I Want to Be Left Behind
(Page 4 of 4)
May - June 2008
by Brenda Peterson, from Orion
As if in answer to our longing, a glossy head popped up in the waves. The seal pirouetted to find her pup on the beach. George and I sat absolutely still, hardly breathing. A soft cooing call. The pup fairly leapt up, flippers unfurling like wings, then an undulant body-hop along beach stones as the pup inched toward the surf.
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“Ah, you’re safe now, buddy,” George sighed as the pup slipped into the water. There was tranquility in George’s face, a sweet calm that comes from sitting on the beach all day with nothing to do but watch over a fellow creature. From our driftwood seat, we saw the two seals dive and disappear. Nearby, comic black-and-white harlequin ducks popped up in the waves. Even though our seal sitting was over, we didn’t move.
The driftwood creaked slightly under our weight. It was a madrona log, its soft ruby bark peeling from years lost at sea. I surprised myself by going back to the subject I had worked to avoid. “What if we’re sitting here to make sure that there will be something left for our kids?” I asked.
He seemed to ponder this for a while. “You’re a really good neighbor, George,” I said. “We would all miss you so much if you zipped up to heaven. We’d all say, ‘Well, there goes the neighborhood!’ ”
George took the compliment in stride.
“I’ll miss you,” he admitted, “and . . . and all this, too.”
“You know, George,” I said softly, “I really want to be left behind.”
My neighbor looked at me thoughtfully and then fell quiet as we watched another harlequin float past, bright beak dripping a tiny fish. Happy, so happy in this moment. Wave after wave lapped our beach, and the spring sun glowed on our faces. We sat silently, listening to waves more ancient than our young, hasty species, more forgiving than our religions, more enduring. Rapture.
Brenda Peterson (www.literati.net/Peterson) is a novelist and nature writer. This essay appears in her forthcoming memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: My Rapture Here on Earth. Excerpted from Orion(Jan.-Feb. 2008). Subscriptions: $40/yr. (6 issues) from Box 469090, Escondido, CA 92046; www.orionmagazine.org.
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