October 2013 New Short Story in Progress

Driftwood

The man liked driftwood, and considered it his friend. Not in the way you might expect an old man to befriend an inanimate object; the the ways in which we caricature the rheumy-eyed sentimentalism of the generations older than ourselves, but in a way that simply said: you are driftwood- you come and you go, but you are always the same, and you are always there.

He walked along the beach north of Nanaimo every day, not particularly long or far, but this consistent routine had become very important to him since June died. She went quietly, unspectacularly, the way an aspen leaf suddenly turns gold one day then the next is buried under a surprise October snowbank. He had hoped for something more sudden, secretly, something tragic that would make him feel real regret and sadness for days passed and things unsaid, but instead like much of time, she just sort of faded away. The man thought a lot about time, not just since June died, but being a geologist and all, he felt as he grew older he needed to understand the concept, the notion of geologic-scale time which so many of his cohorts paid lip service to but didn't really grasp. I mean, the idea of our insignificance on this planet had always been with him, even as a small child he recalled reading a 50's style publication on meteorites, with glossy bold letters exclaiming that you too could own a 5 billion year old relic of interstellar space if you wrote to the provided address and included ten dollars, and thinking that 5 billion years didn't seem like an impossible amount of time. Well, he knew now that it was an impossible amount of time, a terrifying amount of time, and the fact that most people, even scientists could so casually quantify it was proof enough that most people lived in a shoebox their whole lives. He felt he was just emerging from the shoebox, just prying its lid open and stepping out from the cellophane wrapping in time to see another piece of driftwood on the beach, washed across the Straight of Georgia, an escapee from a Vancouver-bound lumber boat.

His days now seemed to take on the same routine which much of geologic time did- the slow passing eons, the accumulation of sediment, whether on an ancient lakebed or a modern coffee cup bottom, until something cataclysmic happened and bam! there formed 10 feet of sandstone or a volcanic mudflow down a mountainside or the death of a 40 year companion.