Life Surprises
Seven Short Stories
About the Unexpected
by
John W. Sloat
CCB Publishing
British Columbia, Canada
Life Surprises: Seven Short Stories About the Unexpected
Copyright ©2012 by John W. Sloat
ISBN-13 978-1-77143-015-9
First Edition
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Sloat, John W., 1932-
Life Surprises [electronic resource] : seven short stories about the unexpected / by John W. Sloat – 1st ed.
Electronic monograph in PDF format.
ISBN 978-1-77143-015-9
Also available in print format.
Additional cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
Cover artwork: White seagull feather: © Zts | Dreamstime.com
Beautiful seascape: © Veronika Vasilyuk | Depositphotos.com
Disclaimer: This is a book of pure fiction, a product of the author’s imagination, and does not represent any person, living or dead.
Extreme care has been taken by the author to ensure that all information presented in this book is accurate and up to date at the time of publishing. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any errors or omissions. Additionally, neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For other permission requests, please contact the author.
Publisher:
CCB Publishing
British Columbia, Canada
www.ccbpublishing.com
For
Jack
Emily
Brayden
RJ
Short stories
for short people
I love
2012
Other Books by John W. Sloat
Lord, Make Us One, 1986
The Other Half, 2001
Memories of My Misadventures, 2008
A Handbook For Heretics, second edition, 2009
Moving Beyond the Christian Myth, 2011
Contents
Cover
Other Books by John W. Sloat
Table of Contents
I. The Feather
II. Memories
III. The Key
IV. Merlen
V. Charlie
VI. The Voice
VII. The Lighter
Author’s Notes
Back Cover
I
The Feather
I: Emily
When I was a little girl, almost seven years old, Mommy and I spent a week at the beach in North Carolina. It was a special extravagance since money was tight at that point in her life. Of course, I didn’t know anything about that, since she carefully kept it from me. All I knew was that Daddy didn’t live with us anymore.
The light seemed to have gone with him when he left the house, and we both experienced long, lonely days. We didn’t talk about it, at least not much, and as a result there were frequent echoing silences between us. But we were best friends, and Daddy’s absence drew us even closer.
So it was a great thrill when Mommy said we were going to spend a week at the ocean. She had grown up in New Jersey, and had often talked about how wonderful it was to swim in the ocean. She told me stories about the fun she and her brother had had at places like Cape May and Seaside Heights and Atlantic City. But for some reason, we never quite got there. The promises, mostly from Daddy, were always, “Maybe next year.”
Now that Daddy was gone, Mommy suddenly said, “Definitely this year.” Despite my young age, I knew what a big event this was going to be for her, and I was sure it would be a shaft of light in the darkness we had been sharing for months.
When Daddy left, we had to give up our house in Minnesota and move to Norfolk, Virginia, where my grandmother lived. As a result, instead of going to one of Mommy’s New Jersey beaches, she said we were going to the Outer Banks. It didn’t matter to me where we went, of course, so long as I could swim in the ocean.
We moved into a little house on the beach on a Saturday afternoon. It was a week after the end of first grade and I was about to turn seven, so our trip was sort of an early birthday present. Back in those days, my mother was able to afford a place right on the beach, something that would be impossible today. But our house backed up to the dunes, and a little boardwalk led from our backyard right out onto the sand.
My jaw dropped when I first caught sight of the ocean. I had never imagined so much water, never been aware of the horizon before. I asked, “Is that where the Earth ends?” and kept bombarding her with questions – “How far does the water go?” Answer: To our old house and back. “Why is the water all crashy and bumpy like that?” Answer: That’s called surf. You can go play in it. “What’s that smell?” Answer: That’s salt, because the ocean is salty.
As soon as we got things situated in the cottage, we went to the beach. It was a glorious day, and I was torn between dancing in the water and playing in the sand. Mommy helped me build my first sandcastle, and held my hand so I could practice jumping over the waves as they came up on the shore to die. We played for the rest of the afternoon, and I had never felt the sun so close or enjoyed the outdoors so passionately. The sounds of the gulls squawking overhead, the constant crash of the waves, the caress of the ocean breeze, the feel of the sand under my feet, everything was exaggerated until I was overwhelmed by the immensity of it all. A million times I said to Mommy, “This is so much fun!”
When supper was over, I dragged her back to the beach. She said that it was too cold to swim anymore, but that we could play in the sand until it got dark. I decided that if we couldn’t go into the water, we would bring the water up to us. So, with Mommy’s help, I dug a long ditch straight toward the water, hoping that the waves would fill it and create a tiny canal right up to where we had spread our blanket.
