One Day We'll All Be Oil Shimmering in the Sun

I rise in front of my remaining family, old friends, retired faculty, and assorted implied demons and saints. I wipe my eyes under the guise, I hope, of adjusting my glasses, clear my throat softly, and approach the pulpit. Once there I grasp the sides of the lectern, then immediately drop my hands, feeling like a politician. The pews creak. After a pause, I draw a deep, incensed breath. “My father was not what I would call an optimist. . .”He had hippyish tendencies, but hardly a sunny disposition. Rather, I would say he had a habit, an innate need really, to see every situation as an opportunity to somehow expand his sensibilities. One of his favorite aphorisms to say, with a shrug, was “if the sky falls, we can see it more closely.”It may not be my favorite or my clearest memory of my father, but the one that first surfaced in the anesthetized fallout after his sudden death also felt most fitting. It was a day spent at the beach, when I was around six or seven. He and my mother, after some back and forth, had agreed to take us despite another oil well rupture and subsequent spill the day before (I think it was the Axis Health Well™, but there were so many in those days I'm not entirely certain on that detail.) When we arrived the lot was packed, so we ended up parking down among the picnic shelters. Opening the doors, we were immediately hit with an eye-watering soup of air that reminded me of my grandfather's garage. We gathered our pails and shovels, our towels and ancient umbrella, and trudged the familiar path toward the water. Once we crested the final hill, the breakers came into view just as the sun sliced through the stratus, refracting in rainbows off the lake as they kissed. It had already reached the shore. My sister and I despaired, knowing we wouldn't be able to swim, but Dad pressed on, barely seeming to notice.The path grew slick, like day-old, trodden snow, only it was blackened and glistening sand. Away from the entrance, however, the beach was more inviting. I remember being impatient to walk down to where there was clearly a lot of activity. At that time, the response to these calamities had become as scripted as that of school shootings the previous decade, before they banned the schools. The media zone was not only set up but already quite busy. There were bays for the reporters and politicians and, beyond these, larger, more elaborately lit sets for the commercials and the influencers. Dad led us past the men in suits to the first set. Here we watched as they removed about half a dozen different species of birds from square cages. A gull, a duck, but also a toucan, a flamingo. Their mingled cries of confusion caused the girl in the next bay over, mugging for a ring light, to pause. Each bird was then pressed down into the fouled water. When they were brought back up, some new detergent was drizzled onto brushes and the birds were cleaned. All lit magnificently and recorded in 64K. “Look at the way the oil just slides off,” my dad remarked. Later, after having built our sandcastles and skipped our stones and felt the crunch of sand in our sandwiches, we were packing up to leave when my dad said, “Our lives are flashes of summer lightning, illuminating whatever is below. We just happen to be here now when things are this way. Look at me, I just happen to be flashing at the same time as you. Imagine that.” He looked from the bismuthic water to us with an expression I couldn't define but found immensely comforting as a child. With time I've come to see that expression as one of unfathomable peace.