'd have said something clever like, "Sorry, ma'am, that's not in my job description" or, "I have this terrible disease." or, if not threatened with immediate death, I might say something like "Lady, If you were the last...on earth..." You know the rest.

I'd backed out the door and had started down the hall when she came out with the hulk behind her. 

            "I'm gonna fuck you 'fore we're through,"  she yelled after me, this time laughing, cackling, crowing, I didn't know. 

She was so damn certain it was chilling.

Nasty. What other word? Unclean? Nope. Vile? Stench? Nope. Nasty. As in "nasty taste","nasty smell","nasty sight", "nasty mess". Nasty. That's the one, the most disgusted I have ever been, before or since. Maybe somebody quick-smart like Billy Crystal could crank out a couple of good one liners. Except, it wasn't funny.

Liam went to a foster home after his release. Miz Homewood got jail time for assault and battery. She punched out a young woman who asked her to sign a petition to save the wild horses of New Mexico.  I visited with Liam a few times then one day he was gone. Never saw him again. 

He was a broken kid. I think about him when it's raining.

My Bulletin Board

  It's six feet by six feet and has hung over my desk for forty plus years.  Four hundred and eighty some months later,  give or take a few  I seem to have lost somewhere, I haven't taken down anything at all. Layers. Like from a dig. You can follow the evolution of the thumb tack on my bulletin board. A lock from my son's first haircut. My daughter's baby teeth. Even a bumper sticker from Gore Vidal's campaign for senator. An old dog tag. Snap shots. A neighbor's key to her front door. Words that intrigue me: "Force is not justice; Power is not law." Cartoons that tickle me: A seriously spaced  guy sitting in an armchair truly blissed out, a benign but knowing hint of smile. Sheer beatitude. The  caption: "Zerotasking". I think I identified with that one. What else? A goose call. Wild turkey feathers. A campaign button for Senator McCarthy (Clean Gene. Remember?) A United States Marine at eighteen. My first Father's Day card. My Bar Mitzvah napkin. A trinket from a Russian folk dancer. The small American flag my daughter held at her citizenship ceremony. A bird's nest. Three of them. Chotchkies from all over the world, and we haven't even started on my desk and shelves. An Apache tomahawk, for example. Whale's teeth. Gold ore. Enough for now.

So, long about 3 a.m. one morning, I had my feet up on my desk looking at my bulletin board.  Roaming, really. Everybody was asleep. I have no idea why I asked Alexa for choral music, but there it was  softly playing. I like all those voices. So, I'm looking and thinking. How much of this did I really plan out? How much just happened? How much what didn't happen helped what did? How much what you wanted to happen really did happen, except, when it happened, you wished it hadn't. Why? Huh? I really did that? I really was there? Didn't we used to be good friends? 

I dislike the word "journey" because it has a guru twinge to it, but that's what I was looking at: my journey. Except none of it seemed to make any sense. It was all here and there. No pattern. A hodgepodge. A stew of left-overs or a cassoulet? Just a bunch of stuff. Did I say I have a Masai sword and a spirit figure from Siberia? Odds and ends. Driftwood. Pebbles.

It's not really a jigsaw puzzle because none of the pieces fit together, too many stories splattered across that cork universe, always expanding, too many to make sense.Throw it up there and see what sticks. Everything sticks! It's life atomized. My life atomized. I still don't know how I got from then to now, but I can say with absolute certainty: it's been a helluva ride. Too bad I didn't always know it at the time. God, what I must have missed!

                       *************************

The Buddha was sitting under his tree when a horseman came racing by.

        "Where are you going?" asked the Buddha.

        "Ask my horse," answered the rider.

                      **************************

A WHALE THE SIZE OF TWO GREYHOUND BUSES, MAYBE THREE

This piece is a bit longer than the others.

 You are not dreaming. You are standing in the middle of a railroad track, bound to a post, stiff as Lot's wife, unable to move an inch, a finger, a toe, nothing, and a locomotive, the size of three school buses, is bearing down on you at top speed, nothing you can do about it, not one thing but watch it come. Don't quibble. You are dead.

