Hello, and thanks for all the fish!

Remember the line, “So long, and thanks for all the fish”? This was the message left by dolphins as the Earth was about to be destroyed, in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. (Late in the tale, Wonko the scientist points out that the dolphins were the actual creators of the planet.)

I thought of this line when I read (actually listened to as an audiobook!) Lynne Cox’s book, Grayson.

This charming and astonishing tale tells the true story of the author’s encounter with a baby gray whale off a Los Angeles beach. Cox was 17 years old at the time and in the middle of a routine two-hour open-water training workout when she became aware of something huge and unknown swimming below.

Wrestling with fear, Cox continued to swim. When she saw a friend gesturing wildly on a pier, she headed for shore, assuming her companion was a shark. But before she reached sand, the friend called a halt to her sprint. She was being followed by a baby gray whale, separated from its mother, he told her. If Cox swam in, the baby would, too, and it would die.

This galvanizing premise sets up the rest of the book, which is tension-filled. I couldn’t believe the number of sea residents and the assorted dangers that threatened the protagonist, a girl wearing only a bathing suit. Beyond the excitement is a pervasive spirituality that makes me wonder at the intelligence of dophins and whales, and at our human ability to connect with them.

Lynne Cox is best known for swimming over a mile in the Antarctic (again, wearing only a Lycra swimsuit). This remarkable feat is featured in this week’s New Yorker (April 21, 2008), and Cox’s book, Swimming to Antarctica.

If you haven’t read Grayson, rush out right now and get a copy!

‘What a coinci-blence!’

I took my grandson, Cadan, to the children’s museum yesterday. While standing in front of an insect aquarium, another grandmotherly visitor pointed out a brown lizard resting on a leaf. Cadan, age four, watched it intently. Then I pointed to the silk-screened image on Cadan’s shirt and said to the woman, “He’s got a gecko on his shirt.” And I read the ID beside the aquarium, which noted that the brown critter we had all been observing, now climbing up the wall, was also a gecko.

As we walked away, Cadan said, “What a coinci-blence!”

And I’m thinking, “What a coinci-blence that I always feel so happy when I’m with this boy!”

A Conversation with Death

A couple of weeks ago, Sally telephoned me.

“Don’t come over tonight,” she said. “I’m coming down with a cold, and I’m probably contagious.”

This was our Sunday ritual, where my husband, Larry, and I bring dinner, and we all watch something from BBC on Sally’s cable TV. I was sorry to miss “movie night,” but I told her to get well.

Three days later Sally called again. She suggested I host the women’s group that meets at her house every Thursday morning. Her cold was worse, and she wanted to stay in bed.

She is remarkably hearty, even at age 87, and Sally’s absence from the group because of illness was unheard-of. But I agreed, and from Sally’s chair I greeted the fifteen or so women who joined in a circle. As we welcomed the new spring season, and we each planted a bush bean in little paper cups filled with soil, the sound of hacking and coughing came from the next room.

This stirred me to action. After the meeting I ordered a mobile chest x-ray and we got Sally started on antibiotics for a secondary infection that was causing her to cough up dark sputum.

Two other friends — Jeanie and Elizabeth — and I took turns showing up every day to nurse the patient. As days passed with slow improvement, it dawned on us all that Sally was sicker than she had ever been before.

Wobbly on her legs, pale, wracked by periodic coughing fits, she slumped in her recliner all day, wearing a bathrobe, a blanket on her lap, too drowsy to turn on the TV.

After about a week, she seemed to come awake as though from a long dream. She told an amazing story.

While apparently sleeping, hour after hour she was actually watching a vision.

An expanse of green ocean spread before her, and a sky filled with billowing clouds met the water. Along the horizon glowed a strip of brilliant light. The sun was setting.

Transfixed, she watched this band of light. It was beautiful and comforting. Her mind emptied of all thoughts, and in the stillness she became aware that she could slip effortlessly through this sparkling portal between earth and sky.

“It would be so easy,” she told me later.

Without words, she sensed a Presence. “Are you ready?” she was asked.

“No. Not yet.” Her boys — grown men now — still needed her. “Not yet.”

And so she got better. Her lungs cleared, and the coughing subsided. Her legs grew stronger, and she began to walk steadily around the house again. She resumed dressing herself and forwarding emails at her computer.

She no longer thinks of herself as invulnerable, however, and neither can I.

Ever since I’ve known her (for over 20 years), Sally has not feared death. “It’s just like a ticket to Paris,” she says.

But now she’s given us another vision as well, of a gentle voyage across the water. Instead of a city, or an island, or a dock — we are beckoned to a brilliant light.