beginning chapter 3 "Sunsets"

People bitch and moan about Mondays for some reason, maybe it is fashion, maybe habit; learned behavior, but I like them. I read long ago that some people make the mistake of judging the day before even getting out of bed. For example, some days you might wake up to a rain shower and think “oh shit, it’s raining again, what a crappy day today is, must be a Monday.” When instead the more positive outlook would be to just get up and say to one’s self, well it’s raining again, better grab an umbrella, or my tomatoes have really needed this. In either case the lesson was intended to illustrate that by simply telling ourselves at the beginning of the day what type of day it would be based on something as insignificant as rain, or the day of the week was to guarantee us a bad day without even exploring the possibilities that day holds for us. Any day may be the day that we won the lottery, or met the love of our lives, if we would only give the day a chance to unfold itself, moment by precious moment. I try to keep that in mind. Today was a Monday, and I didn’t let that bother me, but last night landed my mother in the hospital in a medically induced coma, and this was dominating my thoughts early. To add more of a challenge I arrived at work and everything was the same as it was left on Friday. I had gotten there moments before Morgan, and clocked in before anyone else. The vomit was still on the road and all of the boxes were still piled on and around my desk. I stood silently waiting for instructions on how to remedy the situation. I asked Morgan if there was a direct that I could reach her on and explained my mom’s situation to her. My mom has cancer. There is one tumor in her colon and another in her rectum. The one in her rectum has spread into her vaginal wall and even though she finished all of the radiation and chemo back in December and it is now June, she still awaits surgery. The tumor in her rectum is blocking it so much that two failed attempts at colonoscopies have wasted eight weeks of her time and cost her eight more weeks of unnecessary worry as well as put her surgery off until three weeks from now. She had been getting weak lately, her feet have been swelling and as she puts it, she is growing weary of all of the pain and the not knowing. As I informed Morgan of this I had a hard time fighting back tears and she asked if I needed to be there. I told her I wanted to at least try. She walked over to my desk and saw that all of the boxes were still there and seemed at a loss for any place to relocate them and said that I really couldn’t get started on anything else until they were moved so I walked to a different section of the shop and taped up a bunch of full boxes that were ready to ship and threw them into their respective bins. After about ten minutes there I decided it was time to go so I told Morgan that my dad had just called and asked me to come home, and I left. It was still early once home; the girls and Holly were still there, getting ready for work and school. Holly asked what I was doing at home and whether or not I quit. I told her no I had not quit, but since there wasn’t much for me to do and I was already scheduled to take a half day anyhow Morgan just sent me home. I had an appointment scheduled with my gastroenterologist. I have ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome and a pre-cancerous throat condition known as Barrett’s Esophagus. I needed to go see the nurse for a medical evaluation, basically a refill on the medicines that would hopefully keep me cancer free. Once they left I sat at the machine for a bit contemplating some unfinished short stories but then settled for wasting time on social media and old music videos. It was around ten in the morning still and I needn’t leave until around one thirty. There were tornado warnings out as hot air battle cold in the upper atmosphere and the sky was beautifully threatening. We soon got a drenching rain. The drops were fat and wet and formed sheets as they fell, turning my sandy wasteland of a yard into a running brook for a few hours, it was magnificent. I did indeed have plans to visit my mother but not until after my doctors visit. Mom lives up in Suffolk, Virginia about two hours north and my doctor’s office is in the middle, in Elizabeth City. I waited for the thunder and lightning to pass along before calling my father around noon. I asked how mom was and he said fine. I wondered how she could be given the circumstance, but that’s dad. I mentioned casually that I had a doctor’s visit in E. City at three o’clock and that I planned on coming up after that. He told me not to. He said mom was doing much better and she would be released in the afternoon and back at home with hospice care by nightfall and that the last thing she needed was company. She needed rest and quiet. I talked to her a couple of hours later before heading out and she confirmed that, all she wanted was to lie down; be still and quiet. We talked for a while, the subject of which is not important, but after both of us cried a bit, the thunderstorms came again and blew my reception and I lost the line. Mom quickly called back and cut it all short. “The best thing I could do” she told me was to “take care of Holly and the babies.” I assured her that I would, but also asked her to promise to call if she