We noticed lately that we have not been getting any mail here at The Institute regarding any of the reporting we have done on our swans. Especially about Tranquility, our wayward swan, who has not been seen since she went to Spring Break with Grace her schoolmate, after graduating from Swan School. Since we follow-up very closely with the subjects of our reports here at The Institute we sent one of our researchers back to Padre Island where Tranquility was last seen to find out how her life has progressed. You can read more about Tranquility here at this post  http://www.bigshotsnow.com/grace-and-tranquility/

We received tragic news. Tranquility is lost. Not as in she can’t find her way home, which sadly turned out to be the truth, but lost as in passed away. Dead. Gone forever. Her life of using bad seed, partying, and general self-destructive behavior was  the prelude to a downward spiral that she could not recover from. We found out that the actual cause of death was from a bad tattoo she got from her time at the Quill and Skin Ink shop that was supposed to cover up the kanji on the side of her neck that was mis-spelled. The Kanji was supposed to be the ideograms for her name “Tranquility” but instead, either due to simple error or a malicious practical joke, read “Hotel Bicycle”. For years she ignored it but finally decided to cover it up after she could no longer take the laughter from visiting Asian tourists. A dirty needle, some compromised ink, and blood poisoning was the result. A once beautiful creature was gone. They said the funeral was beautiful. The other swans gracefully swam out into the gulf forming a ring around her, carefully floating her body between them, until they reached the Gulf Stream and then let her slowly drift away.

We thought that was the end of the story. Then our researcher began picking up the threads of a rumor that perhaps led to another chapter. The last one in Tranquility’s life. After haunting the Tattoo parlors and Seed Shops along the beach the story began to become clearer. Some time before her death Tranquility had been trying to turn her life around. To get clean, perhaps even revisit her previous life. Visit Grace. See Yellowstone one more time. That was when she met a handsome young Cob or male swan, who was down for Spring Break, and after taking him under her wing, so to speak, the inevitable happened and she found herself with gosling.

Realizing she had made several poor decisions in her life, she was determined not to let that be her daughters fate. She petitioned the training nuns of Our Sisters of the Immaculate Plumage for the admission of her daughter, who she named Hope, to their swan school. You can read more about the Swan school here. http://www.bigshotsnow.com/synchronicity/

The nuns ever willing to forgive, accepted Hope into their fold and what you see above is the result of their training successfully completed. This is Hope at her very first performance. There on the wide sweeping bend of the Yellowstone river, at the north end of the Hayden valley, in the glorious colors of the fading sunset, she completed something her mother had never been able to do. Off to the side, out of the picture, are the entire faculty of the order of Our Sisters of the Immaculate Plumage, from the Mother Swanperior to the lowliest acolyte, watching with pride, and a little off in the distance is Grace, older now but as proud as if Hope were her own daughter.

Hope is happy with her new life and intends to be a perfectly respectable representative of the School. A credit to the Sisterhood of Swans. But she has a secret that no one knows and that is, under her left wing where no one will ever, ever see it, is a very small tattoo. In simple blue ink it is the kanji for Tranquility, correctly spelled.