FROG TAKES WING

This afternoon, while pausing in my digging labors, I glanced perchance at the blue sky and there beheld a small frog spinning languidly, legs outstretched. My eyes followed the amphibian as he plunged earthward and was caught gently by my son, Keech. Before my mouth could fall fully open the frog was airborne again, once more spinning languidly. When my mouth was available I asked Keech what in the world he was doing to the poor frog. "Sky diving," he replied, as the frog went up again. I pointed out that very likely this had never happened to the frog before in his life, or to any of his ancestors, that maybe the frog didn't know how to handle this, and that he might very well throw up all over Keech, but as I looked at the frog coming down again, to be sent up again, I had to admit that his greenness wasn't complaining, he wasn't struggling; in fact, in the moment of stillness at the top of his arc, spinning languidly as before, legs centrifugally outstretched, up there in the sky with the birds and the trees, bulgy eyes taking it all in with a kind of philosophical serenity, I had to admit that the frog appeared to be liking this a lot, and that Keech might actually be doing a very historic favor for the frog family, who will perhaps one day recall him fondly in their myths as the benevolent god who gave them the gift of flight, as the former amphibians soar in their new blueness, high above the mud they once knew as home. Frog had definitely never looked so far downward before; perhaps he was feeling in his breast the unwonted swelling of an unearned pride... We humans know where that can lead.

---First published, in slightly different form, in Kyoto Journal's Inaka issue---