Tuesday, January 18, 2022

January 18: That Which I Was Born For, Sunrises, Revision

Santiago thinks of the thing he was born to do . . . 

"If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy," he said aloud. "But since I am not crazy, I do not care. And the rich have radios to talk to them in their boats and to bring them the baseball."

Now is no time to think of baseball, he thought. Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for. There might be a big one around that school, he thought. I picked up only a straggler from the albacore that were feeding. But they are working far out and fast. Everything that shows on the surface today travels very fast and to the north-east. Can that be the time of day? Or is it some sign of weather that I do not know?

He could not see the green of the shore now but only the tops of the blue hills that showed white as though they were snow-capped and the clouds that looked like high snow mountains above them. The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water. The myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep.

The tuna, the fishermen called all the fish of that species tuna and only distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to trade them for baits, were down again. The sun was hot now and the old man felt it on the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down his back as he rowed.

I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well.

The old man was born to fish.  Knows the sea like a book that he's read and reread many times.  I think I was born to write.  It's something that I have to do every day, or else I feel incomplete.  Writing helps me to understand life.  Even the parts that seem to make no sense.

I am sitting on the couch in my living room.  Across the room, the Christmas tree is glowing and blinking.  The furnace is cranking out heat.  My son is sleeping in his bed.  These are things I know.  They are the sentences and punctuations of my life.

Went to see my sister, Rose, in the hospital this evening.  She's still breathing hard.  Her last chest x-ray didn't show much change.  However, the doctor recognizes that she has improved, although, according to my other sister, he said that Rose is going to be very diminished in what she is able to do in her life.  Her sentences and punctuations will never be the same.

Sometimes, when I get to work, I climb the steps to the roof of the library building to see the sunrise.  I did that this morning.  Watched light revise the horizon and clouds  And isn't that what every day is about?  Revisions.  Some of them easy.  Some of them difficult.

Saint Marty sees the red ink on the wall tonight.



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