As we walked along the sidewalk, Dad paused and pointed upward. All I saw in the sky was the contrail of a jet.
“Look…it flies!”
“Haven’t you seen them before?” my brother asked archly.
“Heck, I’ve even been in them - but isn’t it a wonderful thing? It’s good to appreciate it.”
That was very typical of Dad. He was always going off on something and demanding that we notice how wonderful it was. One time, he’d picked up a rock off the ground and said, “See how there are pale bits in this gray rock? They’re fragments of older rock that’s been recycled into new rock. And look at the pale bits.”
He pointed at the largest of the pale chunks. It had little flecks of something shiny in it.
“This planet is old,” he said emphatically. “The rocks cry out, ‘Ancient I am! Ancient of days!’”
He’d tossed that rock aside, but I had picked it up. It was a pretty cool rock, after all.
As his hand dropped from pointing out the airplane, I looked at the sky a bit longer, seeing the tree branches and the telephone wires. I remembered a walk we had taken when I was three or four. He’d pointed out different things and told me what lived there: trolls lived in street drains, tiny four-eyed people lived under potted cactus…cats rode bicycles on telephone wires. That last one had stuck in my mind, and I seldom looked at telephone wires without picturing cats on little bicycles racing along telephone wires.
Dad put a strong emphasis on seeing wonderful things in life - and on making them up. I didn’t think that was contradictory of him.
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Don't just look -- LOOK."
No comments:
Post a Comment