Author Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida, USA, in the 1940s, with a sailfish he had caught
“Hello! What are you doing there?” I asked.
The eyes didn’t answer, nor did the face of the somber tabby cat perched safely in the leaves on the trellis—which led me to reflect on the other eyes I saw this early morning (or rather did not see) as I ushered the little spider, with a dish brush, out of my kitchen sink.
How many other eyes surround us even when we ignore them?
That sounds threatening, but I don’t mean it that way.
There are all the eyes of unknown or forgotten friends.
There are the eyes of strangers.
There are the eyes in the yellow centers of daisies and in the light flashing off the leaves of holly.
The eyes of children, the eyes of dogs.
And the eyes of my tabby cat.
Then came an email from the man, now middle-aged, who due to the vagaries of three adults, one being me, became my stepson when he was five years old.
Doug has the gift of remembering only happy moments. One he reminded me of today happened off Key West in the 80s when my then-husband, his two sons, and my son Will took a deep-sea fishing boat far out into the ocean.
As Doug remembered it, Will, always a passionate fisherman, cast with an enormous rod from the seat at the prow of the boat to which he was attached.
Within minutes, a magnificent sailfish broke the surface of the ocean, flying up in a desperate attempt to get rid of the hook in it’s mouth.
Will reeled the huge creature in. I don’t remember how it died; someone must have clubbed it on the deck. It was eight feet long, spectacularly colored, blue and silver, the colors rapidly fading as the fish died. I don’t remember its eyes.
On shore, we found a taxidermist who made the sailfish into a permanent record of what seems to me now a terrible act of destruction. But Doug remembers the triumph of the catch.
And this leads me to my favorite Ernest Hemingway novel, his last, called Islands in the Stream. An alienated, long-divorced husband and father decides to take his three sons on a fishing trip in hopes of restoring their ruined relationships. But when one of the sons fails to reel in a large fish—maybe a sailfish—his father derides him as a weakling and the possibilities of reconciliation are destroyed.
Heather Cox Richardson in her remarkable Letters from an American calls this “Cowboy Individualism,” the myth aimed particularly at disempowering women.
I’ve come a long way from the cat’s eyes in my garden, but this is one of the pleasures of writing my posts.
May you all have a pinch of Doug’s optimism mixed with my darker interpretation of reality.
Holly Oakland has eyes. She has a polished and sophisticated shininess.
Holly recently came to live in my yard. I am happy to consider her a symbol of good.
Heather’s webpage has her last name as Richardson,—looks like we have here yet another example of the ephemerality of names.
Subtle. The “b” stays silent—subtle, even.
Thank you, James – you are correct!