Sunday

Sunday
By
James Strauss

The boy sat on the sand atop the low rocks, staring down into clear lapping water. He carefully lowered his small hand down until it was just beneath the surface. He waited. There it was again. A solid thrumming vibration. It lasted for a few seconds before it was gone. The boy pulled his hand out, and then carefully wiped it on his “T” shirt. The shirt had been a gift from his grandfather on his eighth birthday. In big red letters on the front it said ‘NEVER ON SUNDAY…” which only made sense because of his name. When he’d been a child, the boy and his twin had been called ‘two scoops of an ice cream Sundae’ by someone. His brother had been Ice Cream for a while after, and he’d been Sundae. Nobody called his brother Ice Cream anymore, but the Sundae nickname had never gone away. He finger signed to people that his name was Peter, but they called him Sunday in spite of his communications. The confection had somehow changed to the day of the week, over time.
He watched a dark shape flow through the beautiful lagoon. It swam underwater most of the way. Occasionally there would be a flourish at the surface, and then it would continue moving back and forth across the lagoon, under the surface.
Peter was not afraid. He knew they would come back for him. It was his own fault, being left on the island. The boat had been crammed with families, with kids all over the place, and his father had one room while his mother had another. The vacation plan had been made that way because his parents were getting a divorce. Peter had stayed in his Dad’s cabin, but not really. It was too hard to not cry about what was happening to his family, and most of the kids aboard played and slept all over the boat, anyway. Plus he was a twin. He could understand how they had not missed him. He was used to it, being both a twin and deaf. He lived in his own world his mother said, in spite of her having taught him to read lips and use sign language years before. His brother had not gotten sick when he was a baby so he could hear just fine, whatever hearing really was. Peter understood hearing, just as he could remember never having ‘heard’ anything, but he couldn’t understand what it was like. People could feel vibrations with their ears like Peter could see with his eyes. He knew that it must be really neat to ‘hear’ but he also didn’t feel bad about being deaf. Peter noticed things other people didn’t, like the vibrations in the water. The dark moving shape in the lagoon was talking to Peter. He knew it. He just didn’t know what the animal was or what it was saying.
The sun wasn’t very hot and he had a tan, so he stayed by the lagoon. He wasn’t going to make the mistake of crawling into the thick undergrowth that ran like band across the length of Green Island. Doing that had caused him to be left behind. Peter knew the boat would come back. He was just afraid that they wouldn’t remember what island they’d left him on. The boat had made many stops the day before. It was on a special excursion up into the unexplored northern islands of the Hawaiian chain.
The night hadn’t been so bad. Peter loved Hawaii. It was warm and the soft winds and rough sand were wonderful. The water was so clean he wished he could drink it. But he knew better. Being thirsty was no excuse for drinking seawater his Dad had repeated to him when he’d tasted it a couple of times. But there was no fresh water on Green Island, not that Peter had found, and he couldn’t go back into the bushes, unless it was just the edge to relieve himself. He knew he needed water. He was hungry but his Dad had once told him that a survivor of a shipwreck, not too far from the island he was on, had gone over a month without anything to eat. The boat would be back long before a month went by, Peter just knew.
He stuck his hand back in the water. The moving animal ‘talked’ to him right away. Peter signaled hello back by folding his right thumb into his palm and then waving outward under the water. He pulled his hand out quickly when the thing swam toward him. It was so big. Peter cringed away from the water, wondering if the sea animal could come up onto the sand and get him. But it didn’t.
It was a dolphin. The boy had seen them on television and once at Sea Life Park on the island of Oahu. It was bigger than he thought it should be, but then he’d never seen one up close. The dolphin stuck its head out of the water, half of its body really, and then vibrated wildly at Peter. It backed up and sank as it vibrated. It did the same thing, over and over again.
“What do you want?” Peter signed, using both hands, but the dolphin didn’t change what it was doing, or the vibration it was sending.
“I don’t understand,” he signed in resignation. After awhile the animal left to swim in circles, before returning.
The afternoon came and went. Peter grew thirstier. He knew the heat and wind were drying him out but he didn’t know what to do about it. He felt so alone and tired. The dolphin was all he had. At the park people had been swimming with the dolphins. They had all looked so happy, but his Dad had said he was too young when he’d asked to try it. Before the sun began to set Peter made a decision. Waving hello with his right hand under the water, he moved off the rocks to stand in the lagoon. The water was only up to his waist. He shivered as the dolphin approached. Then he lurched backward in fear when it brushed against his right knee as it passed.
Peter slapped the surface of the water. The dolphin swam quickly to the other side of the lagoon where it could not be seen. Peter watched for many minutes, but the animal did not come up for breath. Peter began to worry that it might somehow be gone, although the lagoon was closed in by a reef and didn’t seem to have a way out.
