The Star Fisher

by Christopher F. Mills

  So the pageantry and parade of life went on for all those pages and during all that time the places we would come to know and live at went through all their different stages—the top of mountains became the bottom of oceans, ice ages became subtropical, dinosaurs died and cave-men lived, wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers—and all during that, our time to live and love was still so far away as to be unimaginable. Then the race of civilized men appeared and went through countless generations. It was some hairy man in a cave who saw a hairy woman in another cave and wanted her in his cave so he went to her cave, knocked her over the head and dragged her home. That was our great, great, to the nth power, grandparents. They had children and those children had children and those children had children and here we all are. In all those generations of men our time to live and love was still so far away.

  Men grew great with power. Fortunes were created, nations rose up from the caves and the trees. Poets scratched in the dust and taught others to do the same and language grew. Inventive minds made lamps from fire and by the light of oil lamps new men wrote the first plays. One man gained the control of many caves and grew from that the first king and then came the queens and queens then waged war with kings, and won. Great empires were founded and then faded away, all the history of the world was put in pages and men drifted by and still our time to live and love was so far away, and dependent upon so many variables and factors related to all of this, and more, that if we were to put it all in a book, it would take a lifetime to read it, but who but God could write, or read, such a book?

  My great to the nth power grandfather decided to turn left one day instead of turning right and because of that he met my great to the nth power grandmother. And on and on down through the ages. Same with yours. Had your nth power grandfather not made the decisions he did, I would have never known you. And all during those times, our time to live and love was still so far away, waiting like a little light to be unbusheled. All that time, waiting. Time is the artful procrastination of the universe. It means to get to its point eventually, but first. . . All of this.

  Where was love, in the waiting? There was no sight of it. Not yet. Then one day I saw you walk by in the bright light of the present moment become the long ago past and then I had the first idea of it. A few more moons came and went and I had no doubt, and was completely depressed about it. Such a long time for us little creatures with such short time to live. Impossible. But love is insistent and had passed between two. And it changed them both and they could not help but communicate that thing they felt about each other and so they made a decision and for so long now have waited and waited, against all, for the time to love and live.

  But no love waits. It is in us all the time, as perfect as it ever was. And we either use it when we find it or we let it go back into the mystery. Our love has been waiting since the first wave began making the first grain of sand. There is just the small matter of getting hands together, and lips need introductions, but souls are tight as two red birds on a holly branch in the spring, if they will fly to each other. These are small matters, important incidentals, and time will see to them shortly, if those who love will see to them. Bankrupt in love and hopeless to ever get out of debt are too many. But we were rich. We were dreamers who found true love, we believed as the child believes, with pure faith in our love. In the real world, such a thing is as impossible as anything that is nearly impossible—kind of like the time it took to make living dinosaurs turn into quiet exhibits in museums. It only seems impossible, true love. It just takes an insistence of soul and mind to believe in impossible things, and that’s why few truly love—it is the hardest, most impossible thing any of us ever do. And that is why we did love. We were dreamers who believed in the impossible thing that was and is, our love.

  But love believes, even when they give it up, love still believes. And love will always believe. And love will walk through hell and come back out of it, still believing. Love is the only power that can make that walk. Love cherishes the small things. If a leaf from a tree brushed your hair as you walked under it in 1940, that tree is yet sacred to me. The very first gulp of air you breathed in 1920 is yet sacred to me, and I have traveled the world looking for it, and I will know it when I find it. The atoms of the sunlight that touched your skin in 1928 are still to be found somewhere, and I will travel the world looking for it and I will know it when I see it. I would fight ten-thousand men, knowing the outcome, to see you just once again, and to keep you happy beneath the sun and trees. My love for you believes in and dreams of and worships, you. I hope one day to be able to describe how it is with me, about you. The ability to do that is far away from me now, and I have never heard of any who could ever do it. But I will try and maybe one day you will know how it is with me, about you. My spiritual entanglement with your soul is a meaningless matter to the world, but it defines my entire being.

  Here are my ten cosmic miracles:

  Walking: The discovery of wonder.

  Talking: The comparing of wonder.

  Pausing: Filling space with wonder.

  Thinking: The defining of wonder.

  Dreaming: The deciphering of wonder.

  Remembering: Sanctifying wonder.

  Singing: The bold declaration of wonder.

  Writing: The eternal recording of wonder.

  Laughing: The prologue to wonder.

  Loving: The ever-unfolding, yet full story, of wonder.

  Now when I dream, remember, think deeply, pause, laugh, sing, write, laugh or love, I do these best because of you. My best walks and talks are with you. And of all my laughter and loving, my laughter and love is made most perfect in tandem with you. All my own cosmic miracles I do best, because of you. So my description of the supreme cosmic miracle is you. Without you, I would have always been deficient in the real-life-wonder of the cosmic miracles.

  May 12, 1964

  The Star fisher's last hour

  January 12, 2013

  It had to have been around five a.m. when he woke. And he surely had to have heard the clarion call of the train's horn blaring in the distance. I heard it myself. It was louder that morning than I had ever heard it. I figured it was from the bitter cold temperature and the dryness of the air, which allowed the big noise to carry far. But then I thought there had been many cold, dry mornings before, but I had never heard that train horn near so loud before. Our city is small and if I heard it, he heard it; and I sure heard it. The big sound of that locomotive filled the atmosphere and it seemed to me it had jumped its track and was passing by on the street. I felt there was something about it that was eternal. And I was right about that; I just didn't know what, then, directly. It woke me from a deep sleep. It reminded me of the Star Fisher and I layed there and thought about him. I imagined him laying quiet and listening. He had heard that horn all the decades of his life. They had built the track in the late 1800's and he first heard it sometime in the early 20's. He didn't know then, but would soon learn at his grandfather's knee, what that horn meant and what made it.

  From the early 1920's through the rest of the twentieth century he would hear that horn blow. It had always been a calling to him. Once, in the late sixties—while he was still young and strong enough to do it—he had done a thing he had always wanted to do: he had hopped that train and went across country, where he jumped back off in a California town and hitchhiked the rest of the way to the Pacific Ocean. He saw then the real life picture of a once-dreamed image: a giant whale jumped clear of the saline sea, but only for a moment was it given to fly free of its great bowl. It had to return from where it came. And so, too, the star fisher. After a few months of sight-seeing and fishing off longer piers than he had ever imagined and surfing with the lost boys, he found a long-haul trucker who took him back to the land of Indian summer.

  Indian summer. . . . It had meant something extra-ordinary to him all of his life. That was her secret name. Partly. When he was eight and a half and she was eight they renamed each other. He ca
lled her India Paris Summer, because her wish was to travel to India first and Paris last and she was, to him, more like the season of summer than all other seasons.

  India was her first choice, specifically Agra, where is the Taj Mahal, the Crown of Buildings, a white marble mausoleum built by the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan. She hoped to sit in quiet contemplation in this worldly Persian wonder, built from the inspiration of an emperor's absolute wonder for his favorite wife. And then to Paris, where she would sit under the Eiffel Tower—Paris's memorial to love past, present and future. These were the two spots on earth she wished to go to the most, when she was able to.

  Except in pictures, her Indian eyes never saw these places. Of her eyes, he said, they were the most enchanting crystal balls he had ever seen. In them he saw the past, present and all of the future. They were his own living monuments to infinite, absolute wonder. They were multi-colored; sometimes blue, sometimes green; sometimes hazel brown, and other times grey. And often a shade of each color all together. They were never the same shade twice—just like an Indian summer—never one thing for very long. She called him Rome Pacific Fall; because he wished to go to Rome first and the Pacific last and he was like the season of fall to her, which was her favorite season. They would shorten all that and just call each other “Fall” and “Summer”. Fall and Summer had been best friends and first and eternal loves.

  It had been, to the day, seventy-six years since he had stayed up late writing her The Letter. He had never written a love letter. He struggled to find the right words and threw away three pages before he made it passable. But he wasn't sure, even then. He wasn't sure, until later that day, about the words he had writ and what they would mean to his life.

  He had taken her home from school in his father's Model T and when she had found the letter sitting on the dash she reached for it but he patted her hand away and told her not yet. At her home he gave her the letter in her room, said a quick hello and goodbye to her parents and grandparents, who were visiting the city from their mountain home up north, and made his escape into the cold winds and rains of that long ago day. Now, seventy-six years later, he knew entirely what those words had meant. They were the words of his soul and the significance of his entire life and had he not writ them, everything would have been wrong.

  Maybe it was the pain and not the horn, that had woke him. As he listened to the horn he noticed the throbbing that came in time with his heartbeat, up his left side. And when Fall, the great star fisher, felt the mild struggle going on in his chest become a great struggle, he knew what it was: it was his one-way ticket to board the train home. The big horn was calling. He had been hearing this horn for months. He had known this train would soon be arriving.

  The pain came in waves, slow at first, and then all of a sudden, and in his dying spasm he smiled, for the pain was not greater than his wish to meet again the girl with Indian summer eyes who he had last seen in 1940, but had never stopped loving and living side by side with. He had kept her as his life's meaning all along. And now they would finally go on that trip to India first and Paris last, in that empyrean realm where a wish is a command.

  He pulled in his lines and net and set his fishing pole down. He no longer needed to fish among the stars, he would now go there directly and catch the one great star that had always been tied to the buckboard of his soul, pulling him along, inexorably, toward whatever destination her soul wished. His age of wonder on this earth was over, and the age of wonder beyond it just begun.

