Melody

About the Book

September 7, 1993 I find an object lesson in a candle moth or some such that fell into my glass of ice water. He was so small I almost drank him. I stirred him with fragments of ice, spooned him out utterly limp, laid him on a napkin & forgot him. Minutes later, I picked up the napkin and lo and behold, he took flight! I have been limp many times in the past year and thought the best I could hope for was a slower progression of my ailment. But I and my doctor and the people who love me kept plugging, and lo and behold, I am better. I will nurture my drive to stay really alive, and see what happens! This was the mind, doubting yet credulous, whose living ruin would strike me as demonic, were I to anthropomorphize nature. But evil cannot exist in nature, only in man. All I could do there in the car by the river was hold her hand and tell her I love her. "I love you too, son," she said. "Are we gonna get shot sitting here?" "I hope not." I laughed. "Maybe we better go." I started to turn the key in the ignition and stopped, because a great blue heron glided in on parachute wings and settled in an ebb of the river before us. The economy of motion in his landing gave us the patient rhythm of the river, the slow motion folding away of wide wings into his skinny gray form. His presence showed us unsuspected shallows. He meant to look for food but the beak stayed pointed at us. He wore a black skullcap and had a humorless look. Deeper black ran along the yellow-orange bill from the obdurate eye. As we in our machine became real the plot thickened. When I looked back from checking my mother the heron seemed to grasp our imperious intent. He took one jerky step, hauled wings out of nowhere as though they were the whole of him, and crossed the river slowly against the wind. "I meant him no harm," said my mother. "Nor did I." Photo of the author (at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul) by John Rhyne Witherspoon in 2008

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