August 13, 2020
Day 162
I’m in a bad movie. Intermission is over. On with the show.
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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
16 Jun
June 16th, 2020
Day 1 (Again)
Despite the sometimes acerbic tone some of the entries in this diary have taken, I am, at heart, not a cynic. The fact of the matter is that for my entire life I have pitched my tent in the unruly, but happy camp of the romantics. Hafiz lives one tent over and Basho somewhere across the way. I consider myself in good company and would not change a thing. That being said, at this moment in time, writing in bed with Goldberg’s Variations playing in the background and the last minutes of this unique and irreplaceable day slipping into history, I am gobsmacked and the cynic in me is laughing and laughing.
Earlier in the day I’d made a run down the 309 and into town for supplies for the pathway that is my current project. I was loading thirty bricks and three bags of bedding sand into the back of my car at PlaceMakers when Bopper, a genial yardman there, came up and asked if I’d heard the news. Bopper always has some tidbit of gossip or chatter on the jungle telegraph to relate so I humoured him and asked what was up? He proceeded to tell me that we had two active cases of Covid-19 on the books and that it happened because somebody was let out of quarantine to attend a funeral in Wellington. Bopper being Bopper, I took everything he had to say with a grain of salt, finished my supply run by strapping two 4.8 metre retaining wall boards on the roof rack, paid my bill and raced home to crack my computer, log into the Ministry of Health to see if he was right.
Here’s what the numbers say…
So here we go again… 2 New cases. Zero Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active and probable cases and factoring in 22 death is… Sorry, but you’re going to have to do the math yourselves. I can’t wrap my head around it.
After 24 days of no active cases in the entire country, we let two women fly in from the United Kingdom via Australia, placed them in a ‘managed isolation’ facility for 14 days but then let them out to drive 642 kilometres in a private vehicle to Wellington to ‘comfort’ a relative after a death in the family. ‘Compassionate exemption’ was the term used to describe it on the government press release. An entire country with five million souls free of Covid-19 and totally out of lockdown and we decide that the ‘needs’ of two people outweigh the possible consequences of spreading a highly contagious virus among an unsuspecting population. A six hour journey and they had no contact with anybody? Right. Who the hell made the decision to let them do that? It beggars belief.
The early press release was couched in wordy bureaucratese to make it sound as though everything was under control, but things were clearly were not. Ever hear the phrase that an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications? Well that press release was the government version of somebody saying, ‘it sounded like a good idea at the time’. Several hours into the news cycle and already the powers that be are stating that, “No more exemptions will be allowed”. You think? It’s tantamount to them announcing that, “Several dozen horses have escaped from our stable but don’t worry, we’ve closed the doors now”.
The contact tracers that have been sitting idle for 24 days are hot on the trail of everyone who was on the flight, all of the people in two international airports in two countries, the staff and other people in the managed isolation facility, every person at the funeral in Wellington and anyone that anyone might have come in contact with these two caring but selfish knuckleheads on their journey by car from Auckland to Wellington. Details are few and far between this early in the story and I cannot wait for the finer points to be revealed in the coming days. There will doubtless be more tap dancing from the powers that be as this unfolds. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has got to be saying, “They did what?!!” to anyone on her staff brave enough to go near her while all over the country a feeling of dread is beginning to replace the cautious optimism we had during the past three weeks.
It is said by the wise that there is very little difference between Saturday night and Sunday morning. That’s kind of where we are now. The process of tracking and tracing and isolating (this time without any compassion, I hope) will ramp up to full speed. Sweden will say, “We told you so”, the threat of lockdown will loom again and everyone will be watching the numbers once more and furtively checking their supply of toilet paper.
As for me, I am officially over it. If it all goes south and I end up taking a long dirt nap would someone please mine these pages and cobble together the story of my end of days? I’ve chosen the title and put together the cover below to save you some work. Thanks.
Cheers, D.
Maybe
19 May
May 19, 2020
Day 59
The skies are clearer than I’ve ever seen them in new Zealand and that’s saying a lot. After my appointment in Whitianga with my new optometrist I chased a beautiful sunset up the 309 Road and rolled down our drive with some groceries and a new car battery. I wonder where the battery was made?
There’s some sort of weird bookkeeping arithmetic going on in the count today, but for me the real number is the ongoing climb of the ratio of recovered cases to the number of confirmed and probable cases.