Back some years I spent a good bit of time on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, windward islands of the West Indies, close to South America. People from St. Vincent, if they could afford it, often went to Venezuela to shop for things impossible to get on the island. I knew people who could afford it, and those who couldn't. The Punnett's were a family descended from the first Brits who colonized the island. centuries ago. Phyllis Punnett wrote the island's national anthem. They ran a boating supply business in Kingston, the capitol. Gombe' lived at the far edge of the bush. Gombe' the hunter. He was seventy years old and hunted wild boar with a cutlass. I knew these people, and through them I found the village of Barroulie, a village at the northern end of the island, where men went to sea in little more than leaking rowboats after gigantic whales, sperm and humpback. It astonished me that these flimsy vessels could outlast a storm as well as haul a fifty ton whale. 

This was a far cry from corporate whaling, large ships outfitted with state of the art contraptions designed to locate and kill as many whales as possible. We are talking about four men - four much older men - descendants of Carib Indians and escaped slaves - in a twenty-three foot wooden boat, open to the weather, outfitted with a struggling outboard and a patched  sail. Their harpoons had been fashioned from old automobile springs. This was mana a mano - "You will  feed my village, or you will kill me."  It had been their way for centuries. A large whale would support the village of Barroulie for a year.  I wanted to meet them. More to the point, I wanted to go to sea with them. 

Jamie was with me at the time, so we rented a jalopy and survived the pocked road that seemed no wider than a donkey path which curved up island to Barroulie. A village of shabby shacks and derelict houses in need of everything, chipped paint, rotting wood, cracked bricks, teetering buildings all around a town square patchy with weeds, with a goat tethered in the middle. I don't remember seeing anyone at all except a sour and wrinkled old woman behind the counter of the small, raggedy store stocked with tinned beef on every shelf. She made no attempt to hide her displeasure at having us anywhere near her. "You people ain't never here. Why you doin' now?" were the questions she didn't ask. Her face was tight lipped, angry, fighting not to say what she wished she could but had been taught since childhood that she couldn't. Children in ragged clothes congregated at the door and stared. We bought them all sodas. "Sunset.They be in sunset,", she volunteered, I think just to get us the hell out of her shop. The jetty, a cement and cinder block structure battered by waves on both sides, partially worn away - that's where the old woman told us to stand and wait. There was no one to see but those kids, the goat, and that old lady who stared bullets into our backs as we walked away. I gotta hand it to Jamie. She had guts for this one.

We waited on that jetty in the open sun for hours amusing ourselves watching the chickens snap up tidbits left on the fishing nets spread out on the beach.  We graduated to making bets on which chicken would get the tidbit first. Or counting lizards. That was fun. An occasional seagull swooped down and broke the monotony.  Late afternoon, when the sun was low we still had another hour before they came in. It passed, and so did they. With the sun lowering behind them, the village fishermen began coming back with their catch, mooring, unloading, brokering...When the whalers were initially sighted, every one stopped what they were doing and watched as the crew took down the mast, and the third man, Millington, started the outboard to navigate the rest of the way, as was the custom.  They finally reached a spot on the far side of the jetty, where it dropped anchor and sat by itself.

 We watched from the jetty as the four men anchored and stored their gear in a shed on the beach. It  seemed they took no notice, however, as soon as the gear was stored, they turned in our direction, looked directly at us, and began to walk towards where we stood on the jetty. They were predators, and they looked like predators: strong, sinewy bodies, alert, loose, eyes that fix, eyes with no mercy, senses all systems go. Black as if genetics hadn't touched them since the  beginning of time. The closer they came the fiercer they looked. The Caribbean Sea was our back-up. They had no idea who we were - rich tourists slumming? - and nobody else had any idea of where we were. Jamie was right next to me. Was this a problem in the making? I really didn't know. What I did was just go still and stayed that way. Kept my face still. Kept my mind still. My body simply there. Just be. Be. Just be. The man in the lead came within two feet of me. I still hadn't moved. He looked at my face the way I looked at his. It was time. I smiled and stuck out my hand. He smiled and offered his. I shook the hand of a man who could be no more authentic than he already was. All four of them. I was in the presence of men who did not pretend to anything.They were not well spoken but answered my questions, and I answered theirs. Did I hunt elephant? No, I did not hunt elephant. White bears? No bear at all. Horns? Yes, horns, also ones that fly - duck, geese...Shotguns were outlawed, so they trapped birds by stretching nets on trees. I told them I was interested in men who did what they did not because they liked it or dreamed about it or was passionate as a hobby, but the actuality that it is you to the core, not something you do, even if you do it well, but something you are, something you are born not made. Reading these words I'm surprised at how academic they sounded, but the crux of it all was that they agreed to take me to sea with them.

