If you are lucky, you will occasionally be in conversation with a few friends, trading stories as the topics change with random deliberation, like leaves in a stream, gently bumping each other as they spin slowly downstream. The afternoon stretches long before you. Perhaps there is a chuckle here and there, and the clink of a wine glass ringing like a bright piano note.

We are there now.

And once in a while a story will arise wherein you delight in the telling seemingly out of proportion to the importance.  It just happens to be a tickle when you tell it, a little firefly in the big clear bottle of your life. 

Here is how I built that swing:

I had a really big, beautiful house once and two small, wonderful children.  I surveyed my yard to build them a swing.  I love this kind of project and was intrigued that the only really good big strong branch was not only nicely centered in my large yard but was also amazingly high.  I’m certain that most people would say “Yeah, -no.”  But man, I could imagine how long that pendulum would swing, and I had had such a wild outdoor life as a child that I really wanted to make this happen for my own two children―who were at the perfect fearless little ages.  The high branch was way out of any kind of ladder reach, and so I tried throwing a stone tied to a very light (feeder) line over the appropriate branch intersection to get things started but, to my surprise, it was out of reach of my throwing even though the line weight was negligible.  And I could still throw a baseball pretty goddamned far. I kept trying and almost threw my shoulder out.  A couple of days later, I was driving home from work mulling it over when the solution hit me:  I could cast a mackerel-jig over the top of the branch with one of my nice surf-casting fishing rods!  It was an awesome light-bulb moment, and I was deadly with that rod by dint of my being a born and raised Gloucester Fisherman. Ever since I was a young kid, when word got out early summer that the mackerel were hitting just offshore in Gloucester, a fishing rod was my weapon and I was on duty.  I had several friends who were similarly enlisted.  We’d walk or take our bikes to the piers or the beaches and we’d fish, and it was amazing high excitement. 

I should tell you what I mean about this.  (I told you that these leaves spin slowly.)

With a medium weight rod with an open face spinning reel, and 10-15lb test line, one can cast (toss/throw) a mackerel jig a great distance.  Across  a supermarket parking lot.  And one can do so with surprising accuracy.  But first, a jig is an elongated shiny metal weight, maybe three inches long-with a hook out the end-weighing 1-1/2 oz. It is cast, and then reeled rapidly, and jerkingly, back in through the water a few feet below the surface.  The action mimics a small, and perhaps wounded, baitfish to a mackerel.  It is fun to cast, reel back in, and hope for that great strike from the fish, a fish that gives a quick vicious fight, zigzagging wonderfully, until you bring him onto the pier. It will be flapping and flipping wildly like an outrageously artistic little torpedo―rocking a gorgeous blue-green neon zebra sheen.

Back to the swing.  So now I get home, grab my fishing rod and I’m in the backyard, still in my Army uniform, looking up at the tree.  I rear back and whip the rod, firing the jig skywards; it shot up and over the optimal branch intersection, and, letting the line run free, I watched the jig lose its arc and fall all the way back down to my shoulder height.  I attached a heavier line and fed it over, then a professional static-line climbing rope.  Voila!  I’d gotten it first shot, and that’s probably half the reason I love telling this story. 

Then I built the greatest swing!  It was a thick wide plank with a wooden stabilizer bar above and some fancy Mountain Warfare School ropework to make it a safe or, as we say in the ropework world, ‘bombproof’ swing that could fit both kids sitting beside each other on it.  And, that thing swung across the yard in such a giant pendulum swing that it would make kids scream― and want to immediately do it again. 

I’d pull it all the way back with one or two of ‘em loaded in it and run forward pushing it all the way until my arms were pushing as high as they could reach over my head and I’d release the swing and get way out of the way. It would pendulum across the whole yard in such huge swoops and the fun would begin. Eventually, all kinds of swing tricks and goofing around were tried and the children were instrumental in the inventions: the huge circle push that always crashed through a certain bush as part of its loop, the super-twisty ride, the standing full up and pumping old favorite, the laying on the plank-stomach or back, the jumping off into our little plastic pool dare, the riding double. Through our friends and their families, it became a neighborhood carnival ride. All the while, our dog was chasing them back and forth. All the while, the children were laughing and screaming.

All the while, the children were flying.

I sold the house in 2016, and I drove by in 2021 and the swing was still there, looking operational.

