Stories about jellyfish, dolphins and The Chef

The Florida Panhandle is far away from us in eastern New Mexico, but some folks around here have been there.

It’s one of the places The Lady of The House grew up.

She gets Facebook posts from her sister who still lives there.

“Lots of those Man o’ War jellyfish coming ashore. A sign it’s winter at the beach,” she said one day last week.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these jellyfish.

It’s called a Portuguese Man o’ War. It has this bubble that allows it to float along on the sea surface. It has long tentacles that hang under the bubble and the thing is radically poisonous.

But that wasn’t the only “fun fact” The Lady of the house shared that day.

After wondering aloud if anything ate the Man o’ Wars, she said, “Did you know dolphins like to get high off puffer fish?”

This, I had to look up.

And sure enough, I read the words from the Internet:

“…adolescent dolphins love to play catch and even chew on the toxic puffer fish, having a narcotic effect on the dolphins.”

That weird dolphin tale made me laugh out loud as I remembered The Chef.

The Chef was an interesting fellow.

He even told me once about we humans’ purpose on Earth, which involved dolphins.

He was actually a pretty good chef, even though he often had a cookbook propped up in front of him.

I was working at the front desk of a hotel in the high Appalachians one summer in the 1970s for the princely sum of $66 a week, a shared room and three meals a day.

One day, The Chef showed up.

Ex-Army or Marines, I can’t remember.

He was in the Vietnam War.

He told stories.

“We were near enemy lines. At night, me and a bunch of other guys used to dress up like Indians (1970s non-PC lingo), sneak into enemy territory and attack with bows and arrows,” he said one evening as we sat on the porch of the employees’ quarters.

I just stared at him. Who was I to disagree? I hadn’t been to Vietnam.

The front porch of the employees’ quarters was also the scene of another interesting discussion involving The Chef and the dishwasher.

All I can really put in a family newspaper about that particular discussion is the dishwasher had his eye on an attractive female guest and he hoped to go out with her.

The conversation soon evolved into one about “the birds and the bees” and how the dishwasher had a lot wrong about that topic.

The Chef corrected the dishwasher. Whether the dishwasher ever got straightened out, I’ll never know.

A few years later I was surprised to run into The Chef again.

I was the club DJ at a restaurant where he was brought on as chef.

One slow night we somehow started talking about our purpose in life.

And then The Chef spoke: “We are here because tens of thousands of years ago Earth was visited by aliens from a dying planet. They set up two forms of intelligent life here, humans and dolphins.

“They will be coming back to check on their experiment.

“Whichever is the most successful form of life they will assume that form and colonize our planet.”

And just like that evening years ago as he told the tale of Vietnam, I just stared at him, smiled, said nothing and got back to work.

Sometimes that’s just the best thing to do.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

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