When I fell into the Atlantic Ocean, my cell phone came tumbling after. No, I didn't mean to fall into the ocean and, yes, when I did, my cell phone, innocent in my pocket, became a fatality. After hoisting myself from the sea, I tried desperately to get a signal, but the thing was drowned. Many important people would be trying to reach me while I was off in Florida, especially my petsitter, Abbie, who promised to keep me updated about Dog.
I admit this is no small thing as Dog means everything to me. She seems to be the only person who really comprehends. Over hundreds of tries, she has never been able to chase down a squirrel, but remains resigned to her failures, and after nine years of this, Dog and I share a joyful, and might I suggest, an ironic mixture of gusto and futility.
Right there on the beach, I administered mouth to keypad resuscitation. If cell phones had lungs, the little bastard would have heaved back to life, ringtone ablazing. But there it sat in my palm, moist with my spit and lifeless in the hot Florida sun. A beachcomber wandered over and wondered what prize I had claimed now that the tide was heading out. When she saw what I held in my hand, she gave some advice.
She said a friend of hers brought to life his dead cell phone by burying it in a bag of rice. Other people have had positive results, she said, by throwing their doused phones in the freezer for a few hours. So, to cover my bases, I put the phone in a bag of rice and hurled the whole thing in the freezer. But after a few hours, no dice and no spark. The thing had the conductivity of free-flowing mucus.
At first, I had hope. I imagined my phone drying out on the beach, sprawled on a pink wash cloth in the pink sun, lazing away the afternoon beneath a cocktail umbrella. A quick turn on the belly and a thin smear of suntan oil, and Celly would be good as new. But I faced it -- it was ruined, dead as a doornail. I imagined it broiling in a pizza oven by a demon chef. I imagined it as skeet, flung at a shooting range. I imagined it chopped and mixed with alligator feed at the Alligator Farm down the road.
Welcome, Fatso, to Flori-freaking-da! I was forlorn as a flatulence fugue in F minor. I needed to buoy my spirits, to take arms against an Atlantic Ocean of troubles. I would fight back and stem this tide of despair. Hence, I dismissed the purple flags, those official warnings that jellyfish or sharks cruised the shallows, and like a conquistador, I marched into the Matanzas Inlet surf to ride the waves that crashed the beach.
The sea was angry that day, my friends, but my brute courage and a will to tame the hurly burly of life's injustices, with its under toads and its slimy and seductive jellyfish, well, I stayed afloat, my friends. I rode those waves like a locomotive rides the rails! A throng of beach spectators grew in the safe distance there, and hoisted bincoculars and telephoto cameras and pointed their praising fingers at the brave and solitary body surfer aboard the frithy froth. It was good to be alive, my friends. It was good to be alive.
After dreaming the dreams of a pharoah that night, I sat on my Florida veranda with a morning coffee and a chocolate croissant. Birds sang and the sun was shining. I opened up the Palm Coast Herald and there, plastered across the front page was a long-distanced picture of a northern being, splayed headlong in the foam. Atop the picture hung the day's sunny headline: "Rare Albino Manatee Sighted off Matanzas Inlet."
I spewed latte right onto the sports section. All right, so I could lose a few pounds.
The article went on to say: "It appeared the animal was in distress as it kept hurling itself to no avail against the breakers." And after viewing several photographs of the event, the article noted, one marine biologist speculated that the albino was a cow, determined to join its calves further offshore, driven by her instinct to suckle them.
I pushed the chocolate croissant away.
The only other time I ever had my picture in a newspaper was when I was 12, when I won a blue ribbon at the Tippecanoe County Fair in Lafayette, Indiana, for a prize rooster I raised. That chicken, whose name was Stanley, by the way, hated my guts and I hated his. Stanley's life mission was to pepper my epidermus with beak holes, and I have the scars to prove it; scars, it would seem, that resemble propeller wounds on a manatee's hide!
