Perhaps you watched the 2008 All-Star Game last week, or at least the first six or seven hours of it. And if you did, then maybe also heard Fox Sports analyst Tim McCarver call Ichiro Suzuki the best right fielder he’s seen since Roberto Clemente.
It was bound to happen some day, but its inevitability makes it no less tragic. A woman who says she was hurt when a small metal clip securing a decorative rhinestone heart flew off her powder-blue thong and hit her in the eye has sued Victoria’s Secret, purveyor’s of women’s lingerie. Macrida Patterson, a 52-year old Los Angeles traffic officer with no prior record of underwear incidents, tells the tragic story in her own words: “I was putting on my underwear and the metal popped in my eye. It happened really quickly. I was in excruciating pain. I screamed.”
Emotions were running high and the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife at the staging area of the Bainbridge Annual Grande Olde Fourthe of Julye Parade last Fridaye afternoone. Anxious paraders milled about anxiously and anxiously glanced at their watches, all waiting anxiously for the parade to begin. One sign of the rampant pre-parade nervousness was the long line outside the two staging area Porta Potties located on the corner of Madison and Wallace Way. The line outside these Porta Potties was among the longest I saw all day, second perhaps only to the line in front of the booth offering free Obama stickers and the queue in front of the American Marine Bank ATM on Winslow Way.
I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea – except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.
This just in: scientists say the earth is humming. Not humming the chorus to “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” exactly, nor belting out Broadway show tunes, but rather emitting random clutches of notes and tiny clusters of chords woven into a mysterious, ethereal, rhythmic thrum of primordial noise so low and deep that it is imperceptible to human ears, so low that it can only be picked up by sophisticated geothermal listening devices, African elephants wallowing in the fetid lowlands of the Kenyan rain forest, and ancient blue whales diving for albino plankton in the silent inky depths of the Mariana Trench.
How long of a line do you suppose you could draw with one ordinary pencil? A mile? Ten miles? Thirty-seven miles?
(The following is adapted from remarks made last week at “Reading Leading,” an event held by the Bainbridge Schools Foundation to celebrate island authors and benefit school district reading programs. I omitted the part where I pointed out that a copy of “Skeletons from Our Closet” would make an excellent Father’s Day or graduation present. And to the very gracious staff at Wing Point where the event was held, I apologize again and want to reiterate that I have no idea how all that silverware got into my briefcase.)
I did a Google search on the word “heaven” and came up with 196 million hits, which seems like a lot of information about a place that (a) none of us has actually been to; and (b) may not even exist.
