What a Beautiful Piece of Writing!

The Promenade Deck was bathed in a light like the rustic gold that conquistadors died for and galleons carried to kings living well and far away.  Ensenada and the Mexican hills were behind us now, slowly fading into the backdrop of sky July blue and the ribbon of browned land that perspired beneath it.  It was five o’clock and Royal Caribbean’s ‘Monarch of the Seas’ carried us due west into a spangled liquid sonata that rejoiced in the midsummer sun.  We made for an island on the bright horizon and the marine breeze stroked me fondly and offered a gentle song as it ran its errand of cooling mercy toward the town we’d bade farewell.  I held Josephine in my arms and knew a rapture beyond what could be phrased.  The great symphony of life flowed in sanguine forte all about me.

Los Angeles was our destination, the base from which our journey had commenced only yesterday.  But it wouldn’t be a straight run for the colossal cranes and colored containers that lined the shore of our home harbor.  Ships Evergreen and building block stacks of Hyundai orange and Hanjin blue awaited our arrival in another place where hands worked hard and clocks dawdled and teased.  But it was time to cruise, time to roam and time to find our moment in the glorious sonnet that begged us to feel the hallowed freedom, the sacred sweetness of it all.  The sky and the water and the light that swirled and danced between them called to those who could listen and delivered a pledge that now was the perfect point that every instant before had labored to create.  As the last couple who shared our heavy metallic overlook departed, I realigned myself with liberty and pure bliss and silently thanked the heavenly financiers who had bought this priceless eve for my beloved wife and me.

We didn’t speak because we knew it just wouldn’t do.  We realized we had discovered that rare gilded span that linked mere mortals with eternity.  For this golden gate had prospectors perished and 49ers forsaken claims on mother lodes untold.  This was the promised land that fools and lovers and ancient dreamers had struggled to hold and it ran through my soul and told me that the alchemist’s magic was here.  Beyond there were tin words and pyrite follies and the musings of maniacs deafened by the crass montage of mercurial importance in Mercedes black and Malibu blue.  We were but sailors uniformly uninformed on a vessel without a compass or agenda and we knew not of this night’s destination or destiny.  But exultant purity had no need of such and pride and vain practicality quaked somewhere in L.A. or San Francisco now fractured and unseen.

In the flaxen wayfarer’s wind, finding Neverland had been accomplished with ease and a soft landing just east of Eden was executed without study or strain.  The island before us was dusty chocolate lacking flavor and forlorn.  But in its exile pacific and sodden pastoral, it conjured potent reverie of opposite isles far to the east and Far Eastern.  I took another sip of the roiling white capped lapis lazuli seven decks below and remembered Hong Kong and Manhattan.  I saw districts Empired and Oriental and teeming with tall glass towers, designs from Tokyo and Turin and traffic snarling with yellow taxis and red Toyotas.  And as Josephine’s silken black hair fluttered and kissed my chin and cheeks, I felt sad for Hang Seng hobos, Wall Street wanderers and atolls marooned in an isolation from which to watch helpless and taciturn as life unfolded in glowing Technicolor all around.

Somewhere deep inside I felt the connection with it all, the flow far from Melville’s insular Tahiti.  Instead of fearing to cast off from this space so full of joy, this late noon idyllic and awash in flawlessness, I poured myself into the irresistible forward motion of life carried now on a thousand feet of cruise liner.  A thousand busy thoughts surrendered to the notion that I was moving at light speed through a life a million times more compelling than that of landed gentry in grounded precincts and Land Rovered driveways located in zip codes as posh as 90210.

For this day I could die happy like the soiled conquistador who knew the gold at the end of the rainbow.  In Beverly Hills, the kings and queens of Rodeo Drive and The Polo Lounge struggled to hold what I saw with my eyes and understood in my heart.  Foolish and without hope of triumph were their earthly efforts.  It was Riviera summer and a treasure trove of elation drifted with me into the approaching night.  I felt its tender touch and paid heed to its warning whispered lightly and in time.  Reach not for that which can’t be held.  In truth, reach not at all.  For every pristine twinkling shall make your acquaintance if but naively you refrain to hear the music perpetual and scored just for you somewhere beyond the stars.