Old- yes

First posted 7-27-04

"Old- yes. Burned-out- certainly, but I can tell you the memories are still there- clear, intact, indestructible, and they'll be there if I live to be 110."
- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

The Chicago Diaries, Part III

Written Monday, July 19, 2004

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I sit on the bridge at the back bay of Herrick Lake, where the inlet dives in shallow and where I used to hunt tadpoles with a hungry purpose. How often I would return to the car black with mud up to my knees and elbows and a dozen or so bullfrog tadpoles to watch them metamorphosize in my aquarium.

Herrick Lake is more "preserved" than Hidden Lake. The bridge has a bench upon which I sit and picnic tables and paved walkways are afforded around the shoreline. There is a concession stand, a boat rental, a covered picnic area and a flock of field-tripping schoolchildren. It is much more park-y. I think this is why I gravitated more and more towards Hidden Lake as I grew older. It was much more wild. Herrick Lake does have its unique intricacies, like the suddenly violent splash under these boards, which one would assume to be a frog. But Hidden Lake has no joggers.

Some things remain the same. The bluegill are still thick in the bay, rising and pecking at the fluff on the sruface, so thick like flotillas of naval ships they are, a tantilizing desire when I was young. Easy prey for my fly rod. But some things have changed so much. The shallow back bay which was the happy hunting grounds for tadpoles in my youth is now grown thick and congested with cattail reeds, glued and filled by a dense layer of duckweed. There is no hope of tadpoling there. And this saddens me as children will not be able to muddy themselves there as I had in the past. According to my profile I should be glad at this. It would be a precious childhood experience unique to me and not repeated, which coincides well with my individualism and elitism. But it does not. Strange that.

The lakeside is alive with shrill, laughing voices. There is little peace to be found here. But I knew that in coming and the smells and sounds of long familiar life do lend me, if not peace, the patience. The wind, sighing breathlessly through the trees and reeds, a sparrow of familiar design calling. Here come the bullfrogs call. One on the right, then one on the left, long forgotten to me that sound, so expensively bought a memory. There on the surface are the insects lighting. Making small circles of waves all over the calm that it looks like rain.

I should retire to a lake far away. Become a crazy recluse writer in the Northern part of the world, where the humans are as sparse and isolated as gems in the ground. I can think of no better life than cold early mornings on a porch overlooking a lake that has known no more than 10 human hands in its life. Odds of that? Slim. Pipe-dreaming my father called it. But all desires in my life are so far beyond reach as to be pipe dreams. Take women. I am now convinced there is no woman in the world for me as there is no perfect woman. I want one that is both romantic and practical. I want a girl who will swoon when I play her a song on my guitar, no matter how bad I am. But I also want a girl who would wear a sweatshirt and jeans to a May Cubs game instead of dressing to nines in a T-shirt and skirt, because ,after all, it's damn cold out. A girl with hard eyes and firm lips that soften and smile at me all time. No such person exists. Pipe dreaming.

Dragonflies rest cooly here, then hover and dart with furious purpose. Pop pop pop go the fish on the surface, go the bullfrogs for flies, go my memories of childhood dreams. Childish dreams. Soap bubbles in this strong breeze.