Oh, my friends, how my soul was massacred that morning by the Palm Coast Herald. Strange coincidence about that place: "matanzas" is Spanish for massacre, and the Matanzas Inlet gets its name from the massacre that occurred there in 1565. To gain religious freedom, hundreds of French Protestants had tried to settle that country south of St. Augustine, but King Phillip of Spain, the first interloper, would have none of it. A Spanish captain sailed to Florida with orders to uproot and murder the French, non-Catholic infidels, and when 200 of them were captured on the inlet beach, their executions were certain. But then, the history goes, the murders were halted by a kindly attendant priest who requested that the Catholics among the French be spared. Unfortunately, only 12 of the 200 pledged an allegiance to the Pope while some 188 maintained their theological integrity and were summarily slaughtered like chickens.
Now, if I had been one of those French Lutherans, lo those centuries ago, and I had been interrogated by a Spaniard who held a sword to my throat, I imagine I suddenly would have been inclined to speak very highly of Catholics. "Senor," I might have said. "I have always been an admirer of Catholics, and especially of your Catholic hats. Might I try one on?" At least I would have had a shot to live out the rest of my life as a slave, probably shucking oyster shells and killing rattlesnakes.
From my veranda, I heard a faint tinkle. At first, I discerned it to be a phantom sound wrought by abject humiliation. But it was distinctive, and I scanned the patio for a wind chime. The sound, though, eminated from within, so perhaps the toilet was running. I went inside to the kitchen. Slightly louder now, I could hear the ringing from the refrigerator.
Aha! I swung open the freezer door, pulled out the bag of rice, and dug from the frozen grain my cell phone, gasping out a sputtering and pathetic ringtone to "Let's Dance".
It was Abbie, my petsitter, and she wanted to tell me all about what happened with Dog. First, how was my vacation going, well, that's good to hear, and well, she and Dog visited her cousin Francine out on her farm in Antrim County, and as soon as Dog's paws hit the ground, Dog tore out for a chicken, and then Francine's rooster went berserk and attacked Dog, and Dog became totally bewildered and traumatized and turned around and ran back to the car and wouldn't come out again, no matter what. Dog just cowered in the back seat, but she was okay, just very upset. That rooster, holy shit, Abbie had never seen anything like it. Abbie offered to send me a picture of the rooster on her cell phone if I wanted.
Spring break be damned, I headed back to Michigan that afternoon. Dog would be glad to see me, and we could compare notes about a rooster or two. And funny, on the night I stopped over in Kentucky, I dreamed for hours about mermaids. Silent and serene mermaids.
Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com
I admit this is no small thing as Dog means everything to me. She seems to be the only person who really comprehends. Over hundreds of tries, she has never been able to chase down a squirrel, but remains resigned to her failures, and after nine years of this, Dog and I share a joyful, and might I suggest, an ironic mixture of gusto and futility.
Right there on the beach, I administered mouth to keypad resuscitation. If cell phones had lungs, the little bastard would have heaved back to life, ringtone ablazing. But there it sat in my palm, moist with my spit and lifeless in the hot Florida sun. A beachcomber wandered over and wondered what prize I had claimed now that the tide was heading out. When she saw what I held in my hand, she gave some advice.
She said a friend of hers brought to life his dead cell phone by burying it in a bag of rice. Other people have had positive results, she said, by throwing their doused phones in the freezer for a few hours. So, to cover my bases, I put the phone in a bag of rice and hurled the whole thing in the freezer. But after a few hours, no dice and no spark. The thing had the conductivity of free-flowing mucus.
At first, I had hope. I imagined my phone drying out on the beach, sprawled on a pink wash cloth in the pink sun, lazing away the afternoon beneath a cocktail umbrella. A quick turn on the belly and a thin smear of suntan oil, and Celly would be good as new. But I faced it -- it was ruined, dead as a doornail. I imagined it broiling in a pizza oven by a demon chef. I imagined it as skeet, flung at a shooting range. I imagined it chopped and mixed with alligator feed at the Alligator Farm down the road.
Welcome, Fatso, to Flori-freaking-da! I was forlorn as a flatulence fugue in F minor. I needed to buoy my spirits, to take arms against an Atlantic Ocean of troubles. I would fight back and stem this tide of despair. Hence, I dismissed the purple flags, those official warnings that jellyfish or sharks cruised the shallows, and like a conquistador, I marched into the Matanzas Inlet surf to ride the waves that crashed the beach.
