Orca, the Killer Whale

Orca the Whale is a bargain at $9.99. It is a plastic inflatable toy. The photo on the box shows a mommy and two children astride the thing, which would obviously capsize it. Actually, if you look closely, the mommy is not astride it, she is holding it, probably holding it upright so it won't overturn and drown her two sons. It is a badly-airbrushed photo anyway, with Orca not in the least submerged in a background of pool water.

On Orca him-or-herself are exhortations under the heading, "FLOTATION TOY WARNING: USE ONLY UNDER COMPETENT SUPERVISION," which goes on to say, "Only to be used in water in which the child is within its depth and under supervision. Not a life saving device. Never allow diving into this product. Never leave in or near water when not in use. Follow the rules to avoid drowning, paralysis or other serious injury."

Paralysis! I hadn't even thought of that! How could this toy induce paralysis? Don't worry! Under those conditions, I wouldn't let my child within five miles of the thing. In addition there are warnings in French (Attention!), German (Warnung), Italian (Attenzione), Dutch? (Waarschuwing), Spanish (Atenci—n), Swedish? (Advarsel!), Portuguese (Atencao) and Greek, Russian, and four other languages including, I presume, Chinese, since it is made in China, plus a language for which the warning is "Uwaga!"

It is made by (distributed by?) Intex, a nondescript name if I ever heard one. It says "84" X 43" approximate deflated size." Deflated? This may be a mistake or they may mean it. They should mean it. I've tried to deflate it and I would say the 84" X 43" is approximately the size to which I was able to deflate it, using a pair of pliers to hold open the valves to squeeze out the air. I never even tried to get it back into the 12" X 12" X 4" box in which it came. Bulleted features on the front of the box say, ""pre-tested heavy gage vinyl." Any lighter and it would come apart in my hands.

This devil's own invention is a toy to which I'm going to entrust the lives of my grandchildren? My grandchildren have invented or discovered enough interesting ways of committing hari-kari or sepuku or whatever you want to call it. They don't need a Japanese killer whale (yes, it is a killer whale). Rachel is perfectly competent at killing herself, thank you very much.

She just tried to climb a red maple, in fact she did climb a red maple, got about ten feet off the ground, but couldn't get down, and decided to amuse herself by pulling leaves off the only tree in our front yard, the only tree that gives our cottage shade on a hot summer's day. Finally, her grandmother and I rescued her, not that she really wanted to be rescued.

It's the last day of our two-day vacation -- three-day if you count this morning. We have 'til noon to clean up the place for the next tenants, who will arrive, supposedly, at noon. I do what I'm told. If they (my wife and daughter) want me to sweep the floor, I sweep the floor, deflate an Orca whale, I deflate an Orca whale. I try to be invisible. It doesn't work. This is the price we pay for two day's vacation (my daughter had one week's vacation; Meme and I came up later after she delivered my mother-in-law to Florida).

These are the "sunset years," the years of leisurely self-indulgence advertised in Modern Maturity, the magazine of the AARP which we have been receiving, unsolicited, since we were fifty. Modern Maturity has the largest circulation of any magazine in America, which means also, I suppose, in the world. Their secret is that the magazine is free and everyone over the age of fifty gets it whether he wants it or not. It's full of advertisements for such pleasure-giving devices as stair elevators and pleasure-inducing compounds as Viagra (you'll never have to tell your wife you have a headache again).

The grandkids remind me of something I'd forgotten since my children were their age:

I try to deflate Orca, the Killer Whale.

Sanity is an option, often less attractive than the alternative. Right now, they are engaged in the seemingly innocent enterprise of filling a canister with pebbles from the beach. They are not (yet) throwing them at each other or swallowing them. That will be phase II.

"When I became a man, I put away childish things," my father used to say. I see Rachel and Matthew's grand scheme now -- it is to take all the pebbles so innocently collected and scatter them over the porch that I just swept. Well, that's okay. I'd be happy to sweep it all day. It's when they ask me to deflate an 84" X 43" Orca and squeeze it back into the 12" X 12" X 4" box from which it came that I'm in trouble.

Every once in a while the women will come to me with something I can do that they can't, like open a jar of something. I'm good at opening jars of something. Give me a jar of something and I'll open it every (well almost every) time. Also screwing things together. I have a multi-purpose tool that sits in a case that hangs from my belt. It's called by the manly name of "Leatherman" (actually it was invented by a man named Stewart Leatherman). Women, the two in my house at least, haven't yet learned to plumb the mysteries of screwdrivers, pliers, etc. They are only able to cook, operate electrical appliances, program heating and electrical systems and do double-entry bookkeeping and other higher math. Whereas I, I can screw in a screw, hammer a nail (or my thumb,whichever comes first), file the corrosion off the contact in a flashlight - oh, you name it, I can do it.

I can also stand on the beach and skip stones in the water, which I do until called to a higher calling, like carrying out some trash.

Why do men marry? Many a man has asked himself this after it was too late. Women have a biological need to reproduce, a dirty little secret that has only recently been scientifically revealed. Having gotten some willing man to collaborate in the planting of the seed (all he really agreed to do in the first place), the woman allows the man to persuade himself of the importance of observing the outcome, at which point he becomes all gooey at the sight of the outcome and decides he must see the outcome raised by him (such egotism!), given a college education and launched on a career. This is more than the average woman bargained for. I mean to say, some help in changing the diapers is always helpful, if the poor clumsy sod can be taught to do it, but does she really want to be stuck with the same man all her life?

Rachel says, with the habit of command instinctive to her sex, "I want to put these seashells in a bottle that grandma keeps seashells in. Follow me." I follow her. She needs me to unscrew the rusty top of a jar into which these fetid little corpses have been fed for, oh, say, three generations. The bottle is half full. In another three generations, it will be completely full and then what?

Minutes to assemble, hours to deflate. The same thing could be said of marriage. So why do I still get gooey over my children, who are in their thirties, and my grandchildren, hedonistic little monsters that they are?

Would I do it all over again, knowing what I know now? Of course I wouldn't; of course I would.