There are Zero new cases today, however, “the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 today increased by four. These cases are people who returned to New Zealand from the Greg Mortimer cruise ship in April and who had all tested positive for COVID-19 in Uruguay. They were classified as being under investigation while we were awaiting information from Uruguay to avoid them being double counted by the World Health Organisation. We have now confirmed these cases were not reported by Uruguay. All four have recovered.” (This from an explanation by the Ministry of Health published today to explain the asterisks. Bookkeeping.)
9 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to the number of confirmed and probable cases is 95.9%.
The powers that be are talking about 28 days being the amount of time we need to go without seeing a rise in number of infections as being the benchmark for success in our fight against the Covid-19 virus. Level 1 may take place sometime around then. Right now there is still a good deal of social distancing being practiced in businesses. Less so with people. Some are aware and conscious when I stop to let them pass. My optometrist wore a mask, as did I. Cashiers are wearing gloves and hand sanitiser is the new normal, but thing are coming back. Life is returning to the town and the nation. I hope it returns to you.
There was a time when the world was a quieter, more peaceful place. The dentists were primitive and lifespans were shorter, but there were no cars and far fewer people. No penicillin, but no processed food either. The seas teemed with life, the skies were clear and the moon and stars ruled the night. Trade offs abound and answers are few, but the same span of years that has made me more susceptible to Covid-19 also has given me wisdom to make sense of its place in the tapestry of life. There is serenity in this knowledge.
I know where I’ve been.
I know where I am.
I know where I’m going.
Maybe I’ll see you there.
Goodnight.
I Have Played Enough
17 May
May 17, 2020
Day 57
Simple pleasures. Like doing the laundry at home. Troubleshooting the plumbing system. Finding that the leak you thought was there was caused by something else. Perhaps the rain running down the side of the container and being blown across the wonky door seal and dripping down onto the floor where it then appeared to have been from the washer. Perhaps not. Either way, the washing machine didn’t leak during two loads I did this afternoon, so it’s an open question as to whether there is a problem with it. That’s a step forward in my book. I’ll take it.
Other simple pleasures revolve around examining the numbers for today and doing the math and thinking about the chances…
1 New case. 5 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to confirmed and probable cases is 95.5%. Two Zeroes on the board.
….the chances that we have beaten this thing. That I might not catch it. That with continued luck and work, this country may find its way through to the other side and come out stronger and better for having taken bold steps quickly and stayed the course. We shall see.
Going to try to go to Whitianga tomorrow to see what is open. It’s a shorter trip than all the way to Thames so Valerie is coming along. Sun might even be out. You never know.
An on another subject entirely, to someone with a bone of contention stuck in their throat…
Two statements, in fact.
And…
A fanatic is someone who can’t change their mind and won’t change the subject. What is it you are doing? If you find yourself wondering, consider this old Buddhist parable and ask yourself whose part you play.
Two monks were traveling together and came to a river where a young woman was waiting, unable to cross because of the strong current. “Will you please help me?” she asks the monks. In spite of a sacred vow he’d taken not to touch women, the senior monk picked her up, crossed the river and placed her on the opposite shore.
The junior monk followed them across the river, angry that his companion had broken his vow. They continued their journey and an hour passed, then two, then three. Finally, the younger monk could stand it no longer: “Why did you do that?” he asked heatedly. “We have vowed we never would touch women.”
The senior monk looked at his partner with patience, understanding and a little sadness, and replied, “I set her down hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?”
Which leads me here…
And I have.
The Things Not Meant for Me
11 May
May 11, 2020
Day 51
3 New cases. 15 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 92.5%.
And this, since it represents progress toward wherever it is we’re going to be in a few weeks.
New Zealand is moving in three step phases to Alert Level 2. Most businesses will be able to reopen with new guidelines for social distancing in force and certain provisos re maximum capacity of establishments in place. I’ve got some timber to buy and there are some time sensitive documents that I have to get into the bureaucratic pipeline so I hope the government will be open for personal business. Those are the only things I’ll be out doing over the next few weeks other than, as you have no doubt figured out, watching the numbers.
We appear to have dodged the bullet, but as that fellow from Sweden warned, we still have to maintain our quarantine of incoming visitors and figure out how to cure/treat/prevent/mitigate Covid-19 for the long run. So there’s still people out there pulling the trigger and bullets will be flying and all it takes is a few bad breaks and happy people sharing a beer (Bars are the last in line for reopening for just this reason) to reverse the gains we’ve made thus far. But it’s another step in the right direction and that is good.
