The Star Fisher Read online

  THE STAR FISHER

  The Biography of a Dream

  by

  Christopher F. Mills

  The Star Fisher

  The Biography of a Dream

  Published by

  The Moving Map Storybook Company

  a division of

  The Shag & Golf Company

  A love letter writ in

  The Field of Wonders

  Copyright 2014 by The Moving Map/C.F. Mills

  International Standard Book Number on record

  All rights reserved, including the reproduction

  in whole or part in any form.

  First edition published on January 21, 2014

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  After love, then comes the bittersweet verse

  There is this epilogue that is meant to mend

  As after injury, comes the sweet nurse

  For true love that hath found its earthly end

  Every broken heart hath this dread need

  Upon the sad memory that be left

  When from its sad cockles, it will choke and bleed

  With fell time and thick emotion, all bereft

  In sorrow's love song is the heart's true ending

  So fail not, that when thy love is done

  To hear the strain and give thy heart, its mending

  And whisper the immortal verse well won

  From Hellen's amaranthine Mount Parnassus

  Where shines the ageless light of Hesperus

  To love

  The Star Fisher

  The Biography of a Dream

  Green Acres nursing home

  I met her on January 7, 2012 at Green Acres Nursing Home, where I delivered twenty-four boxes of homeostatic products. After unloading I spent a few moments to walk around and look at my own future—if it is to be that I am so lucky to live so long. At the end of a hallway I noticed a woman sitting in a wheelchair with her head down. I approached and knelt in front of her and she raised her head. Her face was wrinkled as a dried grape and her blue eyes were pale and faded, but I could see past all that to the beautiful woman she once had been, and was yet. I judged her to be at least eighty, if not ninety. We smiled together. Hers was a damaged, heartfelt smile; the true and humble kind. She was frail and fractured, but the life was still in her eye. Fractured, I knew, because nobody lives that long without having bedded all the sorrows of life. Nobody gains that many days and does not know the experience of complete loss. Fractured, because fractured was writ as the last verse of her being.

  The injured aspect of her life was as patent as her blue eyes. They were a faded pastel, like the earliest days of spring, before the darkest, richest flowers bloom. Their color had been drained. Everything about her was wan and weak. Everything, nearly, had emptied from her. But her life, what little was left, remained in her and I wondered if most days she probably sat with her head in her chest, until some stranger came along to smile at her and make her remember she was still alive.

  I introduced myself. She smiled again and put her hand to her throat and made a movement that indicated she was not able to speak. I nodded my head and said, “Well now, it is high time I met a woman who couldn't talk back to me. You must be the perfect woman. Will you marry me?”

  The smile that spread across her face and ended in her eye was a delight to see. She reached toward me in the gesture of a hug so I reached and embraced her and as I did I could feel her need of love and I knew that she had not been hugged in a very long time. When I drew back there were tears in her eyes. She could not speak, but she could cry, and by that, communicated everything. I took a napkin out of her box and dabbed away her tears and said,

  “Now what are you crying for? I am the one who should be crying. The only reply you gave me was a charitable hug one would give a beggar man. A simple, no thank you, young man, as I am otherwise engaged, would have been sufficient.”

  And she laughed, but no sound issued from her throat, just a slight and happy change of her facial muscles. That threatened to make me tear up a little and I told her I had to go but I would sure come back to see her.

  I was busy the next week, but that was not a good enough—or true—reason why it took me so long to go back. I just made sure not to get around to it. I told myself my business was more important. The pathetic truth is I was not man enough to face the fear of it. When I did go back, ten long days from the day I met her, I learned she had died the day before. They still had her wheelchair, sitting quiet and empty, against the wall. I stared at that damned thing for five minutes and felt the shame that was mine to feel. I had known her for only a few moments but it seemed now like I had always known her and then I let her die alone without saying goodbye. I let go the last hug without having given it. I was a thief for that. I turned around and walked back out, making sure not to catch the eye of any single person there. I will never forgot her. I think of her now.

  Her name was Temple. She was born in the century just passed.

  The delivery man

  I deliver business and industrial products for a saint of a man named San Diego De Le Martinez. He lost his unofficial sainthood status long ago, after losing too many dollars at the penny slots, but he kept the name of a saint, as it is an old habit. He came to seek his fortune in America from Columbia fifty years ago. As I see it, he found his fortune many decades ago. But he is a hard-charging man and always on the go and to him, like to most, fortune is always in the future and never in the present. But I believe, on slow days, he realizes he succeeded at finding his fortune.

