Standing Cliches

From a distance to the pond, I don't even notice the beads.  Not even the wetness of the feathers just moments ago submerged.  Sunlight mostly reveals the silhouette of features common so long now to the decoding mechanism in my visual cortex.  I've been able to recognize a duck since before I could read, since before I could say, "duck."

As I stand in the shower, I remember this moment in splices of time.  Many similar as if one.  The pond is not distinct nor the duck.  The pond could be from my childhood park in Redlands or one of the few I visited frequently around Walla Walla during my 20's.

Even if I could get a better read on the pattern and color of the duck's feathers, I would fail the Jeopardy question.  My dad would get it probably.  He spent a few years looking at birds in a field guide, combed over that book often.  Every once in awhile he sees some bird and spouts, "Green-winged Teal," or "Barn Swallow," or something the like.  He does it so nonchalantly.  So unassuming.  I get such a good laugh each time.

It is so unexpected, coming from the man I revered as a kid for stuff like a golf swing or follow-through at the foul line.  Dad knows birds?  Ha!

I restrain from the towel.  I tell myself to be still.

Stand there, Troy.  Be.  For but a moment, be.

Light drops can be heard around me.  Then I notice the cool of sensation as little swirls of air, unseen, take heat away from my skin.  I close my eyes and hear my mind associate a cliche with the dripping of water down my body: "like water off a duck's back..."

Have I ever actually seen the beads of water fall off a duck's back?

I've seen ducks come up from a dive.  I've seen light rain fall upon them as they propel.  I've seen them shake beads of water into all directions.  I can't recall ever seeing actual beads of water roll off the surface of all those interlocking, hydrophobic feathers.  I can't recall those beads hanging there on its back, even for a flash of sight.

I can't see it in my memory.

It is magic.

The stuff of the hand being quicker than the eye.

Gravity, surface tension, preening oil and intricate complexity of feathers, skeletal angles, all combine to perform an act of water off a duck's back that is invisible to me in real time.

One glance at my forearm and I see several beads.  Though I've been out of the shower's downpour for several seconds, beads.  Visible.  Glistening.  Distinct.

How optimistic cliches can be.  We tell a friend to let the stress of this or that be like water off a duck's back.  We don't want them harboring over something so significant to them and yet inevitably unresolvable by mere rumination.

"Let it whoosh off your back; be a duck, man!" we encourage.

Yet because the bead of stress is already clinging to the back of our friend's brain, the cliche fails.  Metaphorical beads upon a duck's back don't cling.  They don't hang around long enough to see, let alone ruminate upon.

But such a metaphor continues in our pull for sage advice out of love.

Why?

Maybe it is less a reflection of optimism and more the desire to bring magic into a human moment that is so heavy.  We could use some hope—the sensation that spars so well with the realist's burdens.

Sometimes, we need a cliche akin to a child's eyes.

We need wisdom, delightful—contained in the utter, believing wonder of a handkerchief vanishing from an unmoved, and now, unclenched hand.