Category: Words

The girl stood on a rock on the edge of the river and wondered.

What if she fell in?
What if a fish jumped up, and she caught it with her bare hands?
What if someone pushed her in and she drowned?
What if she dove in head first and it was too shallow and she broke her neck and got paralyzed and she had to be in a wheelchair and people had to do everything for her, even holding her books and turning the pages for her?
What if she skipped a flat stone halfway across the lake?
What if she sat on the rock with a book and read in the sun?
What if she saw a merman?
What if she looked down into the water and saw someone looking back up at her?
What if there was a dead person stuck under the rock and he was all decomposed and the fish had been eating his body and he popped up at her like the dead guy’s head in the movie Jaws?
What if she stepped off the rock and the lake was really solid and she could walk all the way across?
What if she stepped off the rock and suddenly a set of gold steps appeared leading down into the middle of a whole underwater world but somehow she could still breathe because she has been stolen from them as a baby and that is why she never quite fit in up in the world above the water?
What if she held up her arms like Olympic divers do and all of a sudden she was on the high dive platform and she did a perfect dive and the U.S. team won a gold medal?
What if she turned around and the boy she loved was there and he kissed her right in front of the whole school?

And then her mother called her over to have dinner.

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?
–Mary Oliver/The Whistler

No matter how long you know someone, or how intimate a relationship is, you can never know everything about another person. Everyone, no matter how open their personality, has things they don’t share. It might not even be on purpose. Something just might not occur to them as being noteworthy.

Like whistling.

Molly didn’t whistle for thirty years…and then she did, and her lover was in love all over again with this person who she thought she knew everything about. A whole new person all of a sudden.

This is a very good thing. A constant renewal and appreciation of our relationships.

Maybe there are a few people who are so utterly bland and unchanging that they are always completely predictable, but surely not very many. I’d like to think that most of us are capable of surprises. Hopefully pleasant ones.

Or is it a sign of inattention? Are these surprises about the people in our lives things we should have noticed?

Once in awhile those things leak out, like when I found myself singing in public without even realizing it, or when someone said “did you know that you hum incessantly?” and I had no idea.

Sometimes the person you don’t know is yourself.