Moment With A Pelican

(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.