JANUARY 10, 2022 – Once upon a time a long, long time ago, as a very young kid I stood next to my grandparents on a marina pier in Old Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut River. I remember watching two guys in a dinghy loaded with enough food and supplies to last a year, I figured. While one guy pulled on the stubby oars, the other guy kept stuff from going overboard. I watched until they reached their big sailboat moored beyond the pier. The goods in the dinghy were so numerous, diverse, and tightly packed, they blended unrecognizably—except, I remember clearly, a soft loaf of Taystee bread teetering atop the load.
For reasons I can’t explain, periodically I still recall that scene and wonder—who were those sailors? Where were they headed? What became of them in the years that followed?
Saturday evening I watched a Nova program about the Big Bang. It was “old news,” of course, but that didn’t diminish its timeless “shock and awe.” We’re not even a speck on a speck . . . ad infinitum, yet a set of human brains within our collective “speck,” leveraged to the hilt by computer power, have blazed a trail of knowledge all the way to a zeptosecond shy of The Beginning.
While listening to astrophysicist-geeks talk like kids in a candy shop, I thought of that scene in Old Saybrook at the dawn of time. I wondered anew about the “whence” and “where to” of those sailors. I soon realized, however, that it wasn’t at the dawn of time. It was now. But, now, I’m in the dinghy, I’m rowing toward the sailboat, I’m heading out to sea. And atop my pile of “stuff” lies a loaf of Taystee bread, listing precariously.
As images of nebulae and white dwarfs in Nova filled the screen, my thoughts washed between my “dinghy” and my “destination”—the ill-defined ether between sea and sky. I began to think of all the things I need to attend to before I put to sea and keep attending to while the vessel is underway. Mundane things. Important things. Things that are featherweight in my hands, but leaden on the laps of other people. AND I FREAKED OUT . . . until . . .
I considered all the other boats heading out to sea and people alone in the water, treading, floundering alone and unnoticed—kids in camps in Syria, old people in Haitian hovels, homeless people within six miles of our house, just to name a minuscule few of the many. The how and why of their circumstances are the flip side of mine. If what lies beyond the fuzzy horizon doesn’t yet register on my radar, at least I have a radar—and charts, a crew, flares, a radio, and a pile of supplies topped with a teetering loaf of Taystee bread. Those people in the water have nothing—no life lines, no supplies, not a single slice of Taystee bread.
But as age-old wisdom instructs, “the meek shall inherit the earth.”
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
