Clouds illusion I recall                             The Word July 14^th.2014

Sitting in the garden, cloud watching. I see a cockerel being chased across the sky by a bottlenose dolphin. My daughter is with me she is thirty, just. A friend of hers died prior to the weekend. Drugs, I suspect but do not pry. She cries a lot. I try to talk to her about grief, but who really wants to hear the thoughts on life and death from a seventy year old fart? Diana, her mother, died twelve years ago and left me with a lovely son and a daughter. Bad luck and good luck, if there are such things. Not really. Just life and death. She was missed and grieved over so I do know about that of which I speak, but I leave it alone anyway. I am lucky I can talk to either child easily. Child?  I change the subject and share a roll up with her and ask her what ‘teabagging’ means. I read the term on Twitter. She bursts out laughing. First laugh all weekend. She tells me but I do not believe her. Then I ask about ‘gerbiling’, something else I picked up on Twitter. I browse Twitter often. It is a way of keeping in touch. She laughs again and tells me to Google that one. I do and I don’t believe that either and wonder who would put such information on Google. Apparently, as she and her brother tell it, you can find out just about anything on Google. I prefer to talk. To ask questions. To enquire. She is still laughing and texting her grieving friends telling them her seventy year old dad had asked her what ‘teabaging’ and ‘gerbiling’ meant. I am happy she is laughing at me. The cockerel has dissipated, vanished and replaced in a clear blue sky by late summer swifts thinking about heading back to Africa. Cloud watching is over for the day. I smile at my daughter and she smiles back. She touches my head as she passes me by, going inside to make us a cold drink.