So that’s the swing story.

In retrospect, I guess those were the Halcyon Days for me, playing with my children on that swing.  Maybe grilling hamburgers or steak afterwards, as the warm summer light dimmed on a long summer day, the sun handing off to the moon. 

Halcyon Days.  Funny cool phrase.  I learned what it means pretty late in life; it is used to denote a past period that is being remembered for being happy and/or successful.  However, the phrase derives originally from a tale of Greek tragedy wherein it refers to a period of time where storms do not occur.  So, one can think of it with the happiness squarely in the frame, or the lack of unhappiness squarely in the frame. 

Either way, it feels good to remember one’s Halcyon Days.

That’s all. 

(and a mouse)

I was sitting on a beach in Bimini yesterday, alone on the whole beach, and taking in the gorgeous sky of scenery before me.  A brown pelican drifted indifferently into the picture, riding a wide light breeze.  I watched him closely as he inched across my field of vision, left to right, and just offshore.    

He seemed entirely unaware of the comic elegance of his deportment. 

Further, something about him evinced an astonishing disregard for the beauty of the moment: the varied bands of teal painting the ocean, the rhythmic vibration of waves breaking white and fussing upon the long languid stretch of sand, and the gift of lift above it all. Above him, messy tatters of cotton candy whites moved at the slow direction of the wind.

A sudden sharp dive.  As if he’d fallen off a shelf and was himself surprised to be crashing headfirst into the ocean.   

Now he sat, bobbing contentedly in the slow roll, and I could see the weight of a small fish laying in the soft hammock-sag of his gullet. The pelican floated, not yet throwing back his head to swallow, masterfully indifferent even to this event. And, though mere yards from me, his glance at me was as absent as the look a teenager gives when taking your movie ticket.

Conversely, he now had my full attention.

Why wasn’t he eating the fish? Not hungry? After all that plunging spectacle? I wondered if he was Jedi-trained in being satisfied, and appearing bored was just a routine disguise, an exercise in contentment that he’d perfected. Finally, and, I’m telling you, reluctantly, he threw his head back and gobbled the fish. For a moment I saw a flash of silver wink from his long goofy bill.

He lifted and flapped his big brown body off into the fame of this blogpost, and history, with all the clumsy grace of an early flight experiment.      

I pondered his scheme of delay in eating the fish. You know this kind of moment―when I was a teenager, I’d delay getting out of bed on a Saturday morning. After rousing slightly, eyes still closed, you let out a little sigh, stretch deep into the sheets, and push hard into rest while it quietly packs its things and prepares to depart. You are so, so satisfied with the moment, and you want it to last. The pelican appears to live in that moment.

How?

Now, on to the mouse.    

Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse On Turning Up Her Nest With A Plough” gives us the phrase ‘the best laid plans of mice and men’ which speaks to how everything can go to shit suddenly. 

It is first about a farmer (the narrator in the poem) apologizing to a mouse after the farmer wrecked the mouse’s nest accidentally while plowing a field. Since it is almost winter, the farmer knows that the destruction of the mouse’s home is especially calamitous.

The farmer then ‘tells’ the mouse that such things happen in the world of humans too, so that ‘the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’. Hence, we have the iconic phrase.

This is a moment of tender empathy and similarity. It is followed, however, by a dissimilarity:  the farmer finally telling the mouse that, despite both being subject to misfortune, she is lucky, or even ‘blessed’, to be a mouse and not a man, since a mouse lives only in the world of present dangers, while man not only worries in the present but also remembers the grim elements of the past and fears the future. 

Written in 1785, this poem is timeless stuff.

Is there a pelican or a mouse anywhere that is torturing themselves daily with regret over decisions they’ve made in their lives?  Is there a mouse or a pelican anywhere that fears war and all of the consequent humanitarian disaster? 

I guess not.

As far as I know, that pelican thinks yesterday will last forever.  Bathing in sunlight upon a kiwi-fresh breeze, floating in paradise, dropping onto a tasty fish once in awhile, bobbing onto the moment at time’s gentle swell, throwing the odd haughty glance about. 

Meanwhile, I’m on the beach, scribbling down these thoughts, in this same paradise, torturing myself with thoughts of my past, my present life, and the beginnings of World War III, already underway in the Ukraine.

Oh!  To be a pelican in paradise.