Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Brilliance Achieved While Clearing Snow

Every snow removal event begins with noble intentions. This time I will shovel. Shoveling is great exercise. Old people sometimes summon heart attacks with the effort of shoveling, so it must burn incredible calories. And shoveling forces quality time with my yard, my land, my little fiefdom on the corner of Nimitz St. and Pamela Pl. I can survey my kingdom like a baron while I scrape the concrete. And shoveling builds fortitude and work ethic, like I'm a role playing game character. Every stroke of the snow shovel is a point. When I was kid, I leveled up every few snowfalls, but an advanced guy like me takes years to unlock new achievements. Still. Someday, when I need to battle an abominable snowman or other extreme ice creature, I'll be ready.



You know what? The snow's a little heavier than I assumed. There's a few more inches than I thought. The snowblower will clear the brunt of it, but I'll clean up with a shovel. That will still count.














Jobs That, Like Clearing Snow, Will Eventually Do Themselves
1. Building demolition
2. Artificially aging new clothes so they look worn
3. Killing livestock
4. Wiping up spilled water off of surfaces that are unaffected by standing water
5. ???











My brother and I handled most of our family’s shoveling when we were kids, but not without an admirable amount of whining.  My dad, with saintly compassion, suggested we try a new approach.  “Try making a game out of it,” he suggested.  “Guess how many rows it will take you to finish the sidewalk, and see how close you are.”  As he had shoveled considerably more miles of sidewalk than I had, I tried it.  Now I count everything - minutes until the end of my work shift, hours until the weekend, socks that need to be folded, words in my writing, and swipes of the toothbrush. The long section of the sidewalk always takes about 90 rows.





People Who Benefit Most From Snowless Winters
1. Flip-flop manufacturers
2. Grave diggers
3. Bugs
4. Kids who really like rolling down hills
5. Bike messengers?













One thing I care about a lot more because of the snow - My shoes. We all do up here. We all have to. In some parts of the world, people can just throw on any pair of shoes at any time. Can you imagine what that would be like? Can you imagine how much less pressure those people face when it's time to leave the house? Up here, one needs to consider how much snow fell, what type of snow fell, how much ice covers the sidewalks, what kind of ice, how warm it will get, and what tasks the day will contain. Only then can an appropriate pair of shoes be selected, and we all know exactly which ones will work in every winter situation.
One thing I care about a lot less because of the snowA few weeks before a particularly nasty snowstorm about ten years ago, a middle-aged gentleman and his wife moved into the townhouse across the parking lot from my wife and me.  He drove a burnt-orange, shiny Firebird.  After the aforementioned snowstorm, he attempted to drive his perfectly stereotypic mid-life-crisis-mobile.  He spun his tires for ten minutes, spraying dirty slush fifteen feet up the side of our building.  Three weeks later, he sold the car.  He explained to me, “It just didn’t make sense for winter.” In fact, no cars make sense for winter. They're all covered in a salt glaze, and no matter what you do, your floor mats will be thick with dirty ice balls. So give up. You can get a car wash in April.

Every time I turn on the TV in the winter, I hope that one of the local weather anchors will break into show, out of breath with excitement.  She will try to collect herself as her weather teammate, also visibly perturbed, will furrow his brow and switch from his normal, forced exuberance to a calm monotone that indicates what he is about to say is very, very serious.  Then, they will both try to piece together the following story.  Meteorologist scouts stationed in northern Canada were awoken by the screeching of their instruments.  They sprang from their cots still half asleep, but were shocked into total alertness at the readings racing across their screens.  They ran a few tests that confirmed the wonderful news - the jet stream shifted south, which meant the south side of the Eau Claire, with my house as the epicenter, would be receiving a massive, record-breaking, mind-boggling amount of snow.  Then, the two anchors,  overcome by their happiness, would hug.

I really like snow. Sometimes I just need to remind myself.



Saturday, December 19, 2015

An Honest Christmas Letter

This is a work of fiction (that's "made up,"  for those of you who haven't been in an English class in awhile.) However, I make no guarantee that the people and situations depicted herein don't resemble real life people and events.

Happy Holidays from the Rasmussens!

2015 was another great year for our family, and we wanted to send along a quick update. One of the best parts of the holidays is making fun of each others' Christmas letters and pretentiously correcting their grammar. We double checked all our apostrophes, but theres' sure to be some mistake's! Here we go!

