Puttin' the Glaxon on It

They had their ice cream and were sitting eating it at a picnic table behind the bayside restaurant. Gulls circled overhead hoping for something edible to be tossed. The sun was bright and the ocean sparkled but the wind coming in off the water was brisk and made more than one of them wonder why they were eating ice cream.

"What I don't understand," said Farhead, "is why I would have a dream like that. I've never been to Newfoundland."

"A dream like what?" said Nearheart. "We weren't talking about dreams. And that's the first thing you've said since we got here."

"Well, I've been thinking it."

"My Daddy Mac was like that," said Noah.

"Your Daddy Mac was absent-minded sometimes," said Minnie. "Farhead has just been smoking weed."

Cloud decided the conversation needed an intervention. She was fond of them all. The ice cream was to celebrate their coming to live together. The mother in her was happy to add a touch of family to the event.

"So, Farhead," she said, "what happened in your dream?"

"I was walking along a street somewhere in Newfoundland. I had just lost my job. I had a bottle of cinnamon whiskey and was drinking it as I walked. This tall slender fellow at a corner pulled me back to keep a car from hitting me. He nodded at the bottle and said, "That's puttin' the Glaxon on it!"

"You know," Cloud replied, "there was a fellow that had a dream of having a boat and a dock. Now he's wondering why he ever had that dream."

"That sounds reasonable enough," said Nearheart. "Lots of people here in Nova Scotia must have had that dream."

"Yes, but now he comes down to the shore to look at the result of that dream. That's when he wonders."

She pointed out on the water to a dock that lay half sunk. "The bank came for the boat," she said. "After that he quit caring about the dock."

Farhead licked the contents of his cone and then chucked the rest in the water. A seagull immediately dived for it. Rising with the cone in its bill, it was immediately attacked by another gull.

"I don't have much use for dreams that just waste my time," Farhead said.

"No one does," Cloud agreed.

"But they all waste our time," said little Noah. "That's what Daddy Mac said. Because they make us think that something's real that ain't."

Cloud had never met Noah's grandfather but had heard many tales of him. And she knew how much Noah loved him. It almost took her breath away. All she could manage in reply to such a young boy entertaining such wisdom was to nod her head and wipe a tear from her eye.

"Then why bother with anything?" said Nearheart, who felt let down by her husband's assertion. "Isn't everything a dream?"

Cars came and went from the restaurant. The wind lagged and gusted. Trash from the wind-disturbed dumpsters spiralled and fell. The spirals revealed spoils that kept the gulls busy diving out of their cloud. Nearheart began to cry.
"Yes," agreed Cloud, offering her ice cream to Farhead. "But the sun also rises."
10 May 2022
Texas Jim
East Dover, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca