The Distant Shores of Memory

          In a land on far-distant shores, in a place the locals call Nippon, lays a small rocky beach sprinkled with black sand dancing in salty pools. In the short distance where the endless horizons of the ocean kiss the ground, a tiny fishing village, untouched by the passing of time, sits just out of reach of the quickly marching masses of millions of Japanese men and woman in Tokyo, always moving to the future.

          Standing on the brine-covered beach, a time-weathered fisherman quietly hums an old festival tune to the soft purring of his long-time angling partner, Neiko, a gold and white striped tabby with fur matted by the pungent tailing of his last meal. With a flick of the wrist and a swish of the line, the old fisherman casts off the rough rope securing his small boat keel-skyward in the black sand. As Neiko jumps clear with a decidedly annoyed yowl, the man feels the dry wood of the hull in his hands and the planks smoothed by years of use, but deep in his heart the man knows that the boat, like himself, isn't quite ready for the fire-pit.

          The grinding of sand on wood temporarily drowns out the rhythmic cracking of the waves on the rocks as the man hauls the ship knee deep into the water warmed by the noon-day sun over the shallow bay. The deep scraping in turn gives way the slow lapping of water and wood, a sound of perfect harmony for those who go down to the sea.

          Through the foggy glass of memory, the man and his cat could see deep into his own past, watching his father and his father before him set sail on the fertile waters. He knew from the generational stories he heard from his mother’s lap, this was the way of his family, his people, and from a time long since forgotten, his countrymen as well. Despite the rapidly changing world around his tiny beach, far from the reach of millions of Tokyo men and women always marching to the future, Neiko, the old fisherman and his boat remembered the old ways from ages past.