  I met him one day at his gas station. We struck up a conversation and I began working for him soon after. I don't make much money, as far as worldly fortunes go, but I like the driving and the time to think and the opportunity to see different locales. I like delivering things to people. They are always happy to see the products they have ordered arrive right on time. I am very good at getting things to far away places, and right on the nose. San Diego gives me a hard time about it, even though I have never once been late, but that is just what Colombian and American bosses do. Keeps people on their toes. I don't take his remonstrations seriously. We both know he is full of it. I get the product to where it needs to go on time, and often against incredible odds. One time I made a twelve-hour trip in seven hours. That was a proud day. I ghosted a big rig that was hot on the go pedal. I figured he was breaking the speed law well enough for at least two, and didn't believe it right to let his rebel act go to waste, so I joined in. Then I had to sit and wait five hours before my customers showed up, right on time.

  I deliver things on time because it is my job, but I don't take it, as an idea in itself, seriously. People worry too much about the idea of “on time”. If you stop to reason it out, on time for what, exactly? The things people spend all their time wanting on time end up sitting around and collecting time and dust. The things people actually need right now, they never get around to doing anything about at all. That would be puzzling if I did not know well that people are, in general, distracted.

  While working for San Diego I met the Star Fisher. He, too, I came to understand, had a parcel he needed delivered—a package far more important than all the other packages delivered here and there by harried and hurried delivery men. But he was not overly concerned about the time, even though time was running out for him. He was not worried because he had faith, that the time would be enough, as long as the work was done. Over the six months that I knew him we talked about this package. It was a package of thought. The package was a story. It is one of the secr
et kind of packages that San Diego sometimes gives me, a small one, bundled up tight and set under the seat, to be given to one person in particular at a certain time and place. Who the Star Fisher's secret package is I am not exactly sure. I believe it is for more than one but not for many. Who it belongs to will know it, when they open it. All the rest will consider it just some other's package and not their business and carry on with their normal routine, busy and harried and hurried to get it there on time. Get what there? I don't know. That is their business. We all have our own deliveries to make and the destinations all seem to be different, but I kind of believe they are all also the same. Somewhat. But I am not sure.

  After my pale, blue-eyed lady, I did not go back to Green Acres until later that year. It was June 24, as a matter of fact. I remember the day well. But the months since have been a blur of time, mystery and memory and it seems to have been a lifetime or two compressed into a few short months. I have lived my own life, plus the life of the Star Fisher, and by that have aged more in my spirit in the last year than all other years combined. Not a painful growth, but a growth in understanding. I think it was a short trip into eternity that made the time go by so slow, yet so quick. I don't know. I don't know a lot, now that I think about it. I just know that these past few months with the old man were extraordinary in their appearance and curious in their disappearance.

  The ring

  1929

  It was an heirloom from his great-grandfather; an old ring picked up overseas in 1915, during the First World War. Inscribed in it were Latin words they did not know the meaning of, but believed they were something very special and ancient. The ring represented wonder to them and they held it as a sacred gift straight out of all the time that came before them. The ring was too large for their small fingers. They were both very young, but old enough to know that wonder was the magic elixir of life. One day the girl said they would bury the ring beneath the great oak and let it simmer in the earth until the day they would come back and dig it up—after they had built a new age of wonder in the world. She had said,

  “Do you realize we have the stuff of stars in us? We are made of stardust and starlight and in each of us is original starlight! We will tell the world this and by that knowledge, an age of wonder will come into the world.”

  As they reached into the hole together, holding the ring, they made a pact that if either one of them died, the other would go on to found the age of wonder they had talked forever about. They both promised and then set the ring in the hole and covered it up. And all that was a very long time ago now. About eighty-four years, give or take. The old man's memory was fading when he told me all this, but that is when he believed it was. He was pretty sure of it. When they buried the ring she was eight years old and he was eight and one month.

  Present day

  2013

  This story began in the long ago, far back in the beginning of eternity, when love began. It is an old story, older than you or I could know. The beginning of a story is more of an introduction to the event that we, as partially-conscious and mostly ignorant beings, can see with our eyes, touch with our fingers, know by our senses and date by our calendars. But time is far older than any memory and all that is here now had its beginnings in a time and a place that none of us could know. So I do not know the true beginning of this story but can only introduce you to it as I was introduced.

  He told me he felt the true beginning of it was in the birth of a star that long ago lived and died. That is how he saw this love story, that its genesis is in atoms belonging to the same part of the same star that blew into smithereens long ago and when those atoms—related by the blood of one star—met again after a long spell of time, that old connection was remembered, if but faintly. It is the story of his love for two beings, so to speak. One he felt he knew far longer than any calendar could define and the other he felt he knew near just as long. Both knew about the other and both liked each other. There was no animosity that way. In his story he would not differentiate between the two, for as he said, that is the mystery he could never figure out himself, which was one and which was the other. To him, they both seemed to be the very same. One spoke for and through the other as often as the other spoke for and through the one.

