Across the pond and back

A breeze lifts a lock from my brow as I eat lunch on a bench in the sun and watch a model boat pitch its prow across the pond that Stuart Little found in Central Park where my father brought me once, half a lifetime ago, an Allegheny mountain boy thirsty for a drink of the City, charmed by fountains’ splash on stone and steel and glass.

I never thought then that I’d live here now in the hush of ten years since the hearse an hour held him.

Yet, here I sit at pond’s rim as if he sits with me again a glance away from Alice in Wonderland cast in bronze facing this liquid looking glass in which skyscrapers and trees and the easy ironies of Fifth Avenue and its balconies of wealth are reflected upside down . ...

Indeed, the gifts you left arise sans script — a teacher’s raft of wisdom alive, afloat, so that I find in the wake of toy boats ripples of your legacy whose interest pays out in measures of peace over time compounded by the peals of laughter ignited so often by your telling wit, which here and now repeat that gift of joy which confounded the world and its fools you suffered so well, leaving unspoken your sojourns to hell and back however many times since the Higgins boat spat you out on Omaha Beach to receive from a Panzer’s shell near Le Désert the wounds you carried ever after hidden.

You astound me still in this, the thirtieth year since we stopped here once — a father and his sons — to watch toy boats pushed by a light West wind under what must have been a soft, summer sun.