The Fury of Deep Blue

I'm blue because I love the sea's bright emerald hues before it descends to deeper depths. Where sailfish sprint by with the speed of exotic cars to stab their prey and live another day.

The sky above is my television screen. I'm free to dream a million dreams like Kerouac on a mountain top collecting snow for drinking water.

I wonder what the deep blue eyes of my father saw in war. Was that war in every wince of pain brought to his face? I imagined it was at least to some degree and to satisfy my own thinking. He drove his van. I watched closely.

He was blue as most men could be, having divorced my mother. His eyes were a storm of electric blue waves frozen in time. They were a marble you would only see in the pages of a magazine.

It was these eyes who took me fishing, threw the football with me, and played hours of basketball. Fishing in a lightning storm, hitting a school of mahi-mahi and watching their colors pop and sway underneath the sea. It was like being on another planet, one of imagination.

I was considered special or lucky because I got to write about the same passion shared by Hemingway--sailfishing. My editor referred to me as the "real deal" once in an email. Words like that meant something when it came from the Editor in Chief of a 50 year magazine.

However most of my days are spent wearing blue jeans doing construction at someones home because the smell of cut lumber reminds me of my dad. He always wore blue jeans whether he liked it or not because his legs rivaled the purples and blues in the fading Florida sunsets. He had bad legs.

And so as I thought of my old man, I thought of the sea because of the blue in his eyes. The unsung bravery of this man called my father with a deep blue fury swirling about his iris, spoke of the ravages of war frozen forever in his mind. Memories so powerful they would awaken a generation of men in the middle of the night for the next several decades until they were no longer troubled by it.

The untold fury of an ocean on any given day with blue eyes that welled up and released 10 foot waves.

Blue is me, blue is the sea that reminds me my old man is still watching me.