Our
Blue Crab Afternoon
At
the table of the fisher folk the grandma cracks the bright red crab
claws. Her daughter now so close in age they make all the rounds in
the village, sisters scavenging, selling Kewpie dolls in long crepe
paper dresses or artificial flowers to the sailors stationed there
awhile before they know when they will be called overseas into the
world war. If they will return at all or if returned be the same in
spirit and in body whole.
Olney
listened to the grown ups hanging on to every word of their wisdom.
He thought also of his father far away torn between the warm care and
daily life around the supper table and his daddy's coils, sparks and
vacuum tubes that in the distance his presence questioned things
said, all seeing his radar.
“If
you swallow a bone from our mullet fish,” they are so low of all
the fish but we free to catch in the estuaries of the tidewaters
beyond the worries of rationing when comes hard times. ” chew a
slice of Wonder Bread to get it down.”
“
Daughter, I have told you
not to eat the dead-man. Who knows what the crabs have thrown away
from the bait of spoiled fish heads?”
“Well,
some do eat it. But I guess we should not let the kids eat it.”
Olney
marveled at the words. How deep and fearful the sound of 'dead-man'.
The world of ghosts were never far away for those simple people in
simpler times. In some ways he felt so much wiser than they were.
They were as crazy as beautiful. But what do we expect when in the
dark we are taught to pray 'Now I lay me down to sleep...” or the
cross above Uncle Woodrow Wilson bed seemed so tortured and bleeding.
Olney could not understand why when one morning asking him as he
awakened under it sitting up on his pillow when after a long talk on
chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, Woodrow revealed to him that he
did not want to live forever.
But
years have gone by, more rapidly than the talk of the time that the
Titanic sunk but yesterday or when breaking chunks of ice off the
block in the ice box the inevitable mention of the news of decades
ago in black and white newsprint about the ice pick murders.
Why
is there a world a precocious child might ask or at least sense
almost if a little older than his time, before our fears confine us,
our life paths paralyzed. What is left after the eight legged insects
of the sea leave only their exoskeleton? That also broken as with
memories they once were boiled in fire, pain evaporated like as well.
The hologram just some neutral limit among the grains of sand that
reached some stable point of singularity in the balance. Yet time and
the tides loop leaving layers on layers of churning compressed sand.
We
harvest the crabs as bounty of the sea, we the predators reaching
down from a higher place. We set traps and weave the fishnets. As
our dreams unfold and we stand on the dust some say is only
simulation, in a deeper sense the cosmic honeycomb unwinds over all
its variations, over all that is and we touch of what is not. So
unfolding in place we really define our own prisons.
There
are also parasites from below who find the brain of the much larger
crustacean. Not there to eat its flesh but to command its fins and
claws and legs, to become its puppeteer in search of other greater
prey. Here at the horizons wise ones debate around the table if we
are such predators, parasites or prey or just the propolis that
supports the honeycomb to which we compress the world made of
dead-men.
Crystal
comes into my life from time to time. The last thing she said to me
which seemed a moment of clarity...”I have no life...” We could
see that as relative in the sense that each of us and the myth as
well of all together we have no life. But what did I give her those
summer hours over coffee and riding the bus but a a little while to
her some respite that she will remember and dry her tears from those
who confuse her troubled dreams. That much of a life I tried to give
her and learned a lot about my own life as well.
***
