Once upon a time.

Perspective makes fools of us all, she thought, nudging Rupert with a foot.  That elusive, diminishing horizon point narrowing the grains of the planks, replacing the illusion of distance with the illusion of height.  

As a girl she'd thought she saw the world clearly with those shiny new eyes of hers. She'd trusted her sight with her heart and her soul. Now she sat, wisdom if not patience incarnate, contemplating trust and the melting of trust, the bitter lessons and the sweet.

Rupert's cold metabolism warmed audibly in the direct sunlight, the creaking and bubblings of a paused fermentation drowning the plash of waves under the dock. The organic sound bringing perspective back to her like a short echo: hunger now outstripping yesterday's meal.

Rupert would require a little something sooner rather than later.

For a moment she was lost in the little somethings available to them: a soupçon, a soup-spoon, a garçon, a –– Good lord, what a racket! ––  of what? Maybe cold green beans or a dab of gravy and a chicken leg.

​Well let's hope that'll hold him, she thought, big boy like Rupert had an appetite, no matter how you look at him.
​


. 

"Solitary and wary, Spawn emerges slowly from her summer den. She occupies the apex of sailing predators, but caution can be seen in every move as her protective coverings fall away. It has been a long six months of shelter away from daylight and water.

"Once she is in the open, Spawn must quickly make her way into the sea. The accoutrements of speed are complex yet remarkably delicate, and each outing she makes entails a frenzy of preparation and grooming activity.

"A single forgotten shackle or mis-run halyard can mean the difference between success and failure as she embarks in one of her highly anticipated adventures.

"Making the ungainly transition from land to water, she begins to bob and sidle with imatience. Having gained her preferred element, her purpose in the world becomes clear. She will sail, and quickly."





Of course someone has already coopted Sir David's style to narrate their part of the natural world; still, thank you!

So for those sweet readers who tell me they enjoy this sort of thing, here are a couple of links to the Flying Scot webpage.

I've been doing an occasional column about boat names there for my Bar Harbor buddy Ned Johnston (Hi Ned!), who edits the class newsletter.

"Sing a Song of Sixpence" Page 18 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_4.pdf

​"From Another Shore" page 16 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_3_web.pdf

"THAT Name" page 12 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_2.pdf

"What's in a Name" tag 11 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_1.pdf

I moved to Florida after a quarter century of blizzards and farm animals and bumblebees. Ah, never will I forget my first enormous cockroach –– when it flew at my head. The size of a Medjool date with wings and a heft like a badminton shuttlecock. 

And fireants and that steep steep learning curve about the volume of  living creatures armed to the tropical teeth with venom!  Never even mind the gators, crocs, and invasive serpents. Black ice? No, black widow.  Rabid skunk? No, rabid drivers, smouldering muck fires, New Year's Eve gunplay.  

Anyhow, the charms outweigh the hazards most of the time. For instance, the lowly gecko –– also a transplanted resident –– with her suction cup fingers and translucent belly, who appears on my bathroom sink to remind me of the old proverb:

A cat may look at a king. 

Sure, there's a reason for labels like this.

But duh.

Which brings me to this summer's cheerful little ditty with the refrain "duh."

Some warming-up exercises from my writing day.

Imagination is like the common cold virus: it's always there, lurking, waiting for the chance to nip in and take the wheel. There's no sure cure, though you can treat the symptoms. Medical advice says let it run its course. 

Today's fiction prompt: a photo I took on a fishing trip to Wyoming.

Rudolph was no fiberglass elk, bugling soundlessly on the street of Thermopolis.
He was neither the victim of a fierce electrical taping nor did he lose an ear during a wrestling match with a drunk guy.
He did not lift his rack of fiberglass antlers into the wide Wyoming sky in an effort to voice his pain.
He did not wear a saddle-pad of twinkling holiday lights. 
He did not sport a compact fluorescent bulb painted red at the distal point of his noggin.

They might have let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, but little matter.
Was he like Bartleby before him, preferring not?
Or like Robert Cratchit, beetling away for the chance of a day's liberty?
Or Balthazar, with the insight to know what lay ahead?
Or maybe, inert as can be, he is like the Yule log, waiting for the dark to yield to light and then celebrate another year beginning.