I started writing this diary because things were, across the board, on the cusp of going seriously awry. I had done what I could to prepare in a material sense and as lockdown loomed I realised I was like a passenger on a hijacked plane, cell phone in hand and little time between the slowly unravelling present and the implacable unknown future. Only I had more time than those poor souls who can only text a few lines to their loved ones before their plane disintegrates around them. It was a gift I did not want to squander. I had time to gather my thoughts and put pen to paper with that long arm from the grave to say…
That I apologise to all I have hurt in my long life. It was not my intention. I was young and ignorant, untried and unsure. I made decisions that experience has taught me could have turned out better had I gone another way. Much later, when I was older, Clavell’s description of prisoners of war in Changi fit me well. Of them, he wrote, ‘These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.’ In the eyes of the woman I loved my crime, too, was vast. Like all the people who had ever hurt her, I was a man. My mistake was thinking that she would know that I was different. In the end her constant fear became a self fulfilling prophecy. I am sad at how things came to pass, but I was not those other men and to be tarred for so long with the same brush became unbearable.
There is the brother I never knew because I never asked about his life. It is a shame and a sadness that is hard to bear. My brother deserved more and I am sorry I never gave it to him. There was a sister once who wanted to be right more than anything else and got exactly what she wished for. Nothing to apologise for there, but had I known then what I know now, I’d have altered my course a few degrees to help her find a better way.
To my co-authors whose long and heartfelt labors of love saw only the slush pile of various agents offices, I apologise. The stories were good and true and though they float now on Oblivion’s Sea with countless others, there was worth in the writing. I know this to be true and I offer this knowledge in exchange for the time we spent filling them with life. That they were stillborn, silenced before their time, is unfortunate. I apologise not a second for striving, but wish that you had been spared the long ordeal of being tied to my falling star.
To the keeper of the light across the channel, I would have loved to love you better. I am a slow learner and thank you for the patient way you showed me.
Every villain is a hero in their own mind. I never meant to hurt anyone. I’m sorry if I did.
The End (I Hate to say I Told you So…)
10 May
May 10, 2020
Day 50
2 New cases. 3 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is still 91%. This number is going to climb slowly from here on out, but climb it shall.
(A picture of the moon out of my window)
In other news today I found the video report below…
…and hope it is not inappropriate to quote Winston Churchill.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
In the meantime Covid-19 burnout continues worldwide. People are tired of there being such an inconvenient thing as a global pandemic and hearing about it endlessly. Because I am sensitive to everyone’s feelings I am going to stop going on about the contagion. We as humans have seen much worse and survived to invent his one. The worldwide economy is reverberating discordantly, the skies are empty of chem-trails and the seas are getting cleaner by the day. Anyone who was reading has nodded off or found better ways to amuse themselves under whatever version of ‘lockdown’ they’re under, so it’s time to move on. If I don’t make it, I’ll send up a flare. If I do make it, you know where to find me, studying Kiwi and Mandarin and watching closely as one era ends and another begins.
Not having Covid-19 to kick around any longer I have decided to branch out into clairvoyance and share some predictions which will come true very shortly. It is my hope that they may help you to plan your soon to be changing future.
- In response to the collective impotence and lack of vision evinced by the rest of the world and as a follow on of its already stated policy towards Taiwan, China is going to take over the renegade island militarily. It will crush all major resistance within three months of the start of hostilities (which will not be called hostilities) and will commence re-educating the survivors with extreme prejudice. There will be ham-handed attempts by America to intervene through a series of useless U.N. resolutions, vague bluster and empty threats, while China, under the policy of We Own Everything except Covid-19, will shut down all maritime traffic through the South China Sea save for its own commercial and military vessels.
- A full court diplomatic and economic press will tie the hands of every country on the planet, giving China time to present the takeover as a fait accompli. As the nation of Taiwan will no longer exist (just ask China) the United States will reason, quite logically and conveniently, that it no longer has to adhere to any treaty obligations it had with the former non-nation. They will hoist a Mission Accomplished banner and leave the area before the paint on the new signs at Taipei’s airport has a chance to dry. What once was called Taiwan-sheng or Taiwan province will cease to exist on paper even as it is subsumed by the invaders who will name themselves something innocuous but patriotic. Something snappy like The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere Forces of Reunification. What? It’s been used before? No matter. Move along please. Nothing to see here.