All of a sudden, from nowhere, the dolphin swam rapidly by the boy, leaped through the air and landed on the sand atop the rocks. It vibrated rapidly, bobbing its head up and down while craning around to stare at the boy with one big eye. A sizeable fish fell from its mouth, flopping onto the sand. With a few twisting shifts of its great bulk the dolphin jerked itself off the sand and fell with a huge splash back into the lagoon, where it disappeared with a multi-colored flashing of reflected light.
Peter climbed to where the fish lay, still moving, as if it was trying to imitate the dolphin’s escape maneuver. The fish was bitten almost in half. Peter’s salivary glands filled his mouth with liquid. He was terribly hungry. The meat of the fish looked just like the sushi his Dad had introduced him to at Nick’s Fish Market on Oahu. The chef there had really liked Peter. He’d liked him even better when Peter kept asking for more of his small chunks of wrapped Ahi and raw crab bits.
He waited for the fish to stop moving. Then he poked it several times. Satisfied, Peter grasped the back part of the fish, separated it from the front, and then washed it thoroughly in the water of the lagoon. Finally, and very gingerly, he held it up in both hands. He took a bite of its flesh. Once he began he could not stop. He chewed, clawed, and then scraped pieces of the flesh free of skin, bone and other stuff on the inside.
He didn’t sit until he was done. His little stomach swooped outward like a beach ball when he finally lay down to watch the sun set. Peter made sure the top of the fish was near his foot when he closed his eyes, but his last thoughts before sleep took him were about the dolphin. It had given him a fish to eat and it had provided him with company. His last thought was about how he might be able to teach the dolphin sign language, even though the animal had only flippers, not hands and fingers.
Another day passed. Another fish was provided by the dolphin. During the long daylight hours Peter learned to swim with the rapidly moving animal. Actually, he didn’t swim. He held onto the dolphin by grasping one fin firmly with both of his small hands. The dolphin took him around the lagoon many times. Somehow it knew just how fast it could go without him being forced from it by the pressure generated by their speed. Peter’s face hurt from grinning while on the rides. In spite of his tan he was sunburned, but he was no longer dehydrated or hungry. Somehow, he realized, the fish the dolphin provided had enough water in it to keep him from being too thirsty.
The lagoon was a closed in body of water. Riding on the dolphin had proved that. Peter realized that the animal was trapped inside the lagoon. There was no way out. A storm must have somehow thrown the animal high enough to go over the reef.
“Maybe you got left behind like me,” Peter signed, when he was once more sitting in the sand by the side of the pool. The dolphin floated contentedly nearby, poking its head out of the water every once and awhile. Peter liked signing underwater. He’d never done that before becoming friends with the dolphin.
The helicopter came on the morning of the third day. There was no warning, except the dolphin raced away for no reason and disappeared into the deepest part of the lagoon. He felt the awful presence of the machine before he saw it. Peter's whole universe shook wildly, and then the sand around formed into a tornado and spun madly about him. Peter cowered, wrapping his arms about his body, burying himself in what was left of the beach.
He peeked out under his arm when the pain and shaking began to subside. The big monster of a helicopter filled his field of vision between the lagoon and the thick band of vegetation. The giant rotor on top of the thing continued to spin, but generated no more wind. A man in a helmet and rough looking green uniform walked out from the helicopter.
He held out one hand to Peter.
“You must be Sunday,” he said, confidently.
Peter read his lips easily, and then nodded, thinking that it was not a good time to correct the man about his name.
The man motioned with one hand for Peter to approach. Peter shook his head. He stood and pointed at the lagoon. The man said something back toward the helicopter that Peter could not understand, and then turned to face the boy again.
“I know you can’t hear me,” he mouthed the words, slowly. “We know about the dolphin. We could see it from the air. We’ll come back and get it out of the lagoon after you come with us.”
The big smiling man held out his hand.
Peter shook his head as before, and pointed at the lagoon, as before.
The helicopter pilot thought for a moment, the lower part of his forehead, revealed under his helmet, wrinkling into a deep frown.
“I’m an officer in the United States Marine Corps. Have you heard of the Marine Corps?” the man asked.
Peter nodded his head vigorously, smiling for the first time.
“I promise you, on the word of the United States Marine Corps, that we’ll come back and get your dolphin out. Is that good enough?”
Peter thought for a few moments before taking the man’s hand with his own. With his right he signed with a bent thumb toward the lagoon to say goodbye, then patted his mouth and gestured outward to thank the animal for all it had given him.
From the door of the departing helicopter Peter looked down upon the lagoon. The dolphin was a visible blur near its center. Instinctively, the boy looked at the side of the pilot's helmet. Without looking back, the pilot raised his fist, then let his thumb slowly rise up into the air.
Peter smiled down toward the swimming dolphin as the helicopter flew him away.



