How To Paint Water

 How To Paint Water

You can’t do it.  The paint will not stick to the water no matter how much you may try.  You can try to use paint on some other surface, like canvas, to look like water. Of course, that is what I mean.  I remember my confusion with many things the teachers, the adults, would say when I was a child.  Such as, “Everyone, draw a tree.”  Nonsense.  

“You can’t draw a tree,” I would think.  “I can try to draw a picture of a tree.”

And quite naturally I would draw a lollipop, a green lollipop, like every other kid in the class.  Which seemed like proof to me that nobody could draw a tree.  I wasn’t a grammar fanatic, or anything. In fact, even now I use a kind of shotgun approach to grammar.

If I can read it out loud and it sounds right, then it is grammatically correct.  I mean, gotta be, right?  When you read out loud to other people, all the stupid pops up immediately.  Thinking, “Huh?  That can’t be right.”  

My mother said, a lot, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”  What!!!  “Cut off my nose!!! “, that’s what a child hears.  And, “What does my face have against my nose.  My nose is on my face. (Isn’t it?). Years later I learned how to use a dictionary and looked up “spite”.  Oh, I get it now.  It’s like, “Shooting yourself in the foot.”  

Which to my mind at the time meant, “Ah crap, then I would need new shoes.”  Shoe buying in my day was a totally unfun experience for a child.  They always had to to be fitted by a shoe salesman.  A man.  Wearing a stiff shirt and what I thought were the ugliest shoes in the store.  He always seemed to have dandruff too.  

Everything about these guys just shouted, “I actually know nothing about shoes and children are alien beings to me.”  They would clamp your foot onto this really cold metal device and move a thingy up to the outcropping just behind your big toe.  He would read off a number. And my mother would add a half for room to grow.  Which meant I would be flopping down the school hall like a short clown for six months.  Trying not to trip on the extra room to grow.  

And you got the dandruffy saleman’s services thrown in free.

I was fifteen before I put a stop to that.  I told her, “I’m gonna get my new shoes myself!” We almost got a “mother/son divorce” over that.  I was gonna run away from home before I went to the Jr. Prom in floppy shoes.  

It was also a time when there was a communist behind every tree (whether you had drawn it or otherwise).  Which meant being able to run fast in floppy shoes wasn’t gonna work.  “Moms”, what are ya gonna do?

Guns  were also serious business then and shooting was mostly in movies and involved with, like, wars. In my family wasting a bullet on your own foot seemed stupid because you can’t eat your foot.  Ah, the days of yore … 

Today I don’t leave the house without my cell phone.

“The what?”

Sparkling Water

Clear, sparkling clear water.  And the thousands of tiny spheres rise from the bottom of the glass.  Crystal clear bubbles rising through crystal water in a crystal clear antique goblet.  These are memories of a life well lived, or mostly well lived.  Nobody’s perfect.

Appearing out of, seemingly, nowhere, the bubbling memories seek the surface.  An old man sits in a common coffee shop and the memories keep rising from his life as a young boy, through a war he knew as a young man and he cannot seem to shake.  

Jumbling, bumping, crashing into and joining other tiny spheres.  They never seem to stop.  Popping at the surface and becoming the air he breathes. Life is so long, he thinks.  When, if ever, will the memories fade.  When, if ever, will the goblet become still water; unconfounded by trapped gas.  So very long have memories clouded his thoughts.

His first true love, overwhelming his soul, locking up his heart.  His first two babies sealing that lock. Welding tight the hasp. And then the explosion. The bullet shot exploding that lock, the door behind and leaving all that was inside covered in shrapnel.  The high definition memory shock of crawling out through the ruins of that doorway.

Bubbles, thousands of bubbles rising through the source of life that is water.  He, waiting for enough of those bubbles to pass into the air above to take the bite out of the remaining liquid enough to take the first sip.  

And the first sip returns his mind to what and where he is now as an antique himself.  His price at auction would serve a provenance of three quarters of a century.  Turn him over and look for the artist’s signature.  An angel arrived, without sirens or flashing lights, but quietly of a warm evening.  Standing under his front porch light, throwing off a glow of her own. And he was saved, his children were saved.

That glow has not dimmed over the nearly half century since.  And casting a new effervescence of thousands and thousands more bubbles.  Tiny miracles one to one to two to two and compounding without an ending.