dream whale

Sightseeing in the Pacific Northwest with my partner Jerry. An outdoor museum and/or Japanese tea garden. Elegant but minimally ornamental wooden structure/scuplture (no ceiling or walls, just the frame) houses a large pool. Somehow I know the pool extends to the ocean, even though I can’t see it fom here. The water is rough and deep, like a little piece of the ocean itself collaged into this structure. Through the waves -- the body of a whale, black, slick, enourmous, sliding throught the water both rapidly and gracefully. I’ve always wanted to see a whale so I tell my friend Steven, who I'm talking to on a cell phone, to hold on -- I’ve just spotted a whale! can’t talk now! I pull out my cheapo digital camera, hoping it’s got batteries and will work, and run to the edge of the pool, vaguely concerned that the pictures I take of the whale will erase some pornographic pictures stored in the camera, pictures that I’d obtained with much difficulty and wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

I recall a conversation with a sailor friend of mine who claimed that whales look stupid when you look them in the eye, so I scan the churning water for a set of eyes –- and there they are, and they don’t look stupid, they look just as human as a children’s nature documentary would want them to look. The whale, meeting my gaze, raises its head above the surface of the water, flips though a foreign phrasebook with its fins, and asks me, in broken English, what country I’m from. I think he probably meant what to ask what language I speak, not what country, so I say in English that I speak English -- then add that I “just so happen” to live in America, fearing that he’ll think me stupid or brutish if I simply call myself an American without qualification. I want the whale, clearly an international traveler, to know I consider myself a "citizen of the world" before I consider myself I citizen of this or that country, that not all human beings are nationalistic and/or imperialistic. Yet I feel kind of false saying this because, after all, I don't even own a passport.