FIREFLIES AT

SUNSET

Our friend John, a mailman. Then my wife was a commercial artist working with Sam Smidt Associates in Palo Alto. His pickup truck, its tailgate had become an ad with purple letters edged in red: US Male – sizzling even on a quiet afternoon. Next came the driver's side of my TR-3, an irresistible billboard on wheels.

I would park it by the plate glass window at work. It was a desecration. For a machine meant maybe to raise dust at Laguna Secca, Stirling Moss in the lead, to be bringing a tech writer up with an arm draped over this field of riotous wild flowers was an abomination. Meant to be.

Inside, taped to the side of my desk, was a small sign: not what is not is! What I wrote at that desk also turned out to be unsettling.

Writing operating procedures for workers in wafer fab, I included warnings that seemed necessary. The process is dangerous. Hydroflouric acid, for instance, will cause severe skin burns. In low concentrations, it can seep under fingernails, causing damage to nerves and tissues that is is not immediately noticeable. There were others, such as potassium bromide. I compiled a list of hazard warnings to be inserted where applicable.

I got promoted. My new boss was VP of sales. He sequestered me in an office right next to his. I became coordinator of Sales Promotion Literature, ensuring an end to my creation of manuals for integrated circuit fabrication. And also avoiding outright dismissal for cause, which would entail disclosure of some embarrassing facts.

The game of Tiddlywinks was on.

He was a graduate of Santa Clara University, where he'd learnt, “You are defined by your relations with others.” I think he believed this ethical and moral stricture would keep me in my place. It would justify my new role. I would make forms for customers who wanted to order products or get more information. I would assemble samples of our latest product and mount them in small, clear plastic cases. If pressed hard enough, soon I would flip out into the great void.

“Others?” Come on, I thought, without saying more. Such as, a “person” is a cloud of contenders striving to be on top. And deeper than that is the undivided, undefined Self.

Houdini-like, Whitman managed feats of poetry through sheer, honest bluster, escaping without anyone quite realizing how. A whirlwind of misdirection passed unnoticed in some gentle breeze over his skin, accepted gratefully in remembrance of Proust past. Leaves are desiccated sea weed on land, with flavoring smacked by literate divers. Drag the curtain back for a moment, glimpse the hopeful chemist hydrolizing memories for Chinese sages in packets that induce rapid heartbeat, drowsiness. A sparse diet is best for the mind to avoid becoming jowly. To break the coffle chain is delight. Forget links that follow an echo of tin demons down vacant alleyways. The song of a downspout hesitates at the start of summer showers. It is the tip of a bumblebee's wing.

“Tell you what, cat. From this end of the boat, the wharf had seemed too far. Out of reach. I had been telling this story to the sea gulls when a water heater floated by. Remember that?”

“Speak on, Sahib.”

“And you said, meow! You are so vocal. Who else would have understood?”

Full of what, Sahib?

unKline: The ocean is a solar water heater. Remember gas stoves? Jonathon Livingston Seagull? Flotsam and jetsam now, washed up on shore with the water heater, its bottom rusting out.

Gas stoves, Sahib, were good enough, better than good enough, for making apple pies. Electric stoves lack imagination. One must hear the hiss of gas, the whoomp at being lit, and feel a shower of sparks spiraling up the chimney, and hear the clack of hooves outside in the street. All of this will definitely fit in a life boat. Don't you think?

“You're such a good cat. Having a nap in the afternoon, when it's too hot for anything but siesta, you purr. You are a cat of few words.”

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