The Living Room

He thought about the time he walked along a pebble beach in winter. Finding and then holding aloft the salt driftwood, tethered by the rapture of a thousand sea waves there was something trustworthy in its bitter texture. The grain roughed by the inaugural transition of flotsam from sea storm to shore and semi-dry land. He thought about the old man who, sitting at the harbour where he watched the ghost of his younger self go out to sea, told him about the great mystery of wood. Which was, he remembered, not that it burned, but that it floated. In this world we have created, forged through individuals and communities, what kind of a man is a man who relates only to journeyed wood. He sits now in the living room in a window of time where the children and his wife are out. Of course the whirlpool of memory and desire and loss are drawn up carefully in this time; for a good person will only let it drown the individual, leaving those who really matter safe and sound on dry land. Only minutes now till the key rattles in the lock and the pitter- patter of feet save him from the living room.