​Hope your season is bright. 

Life is not the only thing out there imitating art.

​Evidently Nature's in on it too. 

According to Edgar Degas, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."  And for that I might as well go ahead and apologize.  

I was thinking about the Alexander Pope quote, which was –– I thought –– Art is but Nature to advantage dressed.  Or, in this case, not dressed. I meant to rift extensively on part about being undressed. Low humor, sure, and possibly dragging in the topic of saggy pants.

But when I checked the quotation (From his Essay on Criticism, which is in strictest truth a poem), Pope actually wrote:
"True wit is Nature to Advantage drest,/What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,/Something, whose Truth convince'd at Sight we find,/That gives us back the Image of our Mind."

Oh Alexander Pope, you navel-gazing noodler. 

Trachinotis carolinas. Characterized by small silvery scales, forked tail, related to Jack-fish but highly valued for eating. ​

A Fishing Story –– Version 1
Caught me a biggun.  Though he had me whupped, but I turned the tables on his bipedal ass. Bootless meet toothless. How do you like them airless apples? Huh?  Swim like a fish much?

All he had to do was let go, but it's greed what catches em, every time.  Sparkle sparkle! Just let go and get back to your spot, but no. Gotta cling. Dunno why it's called landing when you reel one in. Land's the one thing they ain't much of in that situation, if you know what I mean. I figure he'll eat pretty good, give him a few days.


A Fishing Story –– Version 2
A short list of ways I've avoided writing today:  rearranged the fiction bookshelf, cleaned my stainless water bottle with bleach, followed by cleaning the bottle-brush. With bleach. Made a few calls. Perused Writer's Digest. Bootlessly researched a specific twitter from a specific Twit. Cleaned the keyboard with rubbing alcohol and q-tips. Listened to samples of Billie Martin's songs on iTunes.  Decided listing my excuses was nearly as good as writing anything. Words are words when you are trying for a daily word-count.

A Fishing Story – Version 3 
Swimming, swimming, swimming, biting at a shrimp.
Shrimp has sharp –– ow!
And damn! What the hell?
Swimming swimming, vaulting into air.
Tractor beam or something yanking.
Don't beam me up.
Swimming, running from the grasp.
Caught.

"Chrysanthemum" comes from the Greek for "gold" and "flower."  

You know these flowers: big tidy pots of blooms that last for ages. They show up for sale in the front of high-end grocery stores and at the big hardware warehouse stores. Mums, as we call them in English. Mums at Halloween, autumn colors for Thanksgiving. In Australia, mums are the traditional flower for Mother's day. 

In China, they are the symbol of autumn and purity. The chrysanthemum is the official flower of Chicago. Who knew? 

In India, a girl wearing chrysanthemums in her hair is said to bring happiness to her family. And in Japan, they represent longevity. The royal family sits on the chrysanthemum throne. But also –– so I understand after reading one of the Sano Ichiru mysteries by Laura Joh Rowland –– it's a symbol of homosexuality in samurai times. Yeah, don't think about it.

But in France, they are the flower for tombstones. People put them in the graveyard on All Saints.

For years, I have mistakenly believed that Charles Baudelaire's famous book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal –– a chunk of which I translated in college, for pity's sake –– was both "the flowers of evil" (a metaphor) and also an actual flower: chrysanthemums.

Whenever I saw the cheerful round faces of chrysanthemums, my busy brain would supply the subtitle, "Les fleurs du mal!"

But nope. Baudelaire anyhow wasn't referencing these particular flowers in his poems about the pursuit of novelty and erotic decadence. 

How odd: such an infinitesimal and utterly trivial prejudice against an innocent flower, but I have held it for decades. Of course, it's worth remembering that one might also translate the title of that book (which I don't recommend, btw, as fun reading) as "the flowers from evil, or from suffering."  Or something.

Anyhow. They are long-suffering and colorful blossoms, no matter what I've mistakenly held against them.