The Southseas

"I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?' 'Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball.' The boy did not know whether yesterday's paper was a fiction too. But the old man brought it out from under the bed." – Old Man and the Sea


The 33rd visit to the island had taken on a new light for the grandfather.  There was always mystery here, that much was true.  How could he forget the year of the midnight swimming through the tough fibers of the mangroves just in from Sunset Beach.  There were the dolphins the year with Lily as they swam alongside the kayaks.  Seashells so boundless on Caya Costa that the white sands there took on the look of a treasure sight of its own. As he sat outside in the breezeway this night gently tugging from a very short but sweet cigar, looking out onto the pink sunset that lay onto of the blue of the water as icing might on a cake, he was not sure he could keep himself bound together after the sighting of the sunken ship at the strait. Lily herself was quite an adventurer. If he told her, she too would not want to leave the sight.  There would be much talk, the two anchoring there directly in the middle of such a high traffic spot, day by day, diving, popping back up for air, perhaps bringing up items.  He took one more sweet tug from the cigar; he would only roll it off of his tongue and slightly to the back of the throat; he knew better than cigars at all; yes he did; but this marked a special occasion; he saw the island as something quite different now; the imagination took its turn backwards, to previous times, long ago, when the wooden ships would have been met here by nothing more than the kind of silence only an island can offer or, if closer to Fort Myers, just beyond, the native Indians. What could be done? He was now part of that time, having pulled his very hand over the wood of the structure. What lay underneath the sand and shells that had formed over its decks? It gave him a weaving snake up and down his spine. He was too old for fortune and fame.  This was history.  "Grandpa, are you going back out?" Lily asked from inside, having finished her last show on TV. "Going back out? what do you mean," he asked.  He placed the newspaper down onto the terrace floor. "We are going to walk the beach at sunset.  Don't you remember the dolphins?"
"Oh, yes." he said, "the dolphins." Near sunset the local troop of dolphins did their fishing by chasing the flying fish into the shallows at the beach then rounding them up.  "Yes, the dolphins. We should go."