Life is not a day at the beach, especially this one

  • By Mike Dewey
  • August 22, 2010
  • 250
                        
Some things, you just take on faith. Family comes first. Life will be better tomorrow. Mustard makes a hot dog perfect. And that "The Breakfast Club" is a great coming-of-age movie. There is nothing ambiguous about those statements. They stand true and tall and as reliable as sunrise. Without a doubt, you can count on them, the way that heartbreak is inevitable, tires go flat and cops have no sense of humor. It's good that rock-ribbed reality is unshakeable, non-negotiable: a walk on the beach beats a punch in the face ... every day you wake up brings you that much closer to death ... knowing the lyrics to "Louie, Louie" doesn't make the song any less wonderful ... Roger Clemens is in deep trouble ... Notre Dame will contend for a national championship this season. Well, that last one's a stretch, but you get the idea. All my life -- well, for the last five decades of it, anyway -- I've believed that I understood every nuance and every lesson that "The Wizard of Oz" has to offer. From the fact that flying monkeys are terrifying to the certainty that "There's no place like home" is gospel. And then last weekend in the warm waters of the Atlantic, my little world got gobsmacked. My brother and his family were visiting from the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania and it was great to see them again, to spend some quality shore time with them and to catch up on all that's been happening. So we're floating and riding the waves, talking and laughing, when my brother, out of the blue, asked me an easy question. "What," he said, "does the Wicked Witch of the West write when she's flying over the Emerald City?" "Surrender Dorothy," I replied. "What does it mean?" he asked. "That Dorothy should just give up," I said, "and let her have those ruby slippers." The waves were rolling six to eight feet and my brother, my niece, my nephew and his girlfriend were having a great time, cresting the swells, getting back to what mattered and then the world shifted on its axis. "Wrong," my brother said. "That's what I always thought, but I was wrong, too." "You're talking about the missing comma," I said. Fans of the movie -- or at least English majors -- will no doubt remember that the witch's skywriting omits the comma between "Surrender" and "Dorothy." My brother waited, bobbing. "It's because she was flying in a straight line," I said, "and she didn't have time to drop in the comma." "Don't you think," he asked, "that someone noticed that it was missing? A major film studio? A big movie like that?" "What are you saying?" I asked. "That we've both been wrong all this time," he said. "Don't worry about it ... you'll adjust." "To what?" "To the truth," he said. "Which is?" "Well, without the comma," my brother said, "it's no longer an imperative sentence. It's a demand." "What's your dad talking about?" I asked my nephew. "Wait for it," he said. Low, purple clouds scudded across the horizon, bruising the summer sky. "Well?" I asked. "What are you saying?" "It's simple," he said. "The witch wasn't talking to Dorothy." "No?" "She was sending a message to all of Oz," he said. "And that was?" "To 'Surrender Dorothy' ... to give her up ... to turn her over to the witch," he said. "Get it?" I dropped beneath a wave and shook my head, trying to clear it. When I broke the ocean's surface, everything looked as it had been moments before: there was my family, smiling, having fun on the Carolina coast ... and yet, something had changed. Profoundly. A half-hour or so later, I was still debating my brother's insight when my wife weighed in on the topic du jour. "You guys!" she said, exasperated and charmed in her own lovely way. "Up and down the coast, right, you know how many people are talking about the what the Wicked Witch wrote?" We waited for it. "None," she said and laughed, turning her attention to my nephew's girlfriend. "This a very strange family you're getting involved with, just so you know." And I suppose that's true. We're not, in the typical sense of the word, normal. One night in Pennsylvania, we were playing Scrabble and I challenged my brother's playing of the word "Zen." I argued that it was a proper noun and, as such, unacceptable. He then produced a 40-pound dictionary in an attempt to make his case and part of the citation read, "usu. cap.," which he took to mean "usually capitalized." "Usually," he said, preening, "but not always." His house. His rules. His triple word score. It's become part of family legend. And now, another summer's coming to a close. The days are getting shorter. School's starting. Fair time's approaching. It won't be long until it's time to surrender to the fall. But I still believe that the Wicked Witch was warning one little farm girl from Kansas, not the Emerald City. "Get used to the idea," my brother said. "Roll with the flow." And the waves crashed into the beach, threatening what I knew to be true. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load