- China’s Renminbi, or Yuan, will become a global currency and will challenge the U.S. Dollar for supremacy. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-debt-to-china-how-much-does-it-own-3306355
- China will land men and women on the moon, set up a permanently manned base there and claim ownership of the Earth’s satellite. https://www.space.com/13331-china-space-race-moon-ownership-bigelow-ispcs.html
- https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-proposes-establishing-moon-based-special-economic-zone/
- China will take over Australia and New Zealand through aggressive commercial practices and strategic purchases of key industries and land blocks.
- Before item number six happens I will have shuffled off this mortal coil.
- Before I do that I predict that I will say I told you so.
Breathing Easy (or Not)
5 May
May 5, 2020
Day 45
For the record, I am ill. Under the weather. Sick. Feeling poorly. Less than ideal.
I have a recurring headache, a tiny off kilter trembling centered just behind my cheekbones and numbness in my hands and fingertips, but the real kicker is a persistent migrating congestion in my lungs that despite my best intention and mumblings about a river in Egypt, will not go away. Wheezing with the slightest exertion, every now and then hawking up mucous and spitting it out on my work bench to examine it for green streaks or blood or aliens, then wiping it up with a paper towel and continuing with my work, I’ve been ever mindful that Valerie has been unwell for far longer and that I cannot afford to be sick. Yet sick I am. So I telephoned my doctor and told asked her to look at my chart for May 7, 2019 and write me a prescription for whatever I had back then. She did and I’ve been taking prednisone and I’ll keep you informed.
Lungs, lungs, lungs. People tend to take them for granted until there’s a glitch. If the malfunction is serious then they don’t worry long, but that’s not often a problem as the lungs usually don’t just pack it in suddenly. That’s more the heart’s department. Lungs are the long suffering organ of the human body. They absorb a lifetime of a smoker’s choice of combustion byproducts and hang on until the bitter end, fighting all the way to do their simple job of getting oxygen into the bloodstream. Or they are filled slowly, year after year, with coal dust inhaled by a miner trying his best to put food on his family’s plates and after a few decades of this there are no unspoiled alveoli to speak of in the tortured passages of his airways and he dies of Black Lung. Asbestos fibres are another killer that starts out in the lungs, and true to form, that unsung organ soldiers on for many years before giving up the ghost and taking its owners with it.
Tuberculosis, cancer, emphysema, the names of lung diseases are legion. My particular disease is asthma. I daresay there are a great deal more obscure lung diseases that start with the letter ‘A’ that come before asthma but, nevertheless, I’m right there in the ‘A’s’, so I have that going for me. Considering what’s happening in the world right now, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about vaccines, and in my research I’ve come across several accounts of people who developed asthma right after they were vaccinated as children. Vaccinated for what, you ask? Tuberculosis is the main one. My grandfather had tuberculosis and lived, only to die of emphysema much later from chain smoking Marlboros. In looking into what was in vaccines back then I ran across a recurring chemical named Thimerosal.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html
Back in the day (mid 1950’s), almost fifty percent of Thimerosal was composed of mercury, which was used as a preservative. The mercury was considered an inactive ingredient, but, by weight and dosage, it’s use pushed children way above the limits for mercury poisoning then and seems to have been in use until the turn of the century.
What does a three year old boy in the 50’s know of any of that? Precious little. I was simply the child in our house who had asthma and that was that. Luck of the draw. I dealt with it as well as I could and never complained. It was was it was. Looking back though, and talking with childhood development specialists I realise that the disease had to have taken its toll on my energy and stamina throughout my youth and thus affected my ability to absorb information during school and to process it afterwards during the homework portion of life. I was always behind and while I am not blaming the disease on my lack of Nobel Prizes on the mantelpiece, it did affect the course my life took.
I remember being responsible for the exiling of all furred pets from our house, for being excused from the work of sweeping out the basement during monthly cleanups, for being the sick one, of having to be cared for just a little more than others in the family. When I wanted to join the cross country team in high school I ended up being the manager instead. Pop Warner football league for two years in my early teens was a struggle, first because I was a skinny, lightweight kid and second because I had no wind.