Our lives are divided into sections, and we tend to label those sections by saying that they happened before or after such-and-such an event. But nothing warns us that the actual event is about to happen, that this moment is the final word in one whole paragraph of our life.
Mommy was digging her part of the ditch down near the water, and I had wet down a patch of sand higher up so I could dig the opposite end of the ditch. We were about ten or twelve feet apart.
I didn’t see him coming, but suddenly a man walked between us. I was hunched down concentrating on my work, so I didn’t notice much of anything about him except that he seemed to be tall. I glanced up as he spoke to me, but later could remember only blue shorts and dirty white sneakers.
He didn’t stop and talk to me. He merely slowed as he walked by. “Here,” he said, “you need a feather.” And then he was gone. I didn’t actually see him leave because I was focused on the feather.
Since he passed by five or six feet away, he didn’t hand me the feather. He simply let it go and a gentle breeze off the ocean took it from him and dropped it right alongside me. I picked it up and looked at it, but when I turned to search for him, he was at some distance, beginning to merge with others on the beach.
I heard my mother say, “Oh, a feather!” as she came over to examine it. It was about six inches long, perfectly formed and intact, and pure white except for a slight tinge of blue-gray color along its narrow side. It was beautiful, not the least bit soiled, and looked…new. I turned it o
ver and was fascinated by the fine detail, the way the barbs interlocked, their diminishing length as they neared the tip, and the fuzz at the bottom of the stem. “It’s so light,” I said, bouncing it in my hand.
Mommy smiled. “Did you ever hear someone say, as light as a feather?” I nodded as the meaning of that familiar statement sank in.
I looked back down the beach because of a lingering curiosity about the man who had appeared and then disappeared so quickly, but he had vanished into the evening mist. I planted the feather like a flag at the end of our sandy canal, and it served as a target for the water which never did fill our little ditch. Eventually, we let go of our first day at the ocean and climbed into bed. My beautiful white feather was tucked under the edge of an old framed black-and-white photo of the ocean above my bed. As I looked up at it during the night, it seemed to glow in the light from the streetlamp.
I don’t remember what we did during the rest of that week, but I do recall watching people go by and hunting for my mysterious feather-man. I never did see him again or, if I did, I couldn’t recognize him. But his gift became the focus of my visit to the ocean. I carried my feather with me wherever we went, showing it to anyone who seemed interested, and repeating the story of how it came to me.
It was inevitable, given my fascination with my treasure, that we should start inventing stories about the shadowy man who had crossed my path for less than ten seconds. Maybe he was a beachcomber whose hobby was looking for treasures to share with others. Perhaps he was a ghost from some pirate ship who was doomed to wander the shores and then vanish. Or he might be a Professor of Feathers who spent his summers adding to his collection, before going back to some obscure college in the fall to lecture about them.
Then, as an afterthought, my mother came up with the idea that stuck in my heart like an arrow in a bullseye – “Maybe he was your guardian angel.” The shock of recognition which followed that offhand statement made me certain it was true, that she had figured it out.
“My guardian angel.” I said the words dozens of times that night, feeling the taste and the shape of them on my tongue. My guardian angel. The sound of that phrase gave me a whole new sensation – safety, peace. I realize now that after the months of uncertainty, of losing my home and worrying about what might happen next, I was looking for something to give me back my security. And this was it.
Later, I recalled what the man had said when he delivered my gift – “Here, you need a feather.” I mentioned it to my mother who thought about it for a moment and then said, “That was strange. He could have said, ‘Here’s a feather,’ or ‘Do you want a feather?’ I wonder why he would say, ‘You need a feather.’”
At the end of the week, we went back to our new home, my new school, and a different life. And as that life progressed, I was aware that I was being companioned by unseen forces, guarded by an invisible presence no farther away than the gust of wind which had carried the feather from his hand to mine. And I knew it was all true because I had proof; I possessed a tangible talisman that, at least to my mind, banished all doubt. I had my own personal guardian angel who had once walked within arm’s reach of me. In time, everyone knew my story, all the kids in my class, all the members of my family – I was the girl with the guardian angel. Well, everyone has a guardian angel, presumably, but I had seen mine.
I wouldn’t say the feather was an obsession, but it certainly helped define who I was. It connected me with heaven, with my childhood, with the North Carolina shoreline, and it gave me a dimension of serenity which I noticed was missing in many of my friends.
As the years passed, however, I talked less and less about it. All the important people in my life already knew the story, and I had learned the hard way that repeating it once too often brought less than tolerant responses. But more than that, it was such a personal part of who I was that I no longer wanted to share it. It somehow helped organize my core self, it gave my life a kind of private mystical dimension.