  If you think about it, as the story progresses, you might be able to figure out the one from the other. But I have already tried that, and I couldn't do it, at least not until I was deep into the story and then the dim light bulb went off in my head and I got it. And I am the one with the advantage of a direct telling. So it is a mystery story, of a sort. Anyways, if you figure out all mystery then there will be no more mystery, so my advice is not to try that. And for the record, this is not so much a story as a relating. The plot of this story is the plot of a dream. It is the simple biography of an old man's dream.

  The physical introduction here on this lukewarm rock was when he fell in love with a beautiful being, and a very long ago it was, he said it felt like a small part of eternity, but it was not so long ago, after all. He loved her true first time he saw her and only needed the time after that first meeting to make it known to a slow mind and careful heart. It takes a special creature to haunt you with her beauty for a lifetime.

  He writ many obscure poems and long letters of deathless love for her and many times he layed flat on his back for and because of her. She had broken his heart time after time and yet he went back to her with forgiveness. She had been better to lesser men than she had been to him. But he figured it was because she wished for the greatness for him that his young heart dreamed of in the long ago and so had given to him the gift of lonely days he needed to reach that place within. She was his love, and his harsh task-master, too. It was complicated.

  He said she was beautiful. And she was and is. I have seen the pictures of her. She was the most beautiful I have ever seen. He said she was so beautiful that no other could compare. No other man, woman or beast had her grace and charm. She was a charmer, that is sure. Many times he would have been quit of her by his own will, but her spells brought him back from that decision to let loose the tie that bound him.

  She was coy sometimes and perfectly shy at other times. She could be cloistral and other times she was in his face and loud as a foghorn. He loved her the more for her change of personality. She was multi-dimensional. She kept him guessing and on his toes. She was the most intelligent being he ever knew. He learned everything he knew from her. He asked her many questions and she always answered them. And then, too, she asked him questions and he answered those. She was very respectful of questions and very patient with ignorant answers. He appreciated her for that. In her eternal mind were the verities of all ancient and future worlds. Forgive me if I speak so highly of her. I am only recording what he told me about the matter. But perhaps you would say the same things, for this woman is known well by many. You may know her as well as he did, or far better. He dreamed countless dreams, and she was in every one of them. She was the dream of his soul that begot all other dreams. He knew a lot about her, but as soon as he thought he knew all there is to know, she would spring some new knowledge on him. This always humbled him and let him know how little it was that he really knew about her.

  In a word, he adored everything about her. And sometimes he scorned her, but he always went back to understanding it was not her that he scorned, but his own ignorance relative to her. She was his god and he worshiped her fiercely. He was possessive of her and would have kept her close by him as much and long as he could. But he knew she would leave him when she had had enough of him, and when she did, she would forget him as if he had never been born at all.

  He used to rue this future, now past, fact. But then he became grateful about it. She was not his to keep, after all, but only to hold for a little while and only when she allowed it.

  So this is love story, biography, fairy tale and a full fool's course on worldly philosophy. And it is mystery. And the mystery of their having come together is the same mystery of all thing
s mysterious: just the coming together of parts that were always together, with the connection between them unknown. I am not so sure that it is true that all things are connected, that is a bit too honey-dipped, even for me, but this I am sure of: more things are connected than any of us can know.

  I make the Star Fisher's love letter public much like the potentate did with his Taj Mahal, just not so ostentatious nor expensive. I had no bonded souls by which to tote the words that built this poor monument. I was the only bonded soul that carried these words of his. I carried all his own stones here and set them as I saw fit. It was my best try to leave a memorable and lasting imprint of an old man's love for one who was sacred. He told me the story here and there during the summer and fall of 2013 and I sure wondered what it was as it came and then one morning late into it, I knew. I understood.

  It is short and simple discourse to their eternal meeting here. It is for one who was sacred, who inspired his mind to wonder again; inspired his heart to love again; inspired his mind to curiosity again. It is for the inspirational heart who stood by him, when all others stood away from him. She was the one he was destined to love forever and I was destined to write about it. My poor service is to her, the most curious, enchanting and beautiful thing he ever knew. Here are some of the answers to some of the many questions they posed to one another. There is lots of terrestrial and celestial philosophy in it, but that is bound to happen when two star-crossed philosophers meet and fall in love. I did not write this story to sell millions of copies and to be honest, don't believe it is meant for that. I don't believe it is that kind of story and I do not really care. I think it is meant for a special few, maybe only one. In the end, I had to write what I was given to write.