The one picture we got of the kids with their eyes open
The kids are both growing and learning new things every day. Our daughter finished up preschool at the top of her class, and started kindergarten towards the top of the bottom third. Her favorite part is picking out crazy outfits every morning, with wild colors and patterns, and it should only be another year or two before crushing peer pressure extinguishes that creative spirit. Our son became a second-grader, and his favorite subjects are lunch and coming home. He tried joining a soccer league, although he's pretty scared of the ball and the only reason he sticks with it is because one time we bought him a slushy from the concession stand at the sports center. We're all enjoying the daily routines of being a young family, like fighting over teeth brushing and managing the charging of everyone's electronic devices, which we all use way, way too much.

My new running shoes, lookin' sharp!
We all set some goals for 2015, and our updates are as follows. I strove to run a 5k at some point during the year, and I took several steps towards that goal. I bought running shoes, and wore them one time when I cleaned the garage. After that, I thought about running more than a few times, so I'm still making progress! My son decided to stop using the words "poop" and "fart" so often, and he failed miserably. Our daughter strove to accomplish some kindergarten basics, like shoe tying and not showing her underwear to everyone all the time because she just can't figure out that wearing cute dresses means she can't roll around on the ground. She's almost got the shoes taken care of! And my wife attempted to be more patient with the kids and me, and there's still a few weeks left in the year.

Our Netflix screen, where we spent a lot time this year
The biggest news for my wife and me is probably our television consumption in 2015. We rewatched Game of Thrones, caught up on House of Cards, and made it most of the way through Fringe, which is like X-Files, only crazier. We tried watching a few documentaries to be more socially responsible, but gravitated back towards The Office for the third time through. In 2016, we really hope to get to Orange is the New Black.

My wife's well-earned posterior
Early in the year, my wife set out on a brand new fitness and nutrition regime, which worked. She looks great! Unfortunately, her life is now devoid of happiness and joy as her world is consumed with carb counts and desperate yearning for the Tootsie Rolls the kids now have to hide in their rooms. I, on the other hand, have gained nine pounds, mostly on the backs of fun sized candy bars. Thankfully, I've only outgrown two pairs of pants. Everything else still fits!

November brought with it an unfortunate challenge for me in the form an ingrown hair on my chin. My wife unsuccessfully went at it with a tweezers early on, and we decided to give a few weeks to ripen. Eventually I caught it with the beard trimmer and the hair that unfurled seemed to be a foot and a half long! So, while things turned out alright, we were all pretty upset for awhile there, and hopefully we are out of the dermatological woods!

We hope all of our friends and family had as fabulous of a year as we did! We look forward to seeing many of you in 2016, and we wish all of you, near and far, a very Happy Holidays.

Love,

The Rasmussens

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

This Is Not a Music Blog, So Shugo Tokumaru

I know this isn't a music blog, and I'm not very good at playing the music discovery game. My iTunes is full and robust and replete with names that most of my peers have never heard of, but whenever I try to drop a musician full hipster style, it never works. Instead of going with whatever obscure Portuguese indie electro-pop group that plays non-stop in my house and in my head, I screw it up. "Have you ever heard of Radiohead? I just discovered them. Looks like they've been making music for awhile. Pretty heavy stuff. You should check them out."

But, hey, for real, I just found an album, a few years old, sure, but this is it. This is the music that comes closer to sounding like the inside of my head that anything I've come across. Plus, the artist is Japanese (+2 hipster points), the album is in Japanese (+3), features traditional instruments (+5), and has a sweet video that kills when you get into a game of Youtube tennis with friends (+10). Watch this.


Reddit's r/music shared this video, and I watched it twenty times in a row, then bought the album, and discovered that "Katachi" wasn't even my favorite song of the bunch.


This album has everything I love. It is one-hundred-percent, unabashedly, unapologetically happy. You'll hear clapping, and lots of people singing together. Tokumaru is a multi-instrumentalist, and the album contains plenty of weird ones. I wish I knew enough about music to describe what I mean, but it has a light-hit aesthetic delivered with with full pop music energy. The filler tracks between songs tread a little too far into Loony Tunes soundtrack territory even for me, but they are fun. This is fun music, get up in the bright, sunshiny morning music, go for a stroll and have a picnic music. It's probably WAY too sweet for most, but mixed in with all the sugar are some amazing flavors, flavors that are hinted at by acts like Sufjan Stevens in his more playful moments. This is pretty much what I hope for every time I buy a new album.


