Remember the Lake
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to inprovise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." Sylvia Plath
7/28/09 - I pretty much dreamt most of this story up. Was lying in bed thinking, this is a really good idea, I should be writing it down, but I'm really tired and I don't feel like getting up... but somehow I did.
Remember the Lake.
“How many rocks get thrown into lakes each year, total?”
“Just in this country or all over the world?”
“At least 12.”
“How bout 12 million.”
The four men were standing at the edge of a cold lake, on a stony beach. They were all friends, no one was just a friend of a friend, real buddies, the kind that grew up together, and were still at it. The sun was setting but Tim was staring down at a leaf, a fallen fall leaf in the water. It was a dull crimson, mostly, with dark brown spots and the tips were a brighter yellow. Tim watched as the leaf swayed back and forth in it's little pool at the edge of the shore. He felt a bit mesmerized.
Tim broke himself away, “12 million is probably about right.” The others nodded.
“But only for this country,” someone added.
Tim cleared his throat, “How many pennies are flattened in a year by trains?” he asked everyone. “Or what about a pie chart, or no, a graph, yes a line graph. On the vertical axis, the decline in the number of pennies flattened by trains over the last 50 years, and on the horizontal…” Tim trailed off.
“Does anyone put pennies on train tracks anymore?”
“I never did.”
“My older brother used to do it, I think I did it too. A few times.”
“What about cell phone usage, for the horizontal?”
“But we didn't have cell phones 50 years ago, you couldn't have a line graph like that, the line would be cut off.”
“What's something else that we had 50 years ago?”
“All I know is the line on this graph is going straight down.”
“If we find a horizontal it would have to be a slope at least.”
Tim wasn't paying too much attention, the red leaf with gold tips was swimming, or drowning in the lake. He watched as the weak current pushed it up against the rocks, sometimes almost enough to get it over, it looked as if the leaf was trying to beach itself. Tim thought about helping it, like he could save it, just reach down and help it up onto one of the rocks. Then he thought about how pointless that would be, and he might have to try and explain if the others noticed what he did. He stopped looking.
Tim spoke up, “Wonder what the first kid was thinking when he put a penny on the tracks; did he know what would happen?”
“How do you know it was a kid? What if a penny just landed on some tracks by accident and then later some kid finds it.”
“Imagine finding this flattened penny and wondering what it was, you would think some giant must have squeezed it in his giant hands.” They all laughed a bit.
“I bet the first kid that did it thought he had the power of a giant, showed all of his friends, none of them believed him but couldn't figure out what he did,” they all laughed again.
“How do you know who was the first?”
“No doubt there are 100 guys that think they were the first to do it.”
“Or 1000.”
“Simultaneous invention.”
“Just one of those things, it was going to happen, and it did, more then once.”
“Multiple times.”
“Yep.”
“Agriculture was invented at almost the same time independently on 3 completely separate continents by humans that had no way of knowing anything about each other.”
“It's just obvious.”
They all nodded.
“ Edison invented the light bulb in 1879, and so did Joseph Swan, but you don't hear about him, he was British.”
“ Darwin hurried to publish his evolution theories because Alfred Russel Wallace was working on the same thing.”
“I guess Alfred Russel Wallace-ism doesn't sound so impressive.”
Tim went for it. He bent down and pinched the stem of the red leaf with gold tips between his fingers and shook off the water from it, he held it up to the setting sun and it glistened. He looked at its dark silhouette in front of the cool colors of fall sunset. He spun it around slowly, like a model, the sunlight would reflect off the wet bits and highlight it's beauty. It was a centerfold, Tim was sure of it.
Tim stood back up, one of his knees snapped, “Why can't you guys talk about women like normal men?”
“We're married.”
“There isn't anything to say.”
“If there was something to say we wouldn't still be married.”
They all laughed again, they wanted to waste some more time, make it last longer. The wives were near, a car door slammed, and another one opened. There was no mistaking the sound, it was time to go.
Tim was walking along with the rest toward the line of minivans but he stopped in front of last night's fire, with its blackened logs still trying to smoke, he turned around and took a last look at the lake. The sun had gone under, in the light and colors that were left it was hard to see, Tim had to imagine most of it but he didn't mind. Then someone put a large red cooler with a white top in his arms, he took it, and managed to keep his red leaf in-between his pinkie and ring finger, away from the handle and safe. It was still a little wet but it would never swim again.
The leaf would find its way onto a book shelf, inside a book, the biggest one Tim had. It was an old book, and it still smelled like wine, the full wine glass that spilled straight into it at some point in the past; the leaf would live there, incased in so many words for so long. The leaf would dry out and become brittle, but it would still be mostly red with gold tips, and someday it would be found again, rescued, even if it was long after Tim had gone, that memory of the lake could still be remembered. It's just obvious.