When I was quite small I visited the ocean with my father and it was quite big. When I asked how far it went for he told me “as far as it has to.” When I asked what was on the other side he said “Maybe a father and a son who look just like you and me.”
And so I found an old piece of driftwood and used my pocketknife to carve out a note for that boy out there across the water.
Dear friend,
It’s a shame that this ocean is stuck here between us. Out of all the people I’d most like to meet in the world, it is someone just like me. All the others have been so very different and so very hard to understand. Hopefully someday we will find each other and you can answer all kinds of questions about me I would never think to ask and I can do the same for you. Until then, I’ll be waiting.
Lovingly Yours,
Simon
And I threw the wood into the sea and watched it get eaten up by the waves and disappear over the horizon. Several months later when a boy arrived at my house looking much like me, and carrying with him that same large piece of driftwood, I realized instantly all the power that can come from one simple action.
As it turns out aside from his appearance, the boy, who was called Dalton, didn’t have much in common with me, or my father, or anyone else in my small neighborhood in the town of Barron Dell. Barron Dell was a place of honest-faced folks, who moved slowly, and meant what they said. Dalton was twitchy, and spoke fast and deliberate like a salesman planning something crooked three or four steps ahead of the rest of us. Because of this, the questions and answers I’d hoped we would share didn’t amount to all that much. I’d ask and he’d answer. Or he’d ask and I’d answer, but we never did break the surface, just circled around on cautious feet. I can say though, that during his visit I did learn that it is difficult to ride a zebra (Dalton had tried, and was still walking with a limp from where he had been kicked in the hip) and also I learned how to whistle with two fingers in my mouth- the very loud kind of whistle that grown ups use to call taxi cabs from all the way down the block.
Because of our many differences Dalton didn’t feel the need to stay long. After several peanut butter sandwiches and an entire pitcher of lemonade he excused himself to the restroom and promptly climbed out of the second story window, and shimmied down the drainpipe and back out of our lives forever. It took us almost fifteen minutes to notice he’d left. As I sat on the sofa looking a bit forlorn and wondering if it was something I’d done that had run Dalton off my father told me that often times the best we can do in life is to put ourselves out there and to hope that someone hears us. “If we are lucky,” he said, “we’ll get to share a nice meal, tell some good stories, and maybe even learn how to whistle.”
That night I lay in bed thinking about Dalton, and what my father had told me. Before this day I had been quite a lonely soul. This was not by choice. Inside I was brimming full of life and ideas but it seemed on the outside with each and every turn I met a new face who could not understand any of the words I had to say. Each and every day there was some person standing in front of me with all the right answers for himself but none to give or share.
In my classes all the other boys knew just what they wanted to be when they grew up, and all throughout Barron Dell there were rows and rows of houses full of folks who had long ago been just like those boys in my classes, folks who had known exactly what they had wanted and had gone out and gotten it. And then there was me. And as I nestled deeper into my blankets charting the cracks in my ceiling like maps of rivers which had yet to be formed I knew that Dalton’s arrival had been a sign and that my life was meant to be different from this point on through.
As I drifted off to sleep I had a dream, a very bright and vivid dream about a tremendous eagle who spent his entire life searching the sky looking for rainbows. When he would find one he would swoop down though the center of it riding the colors all the way to the ground in hopes of finding a pot of gold resting at the end. Day after day, rainbow after rainbow the eagle would set out and return again, still no gold in sight. But each day he flew was a day he spent doing what he loved, soaring through the rainbows and hoping to find something beautiful. I woke up before the eagle ever found any gold, but I’d like to think that maybe he might never did find it, and maybe that’s the point.
The next morning, after I brushed my teeth, I packed my knapsack with supplies made up my bed, and wrote out a note for my father.
Dear Dad,
I know now what I must do. I must wander. I must seek. I do not know where I am going or what will happen when I get there but I know that I must go. If I am lucky I will end up somewhere perfect and I will find you there as well and if not I will journey on. If ever you are sad and missing me, please remember that I am only one piece of driftwood and one ocean away.
Lovingly Yours,
Simon
