It is not that the weather was particularly awful for me to have shunned my friend. There were quite a few walk-friendly days. But I didn't go.
Not that the river yelled and screamed at me for me to be pissed off at the waters. The cosmos doesn't care. It is. That's it.
Good days and bad days are less a function of the weather and more dependent on the state of one's mind. I am willing to bet that there are people who are depressed in Tahiti and there are quite a few happy campers in Moldova too.
So, well, a man's got to do what a man has got to do. I, pretending to be a man, went for a walk for by the river.
It didn't take me long to figure out that there was a world outside my mind's world. A world in which the sun shines, the river flows with a noise over the boulders, the grass is green, and trees are proudly nude. A world made for you and me, it seems.
Very few were out on the path. There was a good reason--the local football team was playing, which was being telecast, and the maniacal couch potatoes couldn't be bothered, I suppose. If only they had known how awful the game would turn out for their Ducks, well, they, too, would have enjoyed the walk by the river under a bright sun on a cool fall afternoon. The loss was theirs, a double one at that!
A man with a backpack was carrying a pink scooter on one hand. And then I saw a kid walking ahead of him with her helmet in her hand. With her were two other kids--one on a bike and another on a scooter. No wonder the man, perhaps the father of all the three, was walking with a backpack full of whatever supplies the kids need--and the pink scooter, of course.
Fathers and mothers do the strangest tasks, all to make their children's lives happy. The girl had no worries about the scooter--after all, there was dad to carry it. If she felt tired, I bet she knew that her father would carry her too.
I am not sure whether they will grow up to appreciate the father for the small and big things he does. Mos of us do not. When we were kids, we took our parents for granted. Perhaps we even found fault with them for not doing something, rather than thank them for doing everything they did.
The father was walking at the kids' pace and I soon passed him and drew even with the kids. The boy was wearing a pair of shorts. Young blood is much warmer, I thought to myself.
He apparently read my mind. "I am gettin' cold" he remarked to the two girls.
"My fingers went numb a few minutes ago" responded the girl on the scooter.
Could she have meant the "minutes"? Wasn't she way too young to know about hours and minutes? Is it true that kids these days are smarter than the kids of the past--just like how my grandmothers used to comment about us kids?
I was soon way ahead of them, and was lost in my own thoughts. I remembered reading somewhere that normally we are able to have a conversation within ourselves and we know it is all in our head. But, for some, the struggle among the neurons is a chaos, which is why they can't seem to figure out that the internal thoughts are not some spooks telling them stuff. I thanked the cosmos for whatever sanity I think I have.
I saw a large group of friends and families heading to the river, and it was quite a sight. Well, not humans, but:
Naturally, I gave them the space and time and then followed them.
It looked like a bulletin had gone out and all the birds were meeting that the place!
To think that I might have missed all these if I hadn't stepped out to visit with my old friend!
Tomorrow's another day!
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