Somebody Shake Me. Quick, Somebody Wake Me.
Where the Hell Am I?
A little slip of paper DON’T EAT is taped over the light on my coffee machine, because this morning I take the lab slip for blood work. This six-monthly drill is how I know the answer to my question is “no.”
In a touching story about the Civil War, a young man, a captured Confederate soldier is caught spying and immediately sentenced to death by hanging. He is taken to a nearby bridge, where a rope is tossed over a girder, the noose slipped over his neck, and he is dropped.
But the rope is frayed, and snaps, and the soldier falls into the river below. The swift current quickly takes him far downstream out of harm’s way. He swims to the near shore and climbs up the bank, out of the reach of all authority. Free, the soldier makes his way the long distance across fields and down country roads until at last he arrives home at his farm, where his wife and children, all his family and loved ones, are overjoyed to greet him, as he holds in his arms again those he loves most in life. It is a beautiful story so touching that it brings happy tears to the eyes.
At the bridge, the Union soldiers on the death detail cut the rope from the neck of the dead Confederate soldier, bury his corpse, and move on.
Life is a dream, or maybe it’s death that’s the dream, eh? Midway through our walk yesterday morning, Robert and I stopped at Bayou Joe’s for breakfast. BJ’s is out on a pier over Massalina Bayou, on the town side of Tarpon Dock Bridge and near enough to be in its shadow. The first customers to arrive, we took a table right on the water, in the breeze, hot and sweaty from our walk.
Friends for 72 years, neighbors and Cove School classmates, Robert and I both grew up on Massalina Bayou, just around the bend from where we were sitting, and both of us are sentimental about that place. Unlike many things in life, the Bayou itself hasn’t changed all that much and we can still visualize how it really is, which is how it used to be in the nineteen-forties, which for us is real time.
As we looked over the boats at the marina and beyond to Tarpon Dock Bridge, a large mullet jumped, just out of reach. And then another, frying size. Robert commented that this is heaven. I said, Robert, do you suppose that we are actually dead and don’t realize it, and this really is heaven?
It’s as close to heaven as I ever need to be, in this life or whatever comes next.
That Civil War tale comes to mind. Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream, this morning I go for blood work, things are not what they seem, and this is the other place, where I have to lose another forty thousand pounds before my doctor’s appointment next week.
What the hell, I’m having oysters for lunch. And Kristen is home. Maybe this is heaven.
Nope. There’s that gardenia lab slip. Somebody shake me. Somebody wake me.
W