THE THING ABOUT LIQUIDITY

by Jerry Murley

Recently I undertook a mental time-travel exercise. I multiplied the age of just one of my still-vibrant parents by three. To my astonishment that number in years traveled backwards would land humanity at a time before the French Revolution.

For the past nine months, following an operation, I have been troubled with too much fluid in the wrong places. Having taken a low dosage of diuretic daily for about half of that time, I find myself with abundant fluidity in altogether different places every twenty minutes for about three hours a day.

Fluids aren't always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes when we turn on the tap of late at my house, the water is the wrong color. It's a delicious limestone gray first thing in the mornings and then clear to our eyes a little later.

The trouble with liquidity is the absence of balance: when it is not there when we need it or there is too much when we don't or it lacks sufficient purity. At times it just evaporates. As one joke about bankruptcy has it, it vanishes slowly and then all at once. At others, such as during the current drought in our area, there is water some places but it just isn't conserved and shared well. Shared wealth just isn't as easy when it comes to clean water.

The WHO (World Health Ogranization) says that four out of ten people living today don't have sufficient access to clean water. It says about 500 cubic meters is needed per person per year.

While our high finance and household budgets are in trouble – and water is not evenly distributed (or sufficiently liquid or pure), the liquidity that the world really needs now might just be one of those projects that could make our finances both solid and fluid again – and help us conserve and share water resources. What we seek is timely storage and disbursement of a scarce necessity.

Back in the monthly publication PINCH, I noted an ink drought. What I meant then was that people rich in stories and the ability to express them had become too timid to tell them in print. I was struck over the Thanksgiving holidays with the retelling of family stories about living during the Great Depression. Those stories still move me every time I hear them. We need a fluidity of those stories as told by the survivors so that they make their indelible mark on us and on our children. That is a fount from which all need drink; it is worth as much as the daily tick on the market.

Flow forth with such stories and share them. Create the reservoir of experience and expression from which generations are quenched and taught.