May 20, 2008


Two things I did not say about New York:

1) Boots and Saddles is gone.

2) What of the far-famed sophistication and jadedness of New Yorkers? I find in them a kind of innocence, a kind of openness that we have too much private space to need. I sat in the movie Prince Caspian and listened to full-grown New Yorkers gasp at tragic moments and applaud at triumphant ones. I loved them for that.

The one surviving goldfish could not eat enough larvae to quell the mosquito infestation in the 3rd water garden. So, instead of buying more, I went to the pond south of Beaver Lake with my bucket and net and fished for minnows. Brought back a shoal of five good-sized minnows, a couple of fry, a water-strider, a water beetle or two, and a larval something, maybe a dragonfly, to establish a wild ecosystem. I was once again me forty years ago, a kid bent to the wild water, standing so to block the glare of summer sun, watching the life in the moving crystal a few inches from the tip of my nose. I also noted that in twenty four hours I had stood on Times Square and fished with a bucket and a little net in a muddy pond in Appalachia.