Fog, fog, fog, fog, fog.
And I’m talking radio code in my sleep. Hotel-Echo-Lima-Papa! (HELP!)
We’ve seen whales and dolphins and a little black bird. I want to be a fish or a bird. Swim in the water or fly in the air.
Sophie got really attached to the bird and worried and fretted over it. I told her she’d better watch it because she was becoming just like Uncle Stew.
“I am not!” she said.
Every time dolphins or whales come and play by the boat, Sophie is up there watching. She can’t take her eyes off them, and then she starts wondering where they came from and where they’re going and why they’re here and if they are part of a family, if they’re all related.
Brian had to get his two cents in about orphans again. First, he kept calling Little Peep the orphan bird, and then, when we were watching the dolphins, Brian was going on about how the baby dolphin was imitating the mother. “I wonder what happens to orphan dolphins,” he said. “How do they learn anything?”
Sophie said, “I guess they’re smart enough to figure it out on their own. They probably don’t have a lot of choice.”
And Brian said, “Is that what you did, figure it out on your own?”
And Sophie said, “Look! Look at that! Did you see her leap?” and then she went below deck. When I went down a few minutes later, she was juggling pretzel packets. She’s getting good.
“Show me how to juggle four things,” she said. “Then show me how to accidentally-on-purpose bean someone and knock him overboard.”
I figure she was referring to Mr. Know-it-all, Bravo-Romeo, Brian.
Later she told another Bompie story. It went like this:
Near Bompie’s house out in the country was a swimming hole. It was at a bend in a creek and was very deep. Big rocks and tree limbs jutted out from the side, and you could climb out on these rocks and tree limbs and leap into the water, whoosh! It was a dangerous place because there were also rocks and tree limbs under the water and you couldn’t always see where you might land. And because it was a dangerous place, Bompie was forbidden to swim there.
But one hot, hot, hot summer day, Bompie really really wanted to swim. He wanted to leap into that cool water and float there until his skin wrinkled up. So he went down to the swimming hole and climbed up on one of the rocks and stood there looking at that cool water down below. Oh, it was hot. Hot, hot, hot. And the water looked so cool. And so Bompie jumped.
And he hit that cool, cool water and it felt so delicious and down down he went and thunk! He hit something else—a rock? A tree? And thunk! He smashed against something else. And he was dizzy down there under the cool, cool water and whack! His head banged against something hard.
And he was turning and twisting and all confused down there in the swirling cool, cool water, but at last he bobbed up and he climbed out and lay on the muddy bank until his head stopped hurting, and then he went home.
“He got a whipping!” Brian said. “Right? I bet his father gave him one huge whipping!”
“That’s right,” Sophie said. “And then—”
“Wait,” Brian said. “Don’t tell me. Apple pie, right? His mother gave him some apple pie, right?”
“No,” Sophie said.
“What?” Brian said. “No apple pie? But didn’t she want to give him some apple pie because he was safe? No apple pie?”
“No apple pie,” Sophie said. “This time it was blueberry pie. She was out of apples.”
When she finished her story, Brian said, “Why in the heck does Bompie keep going in the water?”
“What?” Sophie said. “What do you mean?”
“If he always gets in trouble in the water, why does Bompie keep going in the water? You’d think he’d stay about as far away from water as he could get.”
Sophie’s lips were pressed tightly together, and suddenly she looked so fragile to me.
I said, “Maybe that’s exactly why Bompie keeps going in the water—”
Sophie looked at me. Her eyes were bright and wet.
“Maybe,” I said, “he’s afraid of the water, but he keeps going back to it because he has to—there’s something he has to prove—”
“Like what?” Brian said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if you think about it—if you conquered the thing that scared you the most, then maybe you’d feel—I don’t know—you’d feel free or something. You think?”
Brian said, “Well, that’s stupid. If you’re afraid of something, there’s probably a good reason for it, and it means you should learn to stay away from those things. That’s what I think.”
Sophie didn’t say anything. She went over to the railing and stood there like she does, staring out over the water.