When my number was called during the 1972 draft (last year of the draft for Viet Nam and I won the lottery with number 68) it never occurred to me to use my asthma to dodge that responsibility. Instead of being hoovered into the army I chose to enlist in the navy and then had to lie through my teeth re my medical history to make it to the physical at the induction centre. There I held my breath, no pun intended, because though I had no special love for, or desire to be in the navy, it was something I’d set my mind to and I did not want to fail at it. As it turned out, I had a pulse and the rest was history. (Though I did have to repeat the lie when I volunteered for submarines and then again to be selected for naval nuclear power school.) Fire fighting training was a challenge, as I did not want to have an asthma attack when they placed us in the training building on hose crew teams and then set the other half of the building on fire. Same with the tear gas training room. Always wondering if I’d suddenly lock up and pass out and be kicked out. But I never did and never was. My lungs ceased to be an issue for for the next 38 years unless you count the times I stayed too long in the same room with a dog or in a house where a dog or cat lived. I learned about albuterol inhalers and exercise induced respiratory distress and I was smart about my exposure to allergens and I coped.
Even living on the Big Island of Hawaii with its constant VOG did not hold me back. I worked on a wind farms and in a restaurant for a while then joined Atlantis Submarines in Kona, Hawaii. After my career as a tourist submarine pilot (had to be SCUBA certified then for maintenance requirements – another test for my lung capacity) I worked construction (lots of treated wood sawdust and few masks). In 2010 I was able to pass a rigorous spirometry treadmill test in order to be in the running for a job at the summit of Mauna Kea at the Keck Observatory. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got the job after the first candidate they chose couldn’t handle the altitude. A curious thing about working at the summit is that without exception, everyone behaves as if they are short of oxygen up there – because they are. Once in the door and assigned to shift work at night I found I was able to handle the low oxygen levels fine and did so for the next 6 years.
Then a leap of faith into another life and love led me to my last physical examination, the one required to be granted a residence visa for New Zealand. This one was not too hard and I passed with flying colours. Found the property we live on now and began building from nothing and over the last four years noticed something strange. For some reason, whether because I was living in the midst of the rot and genesis of a podocarp forest, or because I was (say it ain’t so) getting old or perhaps my life of breathing asbestos from navy ships or VOG or sawdust or extended periods of extreme high altitude were catching up to me, I don’t know, but for whatever reason, take your pick, my asthma had returned.
The building of a house alone, using a shovel to slowly excavate and sculpt and shift the land, clearing under-story trees and scrub, all these and more are candidates for being the possible or cumulative cause for my lungs diminishing in capacity. Personally, I think it’s age and a short use by date. I’d gotten a few respiratory infections that I couldn’t shrug off as quickly as I’d hoped, but nothing serious. I kept on working (the house wasn’t going to build itself) and was doing just that up until two months ago (actually, I’m still building, but I’m using scavenged or saved materials) when along came the Covid-19 Contagion. Hey, presto! – and suddenly I’m thinking about my my lungs more than usual, which, for me, is saying something.
The fact that I’ve got a lung infection right now (which is being seen to and worked on, thanks to Valerie’s persistence and love) was the catalyst for this post, but the contagion is the active ingredient. I am, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, one of the herd destined to be culled. One of Darwin’s least fit, so to speak. I am that person the young are talking about when they blithely say, “He was going to die sooner or later”. (Come say that to my face and see who meets St. Peter first.) But the young are young, they want to be out of lockdown and back to doing whatever the smartest people on the planet do, so I understand. I wish I could fast forward a few decades to that time when the realisation that they were not quite as smart as they thought sinks in. The expression on their faces would be priceless and of course there’d be the spectacle of them being marginalised or dismissed by a younger and equally clueless generation. Different people learning the same lesson over and over again. Life on earth.
But it’s not all bad. There are some bright spots out there for the discerning observer to see. First of these are today’s numbers, fresh off the press from the New Zealand Ministry of Health…
Minus 1 New cases. (How that happens I know not, but I’ll take it as read.) 26 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 87%. And an exciting first today – 3 Zeroes in the Zeroes department. Notable among these is the first day since the count began that there was no change in the number of confirmed cases. ZERO growth. That’s yuge, to paraphrase a politician of note. Really yuge. No change in the number of people in the hospital and Zero deaths again over the last twenty-four hours. Bada-bing, bada-bam, bada-boom! I love it. It’s a big day for New Zealand and big day for me because I have a vested interest in continuing the long saga of my lungs, specifically the part where they keep working.