I don't know what it is, but Mr. Tokumaru will be one of three artists whose entire catalog I will acquire and love and be super proud of (the other two are Sufjan Stevens and They Might Be Giants). This is not a music blog, but I had to share. All the hand clapping and group singing and bubbly happiness has me far too excited.

Friday, November 13, 2015

The One-Year Anniversary of This Blog

Take that, Eric Rasmussen from one year ago. You said, I heard you say it, "I'll start this blog, but I know I'm just going to end up ignoring it." Proved you wrong.

The lake that inspired manuscript #3
To mark the first year of this effort, here's an update on my writing progress. Writers navigating the publishing labyrinth love reading about other writers' progress. There are gobs of places to read people's success stories, not so many places to compare one's data to those who are still fighting the noble fight. So, here are my stats.

Output: 
Since making the decision to pursue writing fiction as a professional, I have written three complete manuscripts (about 900 pages), seven short stories (about 140 pages), fourteen original creative nonfiction blog posts, a few articles for Volume One. I write just about every day. A lot of it is bad. Some of it is okay.

Successes: 
My goal was a blog post every two weeks, for a total of 26 posts. I hit 35, and one of them, Things I Left in My Classroom Over the Summer, hit 2300 views (thanks Reddit, I know you're not big on the blogs). My Volume One pieces have earned much positive feedback from friends, family, and strangers. Manuscript one earned one partial request. Manuscript two received seventeen total requests. Manuscript three enticed eight agents to look at more of the work, with numerous queries still outstanding, and a selection in a Twitter pitch contest (thanks Michelle!) Over fifty short story submissions with my name on them are being considered by various journals and websites. Through all of this I've made connections with all sorts of folks in the publishing world, including a handful of critique partners who I value profoundly. Lots of real-life, non-digital friendships have been strengthened through these writing efforts and a phenomenal writing group.

I used to waste a lot of time on the internet and watching HGTV shows. Now I'm working on something, towards something, and no matter what else, that feels good.

In the story, under this ridge, something exciting happens

Failures: 
93 rejections on manuscript one. 70 rejections on manuscript two. 51 rejections on number three, so far. A dozen rejections from short story and literary journals. For all the effort, I have not yet technically published any fiction.

Next steps:
I enrolled in an MFA program (Augsburg College, yo!), starting June of 2016. Manuscript number four sits prettily at 200 pages, and my goal is to finish by the New Year. Short story ideas abound. This blog is an actual thing. Motivation and hope persist.

The unbelievable, epic, heartbreaking ending takes place on a
frozen lake, much like this
When I started this trip, I thought what I wanted sat just over the next hill. Two states later, I'm still driving, convinced that we'll get there any minute now. If I am epically, monumentally wrong, I'll hit the ocean eventually, and it sure has been a pretty drive.

This blog, year two, stay tuned...

Sunday, October 18, 2015

A Record of the Foodstuffs I'll Never Eat Again

They're making Surge again, and... I hate to say it. Surge deserved to die.

Google "Crystal Pepsi" or "Nerds Cereal" and you will find plenty of nostalgia concerning all sorts of discontinued products. The thing is, most of those trendy foodstuffs of yore tasted bad or looked weird and earned their fates. Survival of fittest. Don't feel bad, it's nature's way.


But there are several products that I will never consume again, and it makes me sad not because they were some novelty, but because they tasted great. They were unique and now they're gone forever, and this is my gallery of foods I will miss, recorded for posterity and my aging memory.




Ore-Ida Cheddar Browns

My entire childhood, my family, my parents cooking brunch on a Sunday while my brother and I played Nintendo after church, cold winter mornings before school when my mom made us warm breakfasts because she cared about our health and our school performance and wanted to make us happy, all of that would rush back to me in a deluge of memory and feeling if I could just eat one more bite of an Ore-Ida Cheddar Brown. Those things were so good, salty and cheesy, and they took forever to cook, but it you left them in the pan they got so brown and delicious. One more box of Cheddar Browns, what I wouldn't give. I like to imagine someone out there has a box in the back of his or her freezer, but they would be so freezer burnt by now. Hope dies with ice crystals and freezer odor.


Jolly Good Fruit Punch


Jolly Good was a Wisconsin brand of soda, purchased by the can, which was delightful. Mixing and matching pop cans on a little cardboard pallet, that's how I learned to plan and organize. Sour Pow'r registers on many people's nostalgia scale, but Fruit Punch was so sweet and fruity and amazing that I can still taste it, unlike many of these other products. A bit of good news - Jolly Good has a Facebook page and is once again producing soda, for sale at Cedar Valley Cheese Store in Random Lake, Wisconsin. Supposedly more flavors are on the way, and maybe broader distribution. I will attempt to corral my optimism, as that news makes me quite excited.



