YARMOUTH RENAISSANCE

"How strange", thought the boy, "To be sealed up in this man's body. I never knew I was in here."

Meanwhile, the man walked over the dune, toward the beach.

"Perhaps it's because I've come back to the sea, the crooked lanes and gnarled trees ... home."

Suddenly the smell, smell of seaweed, giving salty pungent breath to the ocean breeze. No doubt it was that smell that drew the boy out of the old man's body ... pulled him into the world once again.

A Renaissance, a discovery.

The old man's body ... bereft of life like a snake skin drying in the sun ... remained on the lane, near where the sand and macadam overlap each other like lovers.

Newborn, but oldwise blessed, he tore off his shoes, and bounced like the whitecaps as he ran on the wet sand.

Then wonder of wonders, the sand pipers: tiny fragile things, animated dry sticks stuck in a little bundle of feathers. Himself, newborn, just as delicate and fragile, staring at their dartings. He was amazed by the three intersect marks ... footprints, left in the untrammeled sand, tiny records of a reality that seemed so tentative.

"Here am I ... leaving my footprints in the wet sand ... how soon the tide will devour them. Here am I, a tiny speck between sun and sea. Before me, vast rolling masses of slate blue swells, finally reaching England. At my back, three thousand miles of prairie and mountain ... then another sea. Then me, tiny speck, in momentary respite from darting about in life's frantic search ... for what?"

Apparently the old man revived, for later the two of them, man and boy, sit sipping a glass of Chardonnay, alone in a Cape Cod pub. They chat calmly, like new friends; find deep camaraderie, and are only amazed that they had never talked before.

John Fenn

© Copyright, 1997 by John Fenn
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