Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

374

Mommy, what are people for?

Well, honey, they're for watching TV.

What are they "for watching TV" for?

Because, honey, with no people, there'd be nobody to watch TV. It would just sit there.

Life is a bowl of fruit. Come to the Mardi Gras.

373

Dave Matthews sings, over and over again, the refrain,

"Grave Digger, when you dig my grave
Can you make it shallow,
So I can feel the rain?"

Now, Dave, that is a wonderful example of the pathetic fallacy at work, but you don't really mean it, do you?

Matthews is a wonderful singer and has a great band, but sometimes we fall in love with the sound of words, and a poetic extension of their implicit meaning.

If you really mean it, we fans will of course do it for you. But there are the attendant problems of neighborhood dogs, garbage disposal, city ordinances, school children, ad absurdum.

I'd rather resort to an old fashioned funeral pyre, if you don't mind.

The lake on a particularly quiet winter morn

372

The ice is gone, the rains have returned, and it is warm again, so warm that I split old, calcified alder in my shirtsleeves this Sunday afternoon. And it lake is high, as high as I have ever seen it, though Norma argues that she remembers it as being a bit higher.

Beneath the surface, near shore, I can see pondweed not quite dead, though a bit brown on its edges. And the ducks have returned--vast rafts of male common mergansers that cruise the near middle and dive as a team, as though corks pulled under by some invisible cord, only to pop to the surface long moments later (one year I timed a whole succession of them and found it was just short of two minutes per duck) in a manner not awfully different from how they dove. But, since I can't tell one male merganser from another, it was technically impossible to test my hypothesis that each was yoked for its own precise time.

I'm not much of a scientist, admitted, though I try, I do try. And I know just enough not to mix my variables.

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor