"The desire for ownership of what will
eventually own you, is a basic human attribute." He told me the first time we
fished next to each other on the same pier.
I met him in Baltimore
two decades ago, on a fishing pier. A man in his 60s who held an unlit
cigar at the corner of his mouth while patiently waiting for fish to take the
frozen shrimp he had
offered
to striped bass.
"They like moving action to strike, and
rarely take the shrimp. But it is most challenging to catch the ones who
do not behave like members of their school. "
And I fished next to him
a few times, as he always sat at the same pillar; used frozen shrimp for bait;
and never lit his cigar.
I saw him catch striped
bass once. He said a few words to the fish I could not hear, and to my
surprise, released it to the waters.
"That is where it belongs" he
shouted to me. "She smiled at me
before going back."
... I read pages from
Waldo Emerson this weekend. As I re-read Hamatreya, the line
“Earth
laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys/ Earth-proud, proud of the earth
which is not theirs”
made me remember the man
on the pier, in Baltimore. He was not boastful. And he taught me that no one
owns the ocean.
The flowers are the
Earth's laughter, according to Emerson. They laugh at us humans when we believe
and claim ownership of the earth, of nature, and all surroundings through which
we live our ephemeral life, and return to the land and sea we thought we owned.
And the man on the pier,
whose name I have long forgotten, thought that the smile of a fish, freed of
the hook in its lip, is the gratitude of the ocean.
He admitted and
celebrated that we are transient. And that nature - rock, dirt or water, will
never be owned by humans.
... Maybe one day,
secretively, he will light his cigar before his passage is being owned by the
ocean, next to a pier, in Baltimore. He will be the human from whose lips the hook of life had been taken off.
And he will be smiling and grateful.
PS/ I wrote these lines
while in the waiting room to meet my new Primary Care physician, in Colorado.
June 17, 2026
© Vahé A. Kazandjian
2026
No comments:
Post a Comment