felt herself slipping away again. She said she didn’t want to be a burden or to worry me and I told her that she was no burden at all but that I was a forty three year old man and her oldest son and I may live to be one hundred and forty three and would have plenty of time for business as usual but as for now, the situation was far from regular if she would allow me to say so, and that no matter her wishes for me not to worry, I reminded her that not only was she my mother with genuine concern for my well being, I was her son with the same concern. We talked a little more and as I told her I loved her she just said “alright, I’m gone.” We hung up. I got home from E. City around five o’clock or so and started preheating the oven for a frozen lasagna. Holly complained that unless I wanted it I shouldn’t heat up the house with the hour and a half cook time and that she would instead make some pasta and toss the leftover veggies from the night before for her and the girls. I wasn’t hungry so I just said “I’m going for a walk.” “Are you okay?” she asked. “Okay enough that you shouldn’t worry for my safety.” I spoke back and I was out the door. I grabbed my rod and reel and headed for the beach, two blocks away. “What if you get rained on?” I heard her ask as I walked out. “I can’t feel the rain.” I said as I just kept walking. Once down at the shore things slowed down for me. It was slightly drizzly and the sky was covered in the most wondrously shaped cloud banks. There were big billowy trails like those from a steam engine that dumped water miles out to sea, and high towers overhead and behind me. The air was much cooler than it had been the last couple of nights there, and the water a degree or two warmer. As I baited two rusty hooks, knowing I wouldn’t catch anything I noticed a pod of Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins about thirty yards off shore right out in front of me. They were working a bait ball just on the other side of the sandbar. Waist-high barrels peeled over the bar as the sets rolled in and the dolphins fed on the little fish. I could see the bait breaking the water in between me and the bar, and I knew also that these were not fish that I would catch on a line. Nonetheless I through my hooks into the swirl of fish in hopes that a stray Bluefish or Speckled Trout would be taking advantage as were the dolphins, maybe even a small Dogfish or Sandbar Shark. I have caught one shark in my life, a little Spiny Dogfish of about two and a half or three feet. I didn’t use a hook. I had neither rod nor reel, just my hands. I was on one of my tours when I noticed it thrashing in a shallow tide pool on the wrong side of the sandbar. It was drowning in air. I stopped the truck to the amazement of my guests as they asked me what I intended to do. “I am going in after it!” I said, “It’s dying.” I jumped out of the truck and stripped off my shoes and shirt. I left my sunglasses on the dash and waded over. As I approached it I said a funny sort of prayer to the animal gods. Please do not let me do anything stupid I thought. I was well aware that even thought the mouth was too small for any appendage loss, if it thrashed the wrong way I could still really get a nasty wound. As I approached the animal I stretched out my hands and placing my left behind the dorsal fin and my right just in front of the tail I grasped the flailing creature fast. It went limp like a muscular baseball bat in my hands. I held it up for all to photograph as they cheered and then I looked into its eye. It was the most beautiful and mysterious web of color I had ever seen. Forget what you know about the Great Whites and the man eaters of television with that large black inhumane eye, this little guy had what looked like a cat’s eye marble from the old days. The eye was an amazing swirl of amber, teal, green and brown. It was very much alive. I watched as the gills opened and closed, wishing for salt water again, it was weak from the struggle to regain its freedom. After the obligatory showing of my feet to its eyes and the “okay now buddy, remember these, never bite these” joke I walked to the other side of the bar into waist deep clear blue water. I spun around slowly with it to re-oxygenate it and after maybe three to five rotations I stood still and slightly lessened my grip as it took off like a bolt of lightning. It was magical. The only experience I could compare it to would be that of holding a Ruby Throated Hummingbird years before in my mountain cabin after it had become caught in between two window panes. The bird, the shark and me, all caught between two pane universes in our own way. That window glass, the tidal flats and my warehoused haven from the world of the unemployed all seemed as one and the same now. As the sun sank lower behind me I saw my first pod of Humpbacked Whales since moving here when I was nineteen years old. I had been hearing many reports of people seeing them, and even seen pictures taken by locals, but I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes until tonight. I almost missed them too. They were out quite a way, out where the shipwrecks lay on the outer bar, where the waves break during the hurricanes and Nor’easters when they reach twenty five to thirty feet. For those unaware my little barrier island home is referred to as The Graveyard of The Atlantic. There