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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Some people have the kind of confidence that lets them get away with being clueless.
Blue 55 didn’t have a pod of friends or a family who spoke his language. But he still sang. He was calling and calling, and no one heard him.
He hadn’t always swum alone. Long ago, when the loudest sounds in the ocean were the songs of whales, he’d had a pod.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how many years it had sat quietly collecting dust and how close it had come to being thrown in the garbage because no one thought it was worth listening to.
Below the picture of a whale swimming in the ocean was a quote from her favorite book, Moby-Dick: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
“He keeps singing this song, and everything in the ocean swims by him, as if he’s not there. He thinks no one understands him. I want to let him know he’s wrong about that.”
I was like Blue 55, shouting into the void of the ocean, at a frequency too high for anyone to reach.
People who were desperate to communicate always found a way. I’d find a way.
Watching Grandma reminded me of the humpback whales that leaped out of the ocean. The symphony players. If someone could write Grandma’s signing on sheet music, every color would be splashed all the way up and down the musical scale, and off the page.
The new iceberg drifted so far away it was a speck in the ocean. “Time and distance smooth out the memory of what was lost.” I didn’t know anymore if we were still talking about the iceberg, or about 55 and me, or my family, or Grandma and Grandpa. Maybe it was all those things.
I’d found him. He’d never know what he meant to me, but that was okay. I didn’t speak his language, and he didn’t need to be fixed. He was the whale who sang his own song.
Your music sailed through the ocean and over the land and carried me here. Sing your song.
I chose the fifty-five-hertz frequency since it’s close to the real whale’s sound and because the repeated “five” in his name ties in with the sign language poetry in the story.