All this is prelude. Ten years passed.

It was the spring of '88. Mr. Punnett alerted me to the fact that this would be the final season of whaling in the Grenadines, banned forever, ordained by law, so this was going to be the last voyage of their lives - their last season to hunt the whales they've hunted forever - so, if I wanted to go, I'd better get down there. The Punnett's would find us a place to live. 

So, Jamie, Sevi, who was a year and a half old, and I packed up for St. Vincent and went down there for a month, in which time, I'd be out with the whalers. Once again Jamie played guts ball.  She manned the fort for sure. We bought mosquito netting, rented a modest place named Rose Cottage with lukewarm water and Rastas as neighbors. My problem was that all the men I had talked to years ago were dead or disabled, so I had to ask the current crew of three if they'd take me with them - the last three aboriginal whalers left in the Grenadines - I'd sit in the stern and stay out of the way, take a few pictures. The only man under seventy was the man who owned the boat - a Mr. Millington - and he was sixty-eight - bodies lean and strong from a lifetime of brutal work. Clothing so tattered the Salvation Army would immediately consign them to the burn bin. They barely said a word to me, made their points with chin and fingers. Often just a grunt. "Four a.m.," said Mr. Millington.

Of course, there's a whole lot more but none of that is the point. That locomotive heading towards you at full speed is the point. I'd been out with the whalers for three or four days. By that time, I was tolerated which basically meant I kept out of the way and bailed the water that constantly leaked with a gourd , Yes, the boat leaked. It's name was "Faith", just Faith  no "The" in front of it,  just Faith. One day nothing, nothing at all, ho hum, when suddenly the man on the bow, the main harpoon, begins yelling, "Aw, Lawdy! Aw, Jesus!" and pointing, and what he was pointing at was a fifty ton sperm whale churning straight for our boat. I really thought to myself, "Holy shit, is this the way I'm going to die?" Yet, it was the most mesmerizing sight, and I could not look away. I-MAX but real. I watched a sperm whale  coming head on.

What I felt was disbelief, that this should be happening to me, that's all I remember: disbelief.  

           "They never found his body."

I snapped picture after picture as the whale came closer and I thought, "Jesus Christ, who the hell dies this way?" Maybe an archaeologist  will unearth my camera on the sea floor in a few million years when the water is earth again.  But, the weird thing was, I don't remember fear or anything but wonder and disbelief at this behemoth coming for me. What do airline passengers do when they know their plane is going to crash? What can they do?  I stood there and kept snapping pictures. There it was, yards away, but, just before impact, the whale slowed to our speed, pulled up alongside and lifted his head as if to see into the boat. Just curious. The whale was just curious. It wanted to see what we were up to. I reached out and touched its head, rubbed my knuckles over its rough skin. I saw his eye looking at me. It saw me and I was no more man to it as so much flotsam , and uninteresting flotsam at best, but I wasn't dead. The largest living creature on earth had come to see what I was up to. Satisfied, it dove down and disappeared. 

Death let me off the hook that time. Was it a training session? Had that whale been spawn of Moby Dick I'd have been chum. I don't know what my death will be like when it finally comes. I know I'd rather not linger. When Bob Hope's children asked him where he wanted to be buried he said, "Surprise me". 

How do you top that one? 

When there is no moon and it's a pitch black night in early June, you hold hands with a two year old almost three and walk with him through the darkest night he's ever seen in a field with grass almost as tall as he is to watch with wonder thousands and millions and billions of fireflies twinkling on and off as if the stars had fallen and were searching for a way back.