That peace at the core of my being helped me get through my high school years in a system where to have little was to be little. It got me though college, where graduating with the limited means my mother could afford often meant working at two jobs in addition to my classes. It also meant staying an extra year because I was sick one summer, couldn’t work, and had no money for the fall term. It served me through my internship as a physician’s assistant on a staff where jealousy and favoritism tried their hardest to make me fail. And it surrounded and supported me through an ill-advised marriage, the loss of a baby, and a divorce that took most of what little I had left.
While I tried to put my life back together, a strange idea began to form in my subconscious. My feather had been an absolutely essential icon in my life. It had led me back into the church, and I had attached it to the front flyleaf of the Bible which I always had with me. It made God, or at least my angel, a present and active part of every day of my life.
But at the same time, I began to realize that that feather had taken on an almost magical character; the symbol had become as important to me as the divine presence which it represented. I gradually came to see that this was immature, that it bordered on idolatry. That realization came to me in an odd way.
I babysat for my cousin’s little girl one night. Her name was Amy and she was four. We were very close, and I tried to spend time with her as often as possible. It was about a year after I lost my baby, and that made our bond even more emotional.
She loved the Disney film Dumbo, and that night she begged me to watch it with her. I had never seen Dumbo before, which shows how deprived my childhood had been! Watching it for the first time that night was a revelation for me. When Timothy Mouse picked a feather out of the crow’s tail and handed it to Dumbo, I was amused but didn’t make the connection. Then, at the climax of the movie, when Dumbo is in his powerdive clutching his black feather, something began to register. And the instant it slipped from his trunk, I felt a cold shock over my whole body. He had lost his feather! I knew exactly how he felt – the terror, the loss, the emptiness. Then it came crashing in on me – I was Dumbo!
It’s hard to describe the breadth of the realization that spread over me. It wasn’t that I had made an idol of the feather. And it wasn’t even that I was looking on my guardian angel as a kind of magic cloak protecting me from harm and disappointment. It was that life doesn’t rely for success on magic feathers or guardian angels, or even faith in God. All of those things are outside of me. Rather, it has to do with my core, the very heart of me for which I had always given credit to my angel. But that power had always been inside of me; my angel, my wonderful angel, had been my own courage and determination all those years.
And in that instant, I knew what I had to do to purge myself of all my years of magic thinking. I had to find my angel, my feather-giver from so many years ago. I laughed aloud as I heard myself arrive at that conclusion. What was the likelihood that I could find him after all this time? One in a million? One in a billion? How could I even be sure he was still alive? I had no idea how old he was when I first caught a glimpse of him. To a child, a sixteen-year-old can look like an old man. I was now thirty: it had been twenty-three years since that summer when I was just turning seven.
But I knew I had to try. And I knew how to do it. The Internet. It became a sudden all-consuming passion, and I couldn’t wait to get started. I wrote out the story in as much detail as I could, trying to identify time and place so as to make it as recognizable to my “angel” as possible. I told him how incredibly important his tiny act of kindness had been in my life. And I explained why I wanted to find him, not just to thank him but in a sense to get him out of my system, to close the circle which had been gradually forming for almost a quarter century.
I launched the site on New Year’s Day, thinking that the symbolic date might give me a little better chance of success. I pleaded with the readers to spread the word, to help me get as much coverage for my story as possible. Then I sat back and wait
ed, praying for the greatest miracle of all in my unlikely story.
But, of course, nothing happened. I kept checking the site to make sure it was working properly. Months went by. A few responses trickled in, but they were mostly comments about the story or suggestions as to how I could find my man. Then I got responses from two different people the same day saying that my search was over, that each of them had given me the feather. My heart sank. Even with all the work I had done to set up the site, I never really expected to find the man. But if I was going to have to sort through a bunch of phonies, how could I make sure I didn’t miss the real person in the process? That was something I hadn’t considered.
Then, in June, something amazing happened. Within one week, two established websites picked up my story, and days later it was all over the Internet. In fact, it became something of a cause célèbre. With this kind of coverage, my hopes began to soar. Newsweek even picked it up for a brief human interest article and I began to be inundated with email. It seemed that everybody knew someone who might/could/should be or definitely was my man. And I had dozens of letters from him, or at least people purporting to be him. But none of them rang true. There were proposals of marriage, people claiming to have given me feathers on a hundred different beaches, even two women who said they were the person I was looking for but explaining that they had been disguised as men on that long-ago day.
And then it all quit. Just dropped off to a trickle, no more than a few each week, and still nothing definitive. I left the site up but ignored it more and more, rarely checking the mail. January came again and I reexamined the odds I had confronted a year ago at the beginning of the quest. They were way too long – I was just being silly. Maybe he really was an angel and had no access to email! I thought about taking the site down.
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