oysters

 

So I gots this friend up north who used to teach with me for a year in the previous century back when we both were young and feisty and the world was , as they say , our oyster . Well , I don’t know if anyone says the world is our oyster or not , to be honest ; but you know what I mean .

I was up in Morro Bay for a couple of days . It’s a small beach town on the central California coast . Very pretty . Boats and a big rock , seagulls and seal lions ,  otters and heron . Fog , also , and kayaks , and fish restaurants . And oysters , I think . The world may have been an oyster long ago for the two of us , but the Morro boats still go out and catch oysters . I , to be honest , can’t quite comprehend all the ins and outs of  the connections  between the world and oysters . So you’ve got an oyster ! Then what ?

We should just move on , I think .

Why , then the world is mine oyster,

Which I with sword will open.  ——–Willie Shakespeare

We talked , my old friend and I  , of specific events from the old days , and people . One suddenly -retrieved memory evoked another , and we gabbed  away for a few hours , we two old teachers and friends , summoning seemingly ethereal ghosts and a few odd goblins from a shared deep ocean of oysters .

I saw some traps on the pier in Morro Bay but no oysters . The oyster fishermen were gone , too . ( Should I say fisherpeople ? ) They were somewhere unseen . Their boats lolled away the hours lounging lazily on the  still water .

When we were young we opened each of our oysters differently , but we also mirrored the other person along the way , I thought . You see, we were comparing notes because we haven’t seen one another for thirty-five years or so , since that one teaching year at the same little school so long ago .  We both stuck with teaching . We’ve held good memories of one another for all this time  , too .Meeting now was  like discovering pearls , maybe .

Remember that the most valuable antiques are dear old friends .  

I don’t know where this twisted treatise on oysters and old friends  is going . The first one gets the oyster ; the second one gets the shell . I don’t even like oysters . There’s a positive message in this post  somewhere , I’m sure , an optimistic easy-going message wearing a wide easy smile , but I can’t quite wrestle it into words to put them onto the page . So , I suppose , you should stop reading :

HERE .