It was one of those snowballing series of events that started off well and just got
better and
better before rolling out of view.
- I was departing from a noon rehearsal with singer-songwriter Leah Abramson
- when I considered my options and decided, despite the heat and the distance, to walk home - perhaps the silver lining to my busted bicycle.
- Every time I walk any significant distance along Commercial Drive, I encounter at least one person I know. Today there were three.
(But that wasn't the best part.)
- Accordion weighing sweatily against my back, I decided to detour through the cool and shady Trout Lake park
- where I found myself installed temporarily, feet dangling lazily down, on the end of the dock where we had whiled away the previous weekend - the one inscribed Falling in love is the best form of revolution.
- As I unstrapped the instrument and squeezed out a few tentative chords, at the noise rustling from the reeds emerged teeming hordes of ducks. (It should be perhaps noted that ducks are turning out to figure large in my personal library of symbols - often present and overlooked but noticed and appreciated not when my life is necessarily objectively going any better, but when I am feeling better about how it is going.)
(But that wasn't the best part.)
- Out in the lily pads, a heron prowls on stilt legs - a small black bird alighting now and again on its tail feathers, presumably in some symbiotic parasite-removing pas a deux.
- A pair of children run up the boardwalk, beatifically oblivious to the Hawaiian-shirt-clad, squeezebox-armed hairy man, enthralled and engrossed so in the mundane maneuvers of the ducks, who respond to the attentions by stepping it up a notch and supplicating in a full-on display of bathing and diving for bottom-muck.
- Think, I think. Do I know any kids' songs about ducks?
in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...