The sea was angry that day, my friends, but my brute courage and a will to tame the hurly burly of life's injustices, with its under toads and its slimy and seductive jellyfish, well, I stayed afloat, my friends. I rode those waves like a locomotive rides the rails! A throng of beach spectators grew in the safe distance there, and hoisted bincoculars and telephoto cameras and pointed their praising fingers at the brave and solitary body surfer aboard the frithy froth. It was good to be alive, my friends. It was good to be alive.
After dreaming the dreams of a pharoah that night, I sat on my Florida veranda with a morning coffee and a chocolate croissant. Birds sang and the sun was shining. I opened up the Palm Coast Herald and there, plastered across the front page was a long-distanced picture of a northern being, splayed headlong in the foam. Atop the picture hung the day's sunny headline: "Rare Albino Manatee Sighted off Matanzas Inlet."
I spewed latte right onto the sports section. All right, so I could lose a few pounds.
The article went on to say: "It appeared the animal was in distress as it kept hurling itself to no avail against the breakers." And after viewing several photographs of the event, the article noted, one marine biologist speculated that the albino was a cow, determined to join its calves further offshore, driven by her instinct to suckle them.
I pushed the chocolate croissant away.
The only other time I ever had my picture in a newspaper was when I was 12, when I won a blue ribbon at the Tippecanoe County Fair in Lafayette, Indiana, for a prize rooster I raised. That chicken, whose name was Stanley, by the way, hated my guts and I hated his. Stanley's life mission was to pepper my epidermus with beak holes, and I have the scars to prove it; scars, it would seem, that resemble propeller wounds on a manatee's hide!
Oh, my friends, how my soul was massacred that morning by the Palm Coast Herald. Strange coincidence about that place: "matanzas" is Spanish for massacre, and the Matanzas Inlet gets its name from the massacre that occurred there in 1565. To gain religious freedom, hundreds of French Protestants had tried to settle that country south of St. Augustine, but King Phillip of Spain, the first interloper, would have none of it. A Spanish captain sailed to Florida with orders to uproot and murder the French, non-Catholic infidels, and when 200 of them were captured on the inlet beach, their executions were certain. But then, the history goes, the murders were halted by a kindly attendant priest who requested that the Catholics among the French be spared. Unfortunately, only 12 of the 200 pledged an allegiance to the Pope while some 188 maintained their theological integrity and were summarily slaughtered like chickens.
Now, if I had been one of those French Lutherans, lo those centuries ago, and I had been interrogated by a Spaniard who held a sword to my throat, I imagine I suddenly would have been inclined to speak very highly of Catholics. "Senor," I might have said. "I have always been an admirer of Catholics, and especially of your Catholic hats. Might I try one on?" At least I would have had a shot to live out the rest of my life as a slave, probably shucking oyster shells and killing rattlesnakes.
From my veranda, I heard a faint tinkle. At first, I discerned it to be a phantom sound wrought by abject humiliation. But it was distinctive, and I scanned the patio for a wind chime. The sound, though, eminated from within, so perhaps the toilet was running. I went inside to the kitchen. Slightly louder now, I could hear the ringing from the refrigerator.
Aha! I swung open the freezer door, pulled out the bag of rice, and dug from the frozen grain my cell phone, gasping out a sputtering and pathetic ringtone to "Let's Dance".
It was Abbie, my petsitter, and she wanted to tell me all about what happened with Dog. First, how was my vacation going, well, that's good to hear, and well, she and Dog visited her cousin Francine out on her farm in Antrim County, and as soon as Dog's paws hit the ground, Dog tore out for a chicken, and then Francine's rooster went berserk and attacked Dog, and Dog became totally bewildered and traumatized and turned around and ran back to the car and wouldn't come out again, no matter what. Dog just cowered in the back seat, but she was okay, just very upset. That rooster, holy shit, Abbie had never seen anything like it. Abbie offered to send me a picture of the rooster on her cell phone if I wanted.
Spring break be damned, I headed back to Michigan that afternoon. Dog would be glad to see me, and we could compare notes about a rooster or two. And funny, on the night I stopped over in Kentucky, I dreamed for hours about mermaids. Silent and serene mermaids.
Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com