Campbell's Select Italian Wedding Soup



My favorite canned soup of all time perished in the Great Campbell's Salt Purge of 2009. From what I can tell, they moved Italian Wedding to their "Healthy Selects" line, took out the sodium and the flavor, and when I ate that last can of the good stuff, I didn't even know. I would have appreciated it more. I would have spent more time. I would have licked out the inside of the bowl. Now they sell an Italian Wedding soup as part of the Campbell's Cunky Line, but it's not as good. It's got a weird, gross carrot aftertaste. I could try to make my own, but it would never compare.






Coffee Mate Blueberry Cobbler Creamer



Please hold on. I understand blueberry coffee sounds atrocious, but it wasn't. It so, so was not. This sweet nectar was never intended to last; it was a special holiday flavor, but I first tried it at my in-laws on a blustery winter day, Christmas or thereabouts, and it transported me, it flew me to a land of flavor where everything good about coffee and breakfast and fruit and baked goods and the holiday season blended together in a vortex of steamy warmth and sweetness. Cuddling has a flavor, and it's coffee with a generous pour of blueberry cobbler creamer.







Oompas


Apparently Oompas existed in the 1980's as Willy Wonka's version of Reese's Pieces, and there is plenty of candy nostalgia for that peanut butter version. But in the early 2000's, Wonka released a new Oompa, which copied Skittles, except bigger, chewier, and significantly tastier. Every time my new wife and I drove to visit my parents' northwoods cabin, we stopped at the Kwik Trip in Medford and I enjoyed a bag of Oompas while we held hands across the big bench seat of my 1985 Buick Regal. The scene was almost as sweet as the candy, sweet enough to make most people nauseous. Oompas were young love in a plastic pouch, and now they're gone. Thankfully my marriage survives.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

The Odd Phenomenon of the Wisconsin Corn Maze


Get in the car and drive at least 20 minutes. You’ll want to find a corn maze farm far enough away that you feel like you’ve left the city and reverted to something simpler, something agrarian, something like the way things used to be, with tractors. But you needn’t go farther than that. You’ll want to make it back by dinner.



Pack a sweatshirt, ‘cause there’s equal chances it’ll be warmer or colder than it looks. October sun is wily like that. If your spouse asks about bringing a coat, say yes.


Pay the people. Farming is hard for the farming family, especially when they spend a whole big chunk of land on parking and bouncy houses. Divide the total cost by the number of people you brought and the hours you manage to spend there. Cheaper than a movie.


Feed the animals. Goats, sheep, miniature horses, llamas, pigs, whatever they have. The creatures can’t possibly be hungry, they eat corn out of people’s hands all day, but they’re a hair closer to real wildlife than your cat or your dog, and we’re all supposed to share the planet, and the corn’s only a quarter.



When you’re in the actual maze, pretend you can’t hear the highway or see the snack trailer. Pretend you couldn’t just walk through the corn and out the side whenever you wanted. Imagine the sun sets, and something menacing lurks somewhere in the field with you, two rows away, ten rows away. If the way out obviously requires taking a left, take a right. You’ll get there eventually.


Appreciate the ingenuity. Corn mazes attract customers through tremendous lists of attractions. The pumpkin launcher took some serious engineering, but the hay pit is just a pile of old mattresses covered in hay, surrounded by hay bales. Vinyl gutters can be transformed into all sorts of impressive apparatuses, tennis ball tracks, rubber duck race courses, mini-golf holes. Kids will throw beanbags at just about anything, and if they’re filled with dry corn, even better.


Buy some gourds. You don’t eat them, and they look pretty strange, but a stack of them on your dining room table makes it feel like fall more than anything else you can do. And if they have pumpkins or apples, you might as well grab those, too. The Honeycrisps taste pretty good, and you’ll want to make a jack-o-lantern, you know you will, even if this year you’re pretty sure you won’t get around to it.


Take a big breath of the cool fall air. Consider the seasons and the passage time, if that’s the sort of thing you like. If not, buy a cup of cider. It's fall in Wisconsin, either way.




Thursday, October 1, 2015

How to Be a Football Fan in Packer- and Badger- Land

Everything that can be said about football and its meaning and significance has already been said, except maybe for this: I don’t like football.


