* PARADISE *
- THE GREAT ADVENTURE! -

- A Short Fable -

THERE was a certain man
who lived in the suburbs of New York.

Every week-day morning, for years,
he took the 7:45 a.m. train to the great city;
and every day on the 5:15 p.m. train came home.

He owned, we guess, a little house.
It had a furnace for his winter care
and a front lawn for summer.
He had a television, and a car, and a wife.

One night they would play bridge,
another they would go to the movies'
and on Sunday afternoons
they would go for a car ride.

It seemed as if things would go on like this
- Always -
until at last he would die.
And that would have been his life.

NOW
there are certain islands in the South Seas
so far away that everyone believes they are
PARADISE.

Summer is eternal there.
And in the cool shadows of their palm groves
recline fair youths happy in being -
and through happiness, are forever young.

WHEN the vision of these islands
broke upon the commuter,
suddenly the little round of his activities
became endurable.

His imagination took fire
and in the aura of the conflagration
he saw himself sailing the broad Pacific,
landing as a sunburned mariner,
on those flowering coral shores.

He closed his eyes;
the newspaper fell from his hands.
...LOVE...
love enveloped him;
soft hands and lips caressed him;
The air was laden with sweet perfume
and the song of tropical birds.
OH PARADISE!

SO he must build a boat;
about them he knew nothing.
He began to study.
With unwearying purpose he gave himself
to the reading of every authority on boat design,
he filled himself with lore and facts.

He studied catalogues, he looked at craft.
And he came to know them.
He came to know, moreover, what he wanted.
It must be a small boat and a stable boat;
roomy and broad of beam.
It must be a safe boat, seaworthy and able.
And he drew a plan.

IT'S keel was laid
in a little ship yard on the Hudson;
and from that day
to the day of the boat's completion,
her designer watched her growth,
as only a man about to sail the seven seas
for Paradise would watch his magic craft evolve.

He combed the lumber yards
for the soundest planks and timbers
that the forests yielded.
He followed them
through the hands of carpenters,
saw the timbers
cut and joined and bolted into place.
No little detail could escape his scrutiny,
no defect eluded him.

AND what it cost!
And how he could have justified
that cost at home!
What could he say that would conceal
the truth of his exalted plans?

AND So...
in the growing excitement
of the enterprise,
the years flew by;
The boat was nearly done.

What hope must then have beamed
in the commuter's countenance,
what intimidation of approaching glory!
If these signs sought concealment
through a special tenderness at home,
that tenderness was their betrayal.

Was not the boat itself
an unfolding of his own spirit,
an opening of the book of his own dreams,
the materializing in such symbol
as the world might understand
of his most secret self?

JUST as all men must some day
pull off the drab clothes of this world
to put on the shining raiment of immortality,
and in that moment, for a moment,
stand in nakedness revealed before their Maker,
so at almost the very moment
that this poor man was to step into his swan boat,
his wife, we can only guess, confronted him.

"WHAT,"
(arms akimbo)
"DO YOU THINK
YOU'RE GOING TO DO IN THAT BOAT?"

"I was going..."
(he answered with quiet determination)
"...to sail to Par...
...to the South Seas."

"YOU'RE NOT."

AND There,
True or Not,
Ends One of the Saddest Stories
In the World.

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* THE CREATIVE WORLD OF COLEMAN WHEELER! *

Email:adventur@midwest.net