The Spirit in the Umbrella


Arnold and I have a ritual of breakfast and a walk around Glen Park once in awhile. "It's not a big park," I said, "but it always feels different, like it shifts and changes." He said, "That's because this is the last running creek in San Francisco; you're close to the source here." And I looked over at the little creek, living its life here in this canyon and plunging to its death into the city sewer system. Arnold squinted his eye up the hill. "Look at that umbrella," he said. "How strange."

There is a moment in time when one has the option of securing the gates of logic against the chaos of non-repeatable and emotion-driven experience. I didn't do that. I just followed his gaze up the hill, where this black umbrella with a tear in one side, giving it a kind of insane appearance, was dancing around trying to get our attention.

"Pay no attention to it," I said. "It's obviously not right, if you know what I mean."

"Look at it," he said, his British accent clipping along. "It's coming to meet us."

And with uncanny precision the umbrella made its way down the hill in fits and starts and sudden whirls of energy, in the soft drizzling rain, to land right on cue on the service road we were walking along. And there it stopped. It seemed the wind was blowing just the same as before, but some unknown stasis had occurred and it stuck to the ground right in front of us so that we had to walk around it.

"Is there a message in that?" Arnold said, and I could hear his imagination whirring away in science fiction scenarios. It was at his house I had watched the last special Star Trek Next Generation t.v. movie that ended the series. He told me about the Goon Show, which comics had worked with which. the precursors of Monty Python, and introduced me to such cult images as the Daleks, characters from hokey old science fiction movies. He is wired not only to find a message in an event which is wired for logic, but to do the wiring himself if need be.

"It's the only way the wind can get your attention," I said. "We get to where we rely on what we see so much that we lose precision with the other senses. So the wind had to use the umbrella to get our attention."

"What do you think it wants?"

"A new umbrella. That one was ripped."

"Or maybe it's friends with the Creek and heard us say that if a corporation has rights under the law as an individual, then creeks should, too."

"Personification?"

"Exactly. Yogi Bear becomes the forest incarnate. Mess with the forest and you mess with the bear himself."

"It's a perplexing question, about the right to arm bears."

"I know that. Letting them dance and ride bikes, that's one thing. But giving them guns?"

"I don't think so."

"Nor I."

"Bad enough that we're at war with gorillas."

"Precisely."

Posted: Tue - February 17, 2004 at 05:16 PM