  A letter from the Star Fisher

  January 7, 2013

  He died too soon for me to know all I wished to know about him. We had, since late June, spent a few hours together every Wednesday and Saturday. There had not been enough time taken. After he died I went back and asked the nurses about him, who his wife was and when she had died and if he had any relatives. Their answers mystified me. He had no wife and had never been married. He had no known living relatives. And what he did for a living none of them ever knew. He just showed up one day, paid the money, and lived at the center, mostly spending his time speaking with the other residents and making their day brighter. He wasn't bed-ridden or sickly and didn't always stay at the center. Sometimes he left for weeks at a time. Did he never marry the lady of the mountain he had met in '60? I learned at least part of the truth when I received a package in the mail about a week later. It was addressed to me, in his scribbled handwriting and it read:

  My Dear Lad,

  I give to you my thanks for the time spent between us these past months. I am proud to have shared, in my final days, my story with you. My hope is that my life, and its passing, will help with your appreciation of your own life and that you always seek to know wonder. And by that the others around you will also be lit bright and on and on from that it will go.

  That was my own personal dream. Just to help others find their sense of wonder. It is the greatest evolution of wonder: to bring the wonder out in others. It is love, you see. Wonder is the apex and meeting point of truth, beauty and love. And it is best shared. And what a seemingly impossible thing that is to accomplish here—the discovering and then sharing—of true wonder. Love is a flower and the seed of love is hope and it will bloom, with wonder. And that is why the poet said what he did about hope. . . Love is hope that bloomed. If the seed of hope blooms into the flower of love, love becomes life. And there is nothing greater than that.

  On December 3 the fog came in and layed over it all like a damp silver blanket. The leaves had mostly all fallen and the ashes were dripping their last leaves and they made clicking sounds as they landed. Only the pear tree was left with its coat. So the great leaf falls had occurred and now a few loose ends to tie up and the pear tree to color and drop by the first of the year. By the falling of the leaves, the night skies were opened up again for full star viewing.

  During this fall I felt I was soon to gain the heavenly knowledge, and lose forever the full and final earthly knowledge, of a great love. It mirrored the season. It was the end. But the beauty of it was also best displayed to me while it died its graceful death.

  On December 4 the pear tree turned to fire, a bright yellow and dark red that glows in the sunlight. This, after the Silvers let go all their leaves and only the bottom half of the ashes were left with slight yellow leaves that clinked when they fell.

  I thought: “The pear will lose its last leaf by the last of the dying year, and in the first days of the new year this sad and beautiful falling will be over. And the last leaf will fall as graceful as the first one did.”

  I am full of the thought of her, the girl of my dreams, the girl of so long ago. A few years after she died I stopped speaking, or even thinking, her name and just called her what she was: Life. She had always been a beautiful secret of mine, yet one who is famous to all. Her name was, is and always will be, to me. . . Life. She is the one who filled my dreamer's heart. In her was my wonder. In her were and are all the named and unnamed cosmic miracles. But what was her real name? The one I tried to forget, but could not? Her earthly name was Yardley. She was genuinely modest about the perfection she was. She was full of life. She had the biggest, deepest dimple you ever saw. Her eyes were like the Indian summer. She loved truer and greater than any other mortal ever did. She was just an authentic perfection. No more, no less.

  I would like you to find the ring. When you go, dig on the southwesterly side of the oak, in line with the pear tree. It is not the original pear tree, but it is in the same spot as the original. Those pear trees never last terribly long, but the oak, that is the original. It was there before me and will be there long after. It is an old neighborhood, built in the 1910's, around about the time I was. The oak is a giant with a great girth. The ring won't be deep. I have always called it the ring of wonder. I want you to have it and wear it, and to never forget your wonder. I want to tell you my last story now.

  A young bright star was born in the cosmos, of original starlight he was composed. And as he was new-born, was ign
orant of his own being and knew not the original starlight within him. He shined brighter than all other stars in the firmament, but being this light, did not know his own brightness. One day he saw far off in the heavens a bright light and being lonely, he followed the light to what he believed was the end of the cosmos and then, as he came close to the light, it disappeared and all became darkness. After some time wandering in the dark, he saw another bright light appear. He followed that light to what he believed was the end of the cosmos until it, too, blinked out and all was dark again.

  This happened many times over many eons. Then the great, young star saw the brightest light he had ever seen. It was so bright it hurt his eyes. He journeyed to this star, to the true end of the cosmos, where as he approached, the great star blinded him by its light. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, his sight was back to him, and he saw a great mirror. He then looked upon himself for the first time and realized that the bright lights he had seen did not blink out, but only seemed to disappear when he came near by his own great light. In him was a far greater light than any light he had ever seen in any other.

  By the knowledge of his own light he came to know his destiny. He would be the light that shines for others and not seek to have them shine for him. He would be the beacon others were saved by, and would not seek to be saved by them. He would serve, and not seek to be served. He had finally discovered in himself his own original starlight. So I say to you, my young man: shine, save and serve. All your days do this.