Wisconsin Badgers 58, Miami (OH) Redhawks 0
Even that’s not an original sentiment. Some football anti-fan maintains an “I Hate Football” Facebook page, and stacks of articles highlight the damage the sport inflicts on our kids’ developing brains and the decimation it imparts on the minds and bodies of NFL alumni. The sport is sexist, and crude. It used to tempt husbands away from their wives, until women started watching, and now it tempts all of us away from Sunday chores and family time, from autumn corn mazes and apple orchards and productive time at work. If the hours sacrificed by the fans and the IQ points sacrificed by the players produced something tangible, maybe they would be resources well spent. But the season does not end with any legislation or cures for any diseases. The lessons taught to our young men about teamwork and hard work are important, but they are weakened when packaged with all the aggression and concussions.

My distaste for the sport has certainly not prevented me from watching a phenomenal amount of football, this season more than ever. Living in Wisconsin and ignoring the Packers is almost as foolish as living here and never purchasing a winter coat, so watching Aaron Rodgers and company barrel up and down the field is essentially required. A good friend invited me to a Badger game at Camp Randall. I took my son to the Homecoming game of the high school where I teach, and I’ve attended all of his flag football games. On the website for my fantasy team, all the columns of statistics are starting to make sense. When I was a pudgy kid, the television coming on after Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday brunch was my cue to retreat into the kitchen or into my Gameboy. Now I set aside time to watch the NFL draft each spring.



Memorial Old Abes 29, Hudson Raiders 17
I don’t like football. But I like everything that surrounds football. My state of 5.758 million people has built an identity around a sports team, the Green Bay Packers, and however artificial and meaningless the successes and failures of those 53 players and a dozen or so coaches are, they have given me a bond with millions of people. That’s insane, but it’s true--I can go anywhere in this state and meet anyone and feel like a little less of a stranger because we both have opinions on the effects of the loss of Jordy Nelson.

That Badger game, that was a bucket-list level experience. Wisconsin’s 58-0 victory helped, but when the students filed into the stadium in the middle of the first quarter, and the band filled the field at halftime, and the alumni stood up to sing and the rest of us stood up to dance in the second half, and the school inducted a handful of athletes into its hall of fame, and I had some memorable nachos, those moments were not about aggression and violence, those moments were about community and tradition and the breathtaking things we can do when we come together. I sat next to a friend who spent time at the University of Alabama and attended games there, and he made it sound like the experience there might be even more impressive, and in that moment I understood the entirety of college athletics.


At my school, the football team is not great, and has not been great since I started teaching there. Budgets are tight, instructional minutes are precious, and maybe we need to have a serious discussion about whether football and other sports are worth everything we invest in them. But the guys wear their jerseys on game days and standardized test scores and academic programs could never, never replace the pride they inspire. My neighbor in the English hallways coaches the Spirit Line/Cheerleading team, and she pointed out wins and losses have little to do with the success of a school sport. Helping a kid feel involved is a precious thing.



Packers 14, Vikings 6
My son loves playing football, and so far it’s easy for me to love it, too. He plays the flag version on an indoor soccer field, and while turf burns are brutal, the chances of more serious injuries are slim. The 6- and 7- year olds rotate positions, and for all the praise I offer my son for his math scores and reading abilities, his piano and artistic skills, his kindness and compassion, he is fa
r more proud of his two completed passes in his second game as an EC Indoor Sports Center Viking.

I don’t like football. Watching others inflict pain brings me no joy, watching others sacrifice their bodies and their minds feels a little too Greek coliseum for me. But for someone who doesn’t like football, I sure am becoming quite the fan.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

A Shark Story for My Son

Note: In 1937, a bull shark swam up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico to Alton, Illinois, where it was caught by a couple of fishermen. That's 700 miles as the crow flies, countless more in the twists of the river. Eau Claire, Wisconsin is only another 500 miles north of Alton. Who knows, stranger things...


They all said even though it was possible, it would never happen. They kept saying it as they stood on the bridge over the river, the lights of the TV cameras the brightest part of the cloudy fall day, with proof swimming thirty feet beneath them in the gray water.

“Bull sharks are part of the elasmobranchii subclass that can survive in both salt and fresh water, but it’s extremely unlikely they would swim this far north,” the biologist said as he clutched the lapels of his lab coat. “I just don’t see how that would be possible.”

The reporter lowered her microphone and failed to hide her confusion. The shark’s fin darted out from under the bridge after a group of ducks that flapped away just before they became lunch. “But there’s one right there,” said the reporter. “How do you explain that?”