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"AND THEN THERE WERE NUN..."

I read the New York Times this day and was not surprised. On the left side, all the way down the front page, they began a story about protesting Catholic Nuns. There are about sixty thousand of them left out there in the world. At one time there were many many more than that. They, apparently, do not wear the revealing (and respect demanding) habits of the past. I kind of knew that from somewhere, but it hit home with this article. The substance of the article was about how the leadership of the Catholic Church (read Pope Ratso) is opposing the Nuns because they have kind of gotten together to argue against a few idiotic things still supported by the Roman Catholics of Rome. They oppose, for example, the required celibacy of priests. The Pope is still big on this malformed and unsuccessful doctrine. And it is not, or at least I do not think so, that the sixty thousand remaining nuns are simply horny and want all those priests for their own. No, I am afraid that the nun's logic is more factually grounded (however fun it might be to think otherwise). It seems that, over time, the celibacy thing just has not worked at all. Priests have been out there screwing just about any human they could get their hands on for many many years. The Catholic Church is currently paying out billions in reparations because of the failure of celibacy among its priests. It seems that the pent up sexuality of these guys has led them to exploit young boys under their care. But the payouts have not fazed Ratso. He contends that celibacy works and must be kept in place. All priests must be male and they must not have sex. The male only thing is another piece of studied stupidity that the nuns oppose.

I was raised a Catholic and went to Catholic schools all the way up through my undergraduate degree in college. My elementary school nuns were the most noteworthy of my teachers. It was Hawaii right after the big war. The nuns at St. Augustine Elementary School, just off Waikiki, had just returned from surviving the entirety of WWII in Japanes prison camps. Those nuns were in no mood to take any garbage from elementary school children. Later, I was to train and then serve in the United States Marine Corps. The Corps had nothing on those nuns. My D.I., SSgt. Baines, could not have gone one round with Sister Michael Marie (a.k.a. Sister Joseph Louis), much less the dreaded Sister Gregoria (called the 'Flying Black Axe' for reasons unknown).

I am a writer today because of those nuns. I miss their disciplined learning techniques. Techniques no longer applied to school children anywhere. I learned the ABC's, how to decline a sentence, phonics, and the Chicago Style Manual of English. I learned them by trial and error, and the studied application of attentive pro-active pain. Those nuns did not have to strike often. They used a form of willful psychology and parental support no longer existent within the confines of our culture. I learned to speak in front of groups and to overcome embarrassment and failure. I got a C Plus in English at the end of 5th grade. And I still write very regularly to Sister Michael Marie and Sister Gregoria. In fact, when my book was recently published, I sent Sister Michael Marie a copy of the book (lovingly inscribed) and a copy of my fifth grade report card. I high-lighted the C Plus I received in English with a yellow marker, to point out the error of her conclusion. That was a month ago. I got a letter yesterday. She sent me the report card back with a note stuck to it. "You have improved" it said, and there was B Plus written in red over the crossed out C Plus. She also noted a few grammatical errors in the final production hard-cover novel! I suppose that is why I, and my publisher's editors, did not get an A.

The Catholic Church has not supported nuns in any way for fifty years. The older ones live in near poverty under poor conditions in run-down care facilities. The few younger ones do not even get habits to wear. They are allowed to work for the Church for free and get by as best they can. It is a shame. The value those women provided to millions of children across the world goes unrewarded and barely even thanked. Yes, they did it for the love of God, but come on! The Catholic Church is run by men. By White old men living in splendor inside stone chateaus. They are just like human leaders everywhere on earth. There is no difference, and there is about the same level of compassion exercised and exhibited toward those whom worked to put and keep them there, as exists in the civilian world outside.

I loved those nuns and tried my heart out for them. I did that because I knew, down inside, near the bottom of my little well of souls, they wanted the best for me. I really believed that they wanted me to succeed and enjoy life, and a good measure of bliss. They wanted me to be successful, simply because, well, in their prayerful and hallowed way, they loved me. They loved God above all, and then all the children in their charge. They still do. Their belief in me, and my belief in them, sustains me to this day.

The numbers of nuns are dwindling rapidly, as the older ones die off and no new ones come aboard. This is part of the design of the Catholic Church. I do not know why. Maybe, like most male leaders everywhere, Ratso and his Italian Mafia fear women. I just don't know. But I lament their passing. They have been a force for good and love out here, across the surface of this troubled earth. Those nuns left now deserve honors and a great retirement. The young ones, the few, deserve our endearing support...financially and emotionally, because it is good for us all. I am not much of a Catholic anymore, but I know a good thing when I experience it. I love those nuns, and you should too.

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