A few excerpts of vignettes from Tales & Flukes from LIFE IN THE TREES.
STORM LOVE
Kids have love affairs. Hard to say where they start. Mine were storms at sea, ocean storms. “Gale,” “hurricane,” and “typhoon” were my favorite words. The shapes of huge waves and the shapes of ships that survived them were my nature study. I saw every picture in every book in all the libraries in Long Beach, California showing photographs of ships and storm waves. You saw aircraft carriers with their flight decks peeled back like sardine can lids. You saw tankers with their decks so full of white water no one on deck could survive. And you’d see pictures of people crowded into a lifeboat that had survived after their ship went down. Big ships survived. Small ships survived. Mediums had more trouble.
“Why is that?” I’d asked my dad.
“How hard can you hit a feather?” he’d asked back.
POPCORN
Shucked Himself: The Perfect Ear!
Of silks and leaves and perhaps a worm
‘Til golden kernels popped full beautiful
From hot oiled Time’s pan
To Us’s – no Thems,
‘Til a random funfull shuffling brought
Your in… my out:
Affinity’s fit makes We, makes Us,
Makes He, The Perfect Ear,
Harder to find.
But there’s ME!
Yeah, puffed up like mad,
But who remembers our
Golden-rowed Togetherness
Or… at least likes the idea of
The Perfect Ear having laughingly forgot
How to unpop his parts.
UKE CHINA!
GLOBAL WAR NARROWLY AVERTED BY LOCAL ECO-GIRL ARMED WITH PINK FLUBBY
READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!
A grey, sleek, and ominous submarine lay anchored in the roadstead off Lahaina when Meg and I awoke aboard our sailboat at the dock. It was summer, a special time for Megan and me to spend time together. Meg, age eleven, sized up the sub. She imitated it, as she does all animals. Her face and body changed. Some subtle shifts: waves ran down her long unmoving sides. Her conning tower shunned the morning sun. Meg emerged from the merge with a message: “It looks nuclear to me, and if it were coming to visit you…it might not be good news.”
That’s all I needed to know. I fired up the small outboard engine. She tossed off the lines and hopped aboard, as our little boat backed out of the dock for a date with destiny. We both could feel the call…