We Are Turtles
 
In one of my favorite Waterboys songs, chief Waterboy Mike Scott writes, “Grandma, we are Jonah––rolling along in the teeth of the whale.”  I was forcibly reminded of this sentiment yesterday.  I’d taken my boys to a playground called Fortress Park, a space dominated by a host of wooden fort-like climbers, and after we’d tired of chasing each other up the stairs and down the slides, I suggested we take a look in the nearby ravine and see what the local stream had to offer.  To my surprise, both boys immediately assented, and off we went to the woods.
 
The stream had flooded the night before, but it was all parking lot run-off, so the water level was more or less back to normal.  The stream had scoured itself right down to a chute of yellowish clay, and here and there it had dropped fresh fans of alluvial gravel––probably all from shopping center flower beds.  My boys proceeded to start digging.  To their credit, they asked permission.  I gave it, saying, “Please don’t get any muddier than you have to.”
 
Most parents, it seems to me, get upset when their children get muddy.  I don’t understand this.  I don’t like getting my car muddy (the inside), and I don’t want mud all over the house, but let’s face it, the world is often muddy.  I watched a little boy get carted away from a playground not long ago by his irate mother, as she scolded him for the condition of his clothes, his arms, his hands.  But the playground was muddy that day!  It had only just finished raining that morning.  And who brought the child to the playground in the first place?  The mother.  My boys and I watched mother and child retreat with sadness and surprise.  We were the only other people at Vann Park that day, and the now-disappearing boy was a good potential playmate.  But no.  He was in the hands of a parent whose relationship to the world she’s living in is marked by antipathy and an over-reliance on soap.
 
Anyway.  The stream.  The boys, digging.  Me, hovering above on the bank, just thinking, watching the early-season flies and bees and taking note that not a single mosquito had buzzed my ears.
 
Then I spotted something moving in the water.  Moving upstream.  Roundish, bumpy, not very swift or winsome––definitely not a fish.  A-ha!  A turtle.  Better yet, a baby turtle.  Better still, a baby snapping turtle, just about the only kind of snapper worth handling and showing off to children.
 
I jumped down the bank, got hold of the little guy’s shell, and then adjusted my grip.  Just in case, even with a snapper the size of a silver dollar, it’s best to hold the tail.  Those necks are long, and I’m sure he could have given me a powerful nip had he taken the notion.  He didn’t.  He suffered our attentions, and eventually we let him go.  (Too small for soup.)  As my four-year-old swung the little fellow back into the current, I realized we’d put him in the wrong spot: the current here was stronger, and before the turtle could get oriented, he’d turned sideways to the streambed and was promptly rolled head over heels over shell, bump-bump-bump, off and away and into deeper water.  The last I saw of that turtle, he’d been swept under a clump of undercut roots, his head still bursting with questions about what had caught him, why he’d been spared, and how on earth was he ever to get back upstream if Giant Forces kept knocking him off course?
 
Grandma, we are turtles––rolling along in a current quite beyond our ken...
 
Back we went to the playground.  We played a chase game in which I was a spider and my boys were flies.  Both kids took to yelling “Help!” whenever I tagged them––this was basically freeze tag––and after a minute, I admonished my younger son and asked him to holler just about anything else.  He obliged immediately and, apparently inspired by a certain farmer who had a dog, started screaming “Hell!  Hell!” instead.
 
I buried my face in my hands.
 
My latest published story “Robbie’s Zona Cero,” will appear in Escape Clause sometime this summer, hopefully in July.  For extra fun, this Canadian anthology will also make the story available via your iPhone for just ninety-nine cents.  I’ll post the URL when it all comes together, and I trust all of my loyal readers––or at least my loyal relatives––will be rushing to download the story.
 
Nightjars went well.  The second-half scene between Robin and Fareed (with an assist from the piano of Erik Satie) was so well played that I can now die happily, having at last seen something of mine that became truly magical on-stage.  For that sublime experience, I thank cast, crew and director.  And the audience, of course, for letting me know what worked.  See my last blog entry for a link.
 
remains available, so check it out, together with its attendant R-rated story, “Karen Addy’s Cat Flap.”
 
And after several years of quiet prodding and artistic auditioning, I have at last garnered the opportunity to write for Evansville’s own Tales & Scales.  If you don’t know what a Musicteller is, check out their website at http://talesandscales.org/.  I should probably check it out, too!  I have a lot––as always––to learn.
 
‘Til next time!
 
 
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Friday, May 15, 2009