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| Birthday island garden |
I have been on this island for a very long time. I had been sailing with friends when I fell into the water, finding the rubber raft descended in the dark and drifting further away until no one had found me as the night sky with no stars brought only silence until a few days passed. The water all around me glitters in the daytime sun, in the middle of I know not where and how just far away. Every year I write a note and seal it tightly in a bottle so one day it will be found. One day the bottle floated back, tightly with its lid but without the note inside. So maybe friends have read it and perhaps I will be found.
It was 1963 when I awakened and found myself here in this place, where no one else has come for many years. Yet I survive, day after day, watching and waiting for a boat, a plane, a sign of someone arriving to take me home again. I will be forever patient, writing another letter, with that hope---no knowledge---I will be found, and soon.
I remember watching television just before the journey that brought me here in that fall of '63. President John F. Kennedy was on Huntley-Brinkley going to give a campaign speech someplace in Texas. He really is handsome. He is very old right now, over ninety years, for I was young and listened to his words. His life would be so rich with such a loving family all around, especially Robert, since those brothers seemed so close, close enough that some might think they could share their women too. And Jackie, John's sweet wife, is always beautiful in her fashionable suits and hats that somehow I can never picture her with a gray-haired husband.
I wonder who won the election in 1968 after Kennedy's second term. I know some people think Robert would make a good President, and I have often wondered if he was elected too. Somehow I rather prefer Senator Humphrey from Minnesota. I've liked him since reading his introduction to a textbook on desegregation and besides once he takes a stand on something, he never changes his mind. Maybe Adlai Stevenson got another chance to be President in spite of his divorce. Rockefeller is another man I have always liked a lot because as my husband, Frank, once said, “You gotta admire a man who's been married to the same woman for 25 years.
At least Nixon got out of politics after he made a fool out of himself in 1962. Wish I knew what was going on.
And poor Frank? I guess after all this time he went and married someone else. Maybe he had a kid or two or even three, I hope. He always liked kids, he said, so raising them and putting them through college would not be difficult. After all the future has been so bright for everyone, with college cheap and all those good jobs folks can get with a good education.
College was such fun. I remember it so well those years ago. We were passionate about so many things, and all my friends and I were active in civil rights movements as well. Dr. King would now be in his 80's and likely made a difference with his work over all these years. I just hope he never got involved in politics.
I think of my brother now who got a job with the railroad just after I started college, and I wonder how he is. It was such a stroke of luck to start training as a conductor in an industry with such advancement possibilities and job security.
My old friend, Larry, is surely now retired. He got a job writing for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, a newspaper with great potential, likely thriving still today. The country needs good journalists, for certain, since newspapers have always been a reliable source of information that everybody trusts.
Whatever happened to my good friend, Jeanie? I often think of her. She was such fun but a bit of an oddball too. I wonder if she still thinks that the Communists are behind fluoridation.
I'd like to travel when I get back home, but I would not go too far away unless it's something special and I can take my friends along. But I'd like to visit New York City and walk around 42nd Street one night and take in a movie.
I've learned to harvest food here, where the land is fertile and the rains bring fruit and flowers all around. Back home it's too bad farmers have to burn potatoes and throw grain in the river because they don't have enough storage. Maybe we could sell some to a foreign country like Russia.
How beautiful it must be in California now and how prosperous as well. Frank told me, the day I left for that fateful boat trip years ago, how clean and clear the beaches are in California, the water all around, so plentiful and flowing, like the very fountain of youth., that we might want to move there. It must be fun to live in a place like California where you can buy a house so cheap and travel with such quiet reflection along uncluttered roads. For sure I would consider moving there to have that simple life if I am ever found.
I worried about Myrna and still do. How I wish I had been there to have consoled her for the mistakes she made when we were all in school. She was such a pretty girl, but how she ruined her whole life, deciding to live with her boyfriend in another town to have her baby, so no one would find out. But we all knew, and that meant Myrna might never find another man if her boyfriend let her go. After all, living with some guy can scar a girl for life.
We sent a man to the moon those many years ago and I'll bet now ships go to Mars. Maybe that's the trip that I can take with friends someday. No President would ever want to end the space program, leaving Russia's Sputnik to prevail.
I have to end this letter now and hope it finds you well, whoever you are and wherever you are when you find the bottle with my note inside. It is my birthday, yet I don't know and really haven't for a long, long time these many years have passed. I am old now, and my hair is gray, but then one day is like another when you have no way to measure time except the sun and stars.
The silence deepens for awhile, and morning comes again. I seem to hear the sounds of footsteps on the sandy shore. I hold this bottle in my hand, for a toast of celebration, as a hopeful heart looks forward to those good, old days again.
