Our Blue Crab Afternoon

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.

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