are around five to six thousand wrecks dating back to pre-colonial times, before the white folks first polluted this paradise and “discovered” this “new world.” At any rate, out there, among the ghost fleet the whales played, breaching the surface mouths agape and swallowing the schools of menhaden, the distant cousins of the herring that once made our estuaries a world class fishery; again, before we moved everything around, built our castles in the sand and set forth the about the business of trying to hold that which has moved back and forth for scores of millennia in place. Humans are the most stupid sort of beast. We find a perfectly good collective of ecosystems, like those in the deserts of Nevada in the fifties, label it as wasteland, and then go about the business of rendering it as such. We have turned the dunes, the marshes, the maritime forests, the Black Pine barrens into strip malls, mini-mansions and parking lots, continually razing Live Oak to sand and building Cedar Shake domiciles and dentists’ offices. The rule around this place is if it hasn’t been built in the last ten to fifteen years, knock it down and build something bigger. I eagerly wait for the day a Category Five wipes the entire slate clean like today’s heavy rains flooded and wiped away the fire ant hills. Men will then once again scurry about busy like those ants, and maybe next time they will build it differently, more compassionately, but probably not. After the whales and dolphins finished their show I threw a few more casts at the remaining bait fish but for no reason other than exercise really. I thought about heading back home. I thought of the request my mom has for me every summer to just go down to the ocean around this time of the year when the salt air reaches her senses a couple of hours north of here and dip in my toes. I had done that once again, alone. I thought of the pictures of her and my father alone on a March day back in 1969 on a lonely beach in Nags Head, about nine months before I arrived on this planet and I stopped thinking, I just knew. I knew everything and nothing at the same time. As I packed up my tackle box and readied my gear for the walk home I walked once more to the ocean to swish my feet clean of sand before pulling my socks and shoes on over wet toes. Standing there for a moment I allowed the up and back motion of the water to rush around my shins as my feet buried. I watched the Coquina and the Mole Crabs bury themselves fast to escape the piping bills of the Sanderlings and once again, for the first time in my life I saw something that I knew were occasional on our beaches, but had never before seen. It looked shiny and golden as the wave retreated and the foam washed over and away. I have been a collector of coin ever since I was about seven years old but I have never found one on the beach although it has been a lifelong dream of mine. I reached down quickly into the retreating surf so that this magical looking item wouldn’t escape me, sure that it was a candy wrapper, or a polished shell fragment; until my hand grasped it. It was my wildest dream come true; a gold coin that from what I could tell must have been around four hundred and fifty years old or so, probably of Spanish origin. They are out there I know, they have been found before, could this be true? Was I dreaming or did I actually hold not only the most prized possession a kid could ever find, but a very valuable and rare relic at that, possibly worth more than the house I rent coupled with every bit of money that my wife and I had and would or could ever make. I felt butterflies in my stomach, I thought of faraway places and of dreams coming true. I looked around and I was on the beach alone in the azure reflection of the summer sunset on the bubbling ocean bound seawater. Everything was quiet and still as I stood there. Without a thought and before I could change my mind I closed my eyes and hurled that coin as far as my arm could throw it. I saw it splash on the other side of the bar where the dolphins were just playing. Not yet, I thought as I turned to walk home. I pulled those old socks over my cold, wet feet and slipped on my shoes. I passed a few cigarette butts there by the steps back up from the beach to the street and thought again, stupid fucking humans, no sense of what is valuable and what is trash. I picked a piece of salty Sea Rocket to chew as I walked. Once back on the street I was followed by a trio of Mockingbirds. I sang to them as they talked to one another, they flitted and flew along beside me as I walked. They stopped among the Indian Blanket, the yellow Prickly Pear flowers and the Meadow Beauty. Their collective fragrance mixing with that of the freshly bathed Bayberry and Coral Honeysuckle and for those few moments as I walked towards the house, I was home again. I was in my head again. Tomorrow would bring no note from the doctor or sympathy to spare me from the warehouse again, but for a moment I was winning. Butler was back on top, as my world and the barrier islands crumbled beneath my feet. In the distance were the audible groans of green guests caught by Sandspur and Prickly Pear needles while trampling through my garden; their wasteland. Them; drunken and stumbling as I listened, belly empty but soul made whole again by the body and blood of the salt, the rain and the winds.