You’ll hear about it in songs, and stories, but it never happens, does it?
Receiving the fabled message in a bottle, that is. Well it happened to me recently.
No, really. I’m wallowing happily in the shallows after a bracing swim, and a wine bottle floats up.
I yell over to Ken the Fisherman, who thinks I should leave it to float further upstream. I decide to be Citizen Joe, and take it for the recycle bin.
On second glance, it contains a small rolled up piece of paper. I save it for later that evening when my grandson Richie is visiting. There may be magic in that thar bottle.
Retrieving the message intact proves to be quite the drama. We try smashing the bottle, but Einstein here manages to mis-shape a well-used pressure cooker in the process. I finally get it out via the top with tweezers among other things – yes, a garden-variety bread-knife would’ve smashed the bottom – and the excitement builds.
Is it from a marooned sailor bearded to the knees with instructions for rescue? Is it from an Island princess cruelly shut off from the world by a ogre-like male relative, and begging for rescue? Does it contain the scrawlings of a mad mathematician with the last word on reconciling the Theory of Relativity with the Quantum Physics? Is it a potent poem lamenting Lost Love and a heart split asunder?
None of the above cliches, although the last is closest. It says something like;
Well I met the girl
and she rock my world
Like fe
LS1 V8NO WOOD
NO WINE
LOVIN’ Life!
It beats a grocery list, but that Island princess is still out there somewhere.
One reply on “Message In A Bottle”
Perhaps you should have left it to continue to float and have lived with the intrigue of what it could have held, Duncan. I was hoping for a message that was more captivating, intriguing and perhaps about where the hidden money is buried. Nevermind. Thanks at least it was better than a slap on the face with a dead mackerel.