Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

I am thinking about oceans.  Fathoms deep. Wide as the sky.  Unknowable.  Watery gateways to the deepest mysteries.  I am thinking of pirates and fishermen and tsunamis and sixteen-year-old Japanese girls.  I am thinking of Captain Phillips and Captain Flint and of young Naoko Yasutani and her great grandmother Jiko, the hundred-year-old Buddhist nun.   I am thinking of floods and earthquakes and the men of Loyalty Island, of moral choices and immoral acts, of diaries that float across oceans to faraway beaches, of the women who find them.  I am thinking of the men who draw their livelihoods from the nets of hard times, betraying their sons with each ocean journey that leaves empty seats at the kitchen table.  I am thinking of my own father and mother. So powerful are the stories that harbor these images that I no longer care which of them is factual.  I only care that they are true. When fiction mimics life, and life mimics fiction, and the lines between what is factu