The scientist stared at the outline of the shark before it faded into deeper water. “Bull sharks would never swim all the way to Wisconsin. It wouldn’t happen.”

Despite the disbelief of the scientists, there it was, swimming between the old railroad footbridge and the point of the river confluence. The government was convinced it was a hoax or an accident. Someone must have been transporting the shark who-knows-where for god-knows-what, and the truck crashed or, hidden in darkness, some joker backed up to a boat landing and released the beast. There was no way it swam all the way up the Mississippi, took a right at the Chippewa River, jumped over dams, dodged bridges, and navigated the shallow stretches without anyone noticing. No matter how the shark got there, the people who worried about that sort of thing were very worried. The sheriff’s small fishing boats couldn’t capture a beast like that. Killing the thing would cause an uproar. The best hope was that falling temperatures would push the animal south a little each day until it found the Gulf of Mexico again. And if it stayed in Wisconsin, the freezing river would eventually kill it. The best the people in charge could do was wait.

Everyone else who wasn’t an expert thought the tropical visitor was delightful. They arrived at the park that lined the river, parked their cars, and walked over the bridge or down to the point carrying plastic bags full of old meat from their backs of their freezers. They threw their dried out roasts and gamey venison steaks into the water. They tried skipping their leftover chicken thighs and gristly porkchops across the surface. The shark learned quick that he preferred his meat thawed, so he ignored the still-frozen offerings, which bobbed in the river until they warmed, like a giant stew. Sometimes the shark would snatch the meat from the surface without much fuss, and sometimes he put on a show, with a full breach, mouth wide, and terrifying teeth snapping down on the snack. Everyone cheered when he did that. Someone set out a table on the sidewalk to sell t-shirts. One little boy with curly hair and too big teeth ran between groups of spectators to share his knowledge of sharks. “Did you know bull sharks are the largest of the requiem sharks?” “Did you know bull sharks give birth to four to ten pups at a time?” “Did you know bull sharks are the most dangerous shark to humans?”

There were a few close calls. The crowd almost lost a few dogs that were jealous of the shark’s meaty bounty. The canines wandered too far into the water and found only the shark’s jagged teeth racing towards them. Dozens of cell phones and sets of keys plunked into the water under bridge, dropped by shark enthusiasts trying to juggle bags of meat and cameras and purses and toddlers climbing the railing to get a better look. Although it was too cold, several groups of teenagers tubed down the river past the shark, to get a better look, to prove their toughness, and those inflated flotillas provoked at least one attack. They lost a tube. The tuber was fine.

And then, a few weeks later, the show was over. The shark remained, hungry, out of place, and alone, but the novelty had worn off. The people went back to feeding the ducks, which had learned to stay on land to avoid the river’s violent and increasingly unwelcomed guest. The weather got colder, and the sheriff started making plans for what to do with the shark’s body when it finally froze to death. No one cared anymore.

Except for the little boy with the curly hair and the teeth.

He still came to the river and offered the pieces of meat he had hidden in his pockets from previous dinners.  The shark jumped out of the water to eat them, and the boy laughed each time, but they were both worried. So the boy did what he had to do.

He took off his shoes and stepped into the water. His feet went numb immediately, but he gritted his teeth and kept going. He couldn’t pull his pants up any higher than his knees, so they got wet, but he didn’t stop. Then he saw the dorsal fin racing towards him, and he winced and turned and prepared for the worst.

But the shark stopped and swam in a circle in front of him, and the boy relaxed. He pulled a slice of ham out of his pocket.

“Hey,” he said, “you need to swim south.” He threw the ham downriver. The shark swam to it, ate it, and returned.

“No,” said the boy, “you need to keep going. Otherwise you won’t survive.” He pulled out a piece of hamburger and threw it farther. The shark chased it, ate it, and came back.

“You don’t understand,” the boy said, and sighed.

If sharks stop swimming, they drown, but this one paused for a minute and turned its great head and looked the boy in the eye. The boy looked back, face full of worry and hope. He whispered, “Please.” And then the shark understood.


Gordon, a few years ago, at the aquarium
The boy had one morsel left in his pocket, half a hot dog. He pulled his arm back, exhaled, and threw it as far down the river as he could. The shark raced to the ripples it left in the water, chomped the morsel, and kept swimming. The ducks looked around and hopped back into the river. The boy stood on the point that marked the farthest north a shark had ever swam. He stood there for a long time.