The Pelican

.....his bill holds more than his belly can.  - Dixon Lanire Merrith

I had to google that to find the original attribute.  It's from a limerick written by Merrick, a newspaper editor, way back in 1910.  To me that phrase is and always will be associated with my Grampa who had a very strange sense of humor that a number of his grandkids seem to have inherited.  Anyway, I heard him pop off with that a lot.  Growing up we spent part of every summer with my grandparents in rural Minnesota on Pelican Lake near Pelican Rapids - home of the worlds largest pelican.  No lie people.  See postcard.  If there were more boys in that postcard it could almost be us.  Same 1960's vintage.

Grampa was full of stories and twisted little word play sayings like that.  For years he called my younger brother Phillip McCann.  I failed to hear that what he said was Fill up ma can such that 40 years later I finally get the joke and laugh even harder for being so obtuse.  I think he had little sayings like that for each of us, or maybe it was just us younger two.  Don't remember.  I was always Mary Mary quite contrary.  Thing is I was anything but contrary.  I was compliant as hell.  And that was probably what he found funny about it.  On good days he would give me the next line 'How does your garden grow?' and then he would wait for me to answer.  Somedays I would give him the next line of the poem 'with silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row'.  And on other days I would just invent something else to slide in there if I had grown bored with the proper response.  As I grew older, I tired of the game and would just give him that patented teenager shrug of noncommittal-ness.

To this day, when someone says that to me, or much more likely in this post Run DMC age, sings it to me it always brings him in clearly and immediately.  That is the way of things for games played in your childhood.  I have been seeing a lot of pelicans, have been spending large swaths of time watching them feed out there in the sound.  Ever curious and nerdly about such things I found out that these are the coastal browns.  Those I remember seeing, ever so rarely in Minnesota and later in Montana were the white variety.  So pelicans have been around me my entire life.  They are intimately linked to my grandfather and his strange wordplay humor, to the beautiful strangeness of being somewhere else, to water (OMG to such waters!), and to safety.  Nothing bad ever happened there on Pelican Lake and for a few blissed out weeks every summer, I was safe.  I could unpack and get comfy.  I could breathe and I could laugh with my grandfather.  What I wouldn't give for that today here with these pelicans.  Oh I feel safe and as for unpacking, pshew I used the Jackie method of unpacking which resembles nothing so much as a mini explosion.  Nope.  It's the laughter I miss most and the silly play on words.  But I am content to be reminded of those things by these other pelicans here on this water.