Leaving...
It was when I saw the frog I think, that it first really struck me. Standing there below the gutter on the street. Rain, that was the difference. It never rains here. But yesterday it did. The downpour caught me in a corner coffee shop, nearly asleep in the haze of the mundanity of something forgettable. So novel was it, that I left my corner of obscurity, and took a walk in it with no umbrella. I suppose a great many things that never happen might happen soon. I sit at the edge of the greatest unknown I have known in years. Aside from a few rather miraculous moments of near happenstance, I have let the reins of my life slide down the oozing track of least resistance. Now that is not entirely fair, I have taken on my plate a healthy portion of challenge, but far too many things I passed up, deeming them not worth my so valuable time, valued in hours on Youtube perhaps.
The frog was just sitting there, a look of near longing on its face, to be on the other side of the busy city street. I’m not sure what it saw, a cricket, a particularly titillating puddle to splash in, or even the simple pleasure of being in a place other than where it was. The reasons that compel even the simplest of God’s creatures to strive forward, are perhaps not so much different from our own. I don’t know what changed from one moment to the next, but with no prior indication, the little creature lept forth from it’s watery muse, and was suddenly half a yard closer to me. I was filled with a kind of naive optimism. The odds of a frog making it to its object of interest across a city street in Phoenix was nil. But the fact that I was watching this particular one, I suppose the story wrote itself. I looked frantically up the street, where a red light saved the frail amphibian, for now. A red suburban put on it’s blinker at the stoplight, and spelled near certain doom for the oblivious wanderer. At just the right moment, it lept twice more, and cleared the lane of danger, bringing a feeling of joy to my now beating heart. I even became aware of the childish urge to run out in traffic, and wave the busy city-dwellers around my prized hero, like in an old children's book I once read about a family of ducks caught in a big city.
The light was now pregnant with change, and sure enough, on came the hail of tires from an unknowing firing squad. My jaw hung open as two, then five cars passed, and when they were gone my amphibian friend was nowhere in sight. I turned back towards the corner cafe, struggling to find some meaning, or reason, in nature’s play I’d just witnessed.
As I looked back at the street, my eyes were struck again by the shiny silhouette of a frog, sitting beneath the gutter. The creature had turned back in fright. It’s fear had saved it’s life certainly. But as my eyes drifted back my own way, a small face I knew well, now perched on the curb at my side of the street, it’s big froggy eyes eying the dampened gravel, and small trail of ants moving their home to higher shores.
I suppose there was no victory here, nothing of real significance had transpired, I had merely witnessed a statistical minority of the thousands of frogs crossing damp roads today. Perhaps I saw in this ballet of nature, the story I was living in. Perched beneath my own gutter, eyeing from afar the paces I could be. As I returned to my corner cafe, and the triviality of my routine, I suppose some small courage entered my heart, and I looked over my shoulder one more time, to thank the oblivious creature eating it’s fill of desert ants.
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