On that note I saw a video posted by an emergency room doctor who said that though the current paradigm has doctors preparing for and treating patients suffering from the Covid-19 virus as pneumonia and/or ARD cases, they should in fact be looking deeper because, he said, it appears to him that everyone he’s treated and who has died appeared to be suffering from high altitude sickness. Which I had Zero trouble with during my time at the observatory. An obscure connection? Perhaps. But it’s good news to me and it gives me hope, because, unlike the person in the photo below, who gives me no hope, I know what it is like to really have difficulty breathing.
You can’t make this stuff up.
(On second thought my friend Russell Gayer could make it up. https://www.amazon.com/One-Idiot-Short-Village-Characters-ebook/dp/B079848Q3K
On third thought, he probably did, and paid that lady to do it. Kentucky’s not too far from Arkansas.
Give me hope for the human race, Russell. Tell me you put her up to it.
Our What?
3 May
May 3, 2020
Day 43
2 New cases. 3 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 85%. Two Zeroes on the board.
Two weeks from now will be the time to watch for new cases numbers to rise as the ‘freedom’ of Level 3 facilitates a higher level of transmission. Until then we’re living on Level 4’s dime.
Toady it rained off and on as I worked my way through parts of several projects in the workshop. I made more progress on the ‘grouting’, did another load of laundry and cleaned off the old workbench. This allowed me to move all the parts and pieces of the ‘in progress’ from various horizontal surfaces to the newly swept wide open table top that has been the ‘go to’ workbench in the shipping container for four years. Returning to the space after a lunch of homemade tomato soup and hot roll and butter I discovered there is a small leak from somewhere behind the washing machine. Add another project to the list. Will tackle that on first thing tomorrow as the plumbing needs to be bullet proof. Still and all, there was slow progress on a number of fronts and I am happy.
During lunch Valerie read to me an entry from a fascinating blog she discovered (the author had ‘liked’ one of her posts and she visited his blog as a courtesy and found an intriguing and thoroughly well researched site that I am sharing here.
I have yet to read any of his work, but on the strength of what I listened to and what Valerie has related to me of some of his earlier posts, I think you may find yourself surprised and also more ‘in the picture’ as to where the west stands with regard to China, and vice versa.
In the illustration above the west is represented by the guy and China is the girl. (I mention this only because it can be looked at either way.) It is my contention that the west must work hard to reverse this. In order to stave off disaster and economic, if not actual, subjugation, we must create a world in which the west is the one asking, “What relationship?” Failure to do so will condemn our children and our children’s children to a future so bleak that I balk at even trying to imagine it.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/when-china-rules-the-world
This is the reality we face and the peril we ignore. It isn’t coming, it’s already here.
I keep saying that I won’t be around to see the worst and Valerie smiles and says, “unless you are reborn into it.” So I’m going to do what I can, where I am, with what I have…to change the future. (Which, at present, isn’t what it used to be.) Wish me luck.
The Windlass of Time
4 JunA hundred words for those who are still left and for those who have gone before, based on the photo prompt below. We walk in the shadows of giants. D-Day. June 6th, 1944.
(Copyright C. Hase)
A stooped and wizened man stands behind a bench at the end of a pier, supporting himself with both hands as he watches liberty boats ferry passengers to the beach from a cruise ship anchored offshore. Long years have extinguished everything in his life except the fire in his eyes. Through them he sees soldiers in a maelstrom struggling in crimson surf beneath a dull gray sky.
A car backfires and he flinches, then squares his shoulders and turns to walk resolutely inshore, sure that today will be his last. Another day, another turn of the wheel. Maybe tomorrow.
Qui Tacet Consentiere
27 May
100 words for Friday Fictioneers.
Unlike the many creatures we’ve sent, as W.S. Merwin said in For a Coming Extinction, “…to The End.”, I have returned, if only for this week, because the photograph is mine and speaks to me of teeming seas from a time long past…. No need to comment. I love you all. Aloha, D.
(Copyright Douglas MacIlroy)
“And they lived in the oceans?” At three years of age, my daughter was just beginning to get an inkling of the world that had gone before her.
“They filled the seas, Pearl. We were once just a distant rumor to them.”
“If there were so many, where did they all go?”
“To feed us, darling.”
“Every one?”
“Some say a few still live in deep canyons where nets can’t reach, but none have been seen for many years.”
“Will they ever come back, Daddy?”
“In time perhaps.”
“When we’re gone?”
ironwoodwind 