The Tuba and the Pufferfish
Down the beach there are the sounds of deep and guttural horns. I don’t see the players but I can imagine they are people from here entertaining people not from here — the likes of me that venture south, chasing the sun.
We walked along the beach past where the music seems to be coming from earlier in the day; sun high but sheltered from its swelter by wind coming in across the pacific.
Along the shore near where the horns play now, no more than 10 yard from each other, there were two dead pufferfish. I realize as I write this that I have a habit of writing about my intersections with dead animals. I find that the wonder they hold in their living as well as their wry evasiveness make their stoic and still and fully displayed cadavers jarring. These fish all the more so. As they emerged from pacific deep, a place foreign and unfamiliar. Their deflated form residing on sand just far enough from retreating high-tide wave that they are unable to return to their residence to fade into the next.
Should I toss them back in? Should this resident of the sea be forced to be pecked away and torn at from bird on land? Would this not also happen as its form floats on the water of the blue?
The horns have now joined other horns and some “la la laaa la-ing” has commenced. A collective cheer erupts. And those that will likely die here because they were born here blow their breath into instrument as the breath of those that will likely die elsewhere because they were born elsewhere erupt in drunken praise.
Sea will meet sand and I will meet local and pufferfish will wither and horns will sound and cheering will commence and the player of the horn will later, exhausted, return to his daughter and kiss her on the forehead as she sleeps and he eases himself back into a home that is his in a land that he knows as the drunken cheers finally fade into silence far across the water and home beds and resort beds lull us all back into darkness.
And in the middle of the night, the puffer will whither but it will continue. Regardless of where. And no matter how far away from home we embark, our breath and our voice and our self will push past the love and the blindness, the hate and the kindness. There is too much swirl for us to know exactly the ways of the elusive beginning or end.
At the place where ocean and sand meet, our feet melt into earths most nurturing softness.
