Messy Metaphors

My wife and I went away to Half Moon Bay this weekend and had a great time. The weather was outstanding, the shops were quaint, the cafes were cozy, and the tide pools were lots of fun to explore. It was our late Christmas present to each other. Part of the highlight of the weekend was the wonderful dinners that we treated ourselves to at local restaurants. On the evening we arrived we went to an Italian place called Mezza Luna. It had an upscale atmosphere, excellent service, even more excellent food, and all at a suprisingly average price. But on our second evening there, our dinner at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Co. turned out to be more of a mystery.

The hostess seated us at a table near a fireplace. It wasn't a normal brick fireplace, built into the wall. It was free standing, in the middle of the room, like an old-fashioned wood burning stove. Except more like a new-fashioned gas burning stove. Anyways, the fire swirled from the gravel in its base in a cyclone pattern up towards the chimney. And in the center of the circle of swirling fire was, of course, a cast-iron whale. Not an anatomical whale, mind you, but more like a cartoon whale. It was like an egg with a tail at the small end, and smile at the wide end, and stubby fins sticking out of it's middle. Hmmm...

We spent the majority of our delicious meal trying to decipher the meaning of this odd sight. Perhaps a mermaid or a crashing wave would be better suited for a bay-side fire pit. But why the friendly whale? We were trying to match the smiling whale from a toddler's cardboard picture book to the dangerously passionate hurricane of flames - and it just wasn't happening.

Suddenly, it dawned on my wife! With her astute powers of observation and spiritual discernment she declared, "It's like Moses and the burning bush! Just as the bush was on fire but was not consumed, so the whale is not consumed by the fire."

"Aha!", I said. "And Jonah was eaten by a whale!"

"Yes!" she said. "Jonah was consumed by the whale, but the whale was not consumed by the fire. Therefore," she reasoned, "Jonah was not consumed by the fire!"

"Just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!" I finally declared.

We were so contented and proud of ourselves for unraveling this complicated, Old Testament metaphor that we decided not to care that we didn't have the foggiest clue as to its meaning. We had solved this puzzle, gosh darnit, and we wouldn't let it dampen our spirits that its purpose was completely inane and irrelevant to any of life's questions.

So we conversed on slightly related topics over the rest of our dinner. Like Jonah and the whale versus Jonah and the "big fish." We decided that for correct biblical interpretation and scientific accuracy, we'd someday tell our children the story of Jonah and the Coelacanth. Next to that fire pit, anything seemed more reasonable.