FROM A GOOPY FUTURE

You know how it is when you're freewheeling down an amber mountain early on a blue spring morning, you zone into the big picture and just pixel along... So it was with me when I went down to the station this a.m., and so it was as I went through the ritual of leaving my motorcycle, bending down in the same zone to put my helmet strap as usual into the helmet lock-- when there staring back at me from another world was a jade-shade frog, as comfy in his place atop the lock as I would be if I were still in bed. Seems I get a froggy stowaway every year at about this time.

Fortunately I had a bit of time to spare for some amphibian conversation, and it was a fine morning, so I asked if he was gonna move or what. He looked at me goggle-eyed as if I was another species, kidding him bigtime. He was hunkered on his magic shelf that flew like the wind, and he wasn't about to give it up. Would you? It had borne him in a windy twinkling from a hoppy, floppy lifestyle, with a goopy future, to a fresh beginning in a newer, harder and impressively technological world. Trains sped past above us; cars whizzed by out on the road, there was asphalt, and no mud! And here he was atop it all! These matters filled his dark eyes as he gazed at me with the somber expression that attends all amphibian revelations.

His magic shelf fitted him perfectly, as though he were glued to it at every key point, and not only physically; he looked almost melted in place. Not wanting to interfere with this radically new perspective to which he clung so tightly (or perhaps I was misreading it all, and he was awaiting a ride back home to his family of millions?), I tried to fit the strap into the lock by edging it in under his rear, but His Jadeness clearly did not intend to return upmountain: at the touch of the strap, with a froggy "Geronimo!" he leaped over my shoulder and onto the asphalt of the bike parking lot, astonished at this new hardness and dryness as he hopped about, taking in the variety of new perspectives.

He had made his start. And who knows but one day, when the world's predominant life form has long been amphibian, he will be the Adam of his kind.

I will be the absent footnote.