I decided to talk to the fisherman on the north bank of the river. This happened right after an encounter with sunlight in the local diner, where for a moment, everything in my torpid life was wonderful and even danced with the brilliance.
“You’re a wise man, aren’t you?” I said to the silver-haired man on the shore.
“I see things sometimes,” he said, and shrugged. “Once, I saw a young man on a motorcycle flying down the highway and the highway turned into a silver band like a Christmas ribbon and stretched forever through the starry cosmos. Once I saw a unicorn dip its horn into a pool of blood and come out with the horn all golden. I even saw you, believe it or not, as you sat in the sun haze in that old diner, sausage sizzling behind the counter, men belching enough to tempt you against romanticism, swilling there in the booth like a man caught off guard for the first time in his life. I saw it from across the room as I arranged a box of tackle.”
“Will it last? What I saw in there?”
“Your ecstasy? Oh, life is always gift, blazing trails our way through the dark, the mirror dim. Take it a day at a time. Practice makes perfect. Permit me to commit cliché. I’m casting for insights!”
I know, now, how deep was the need to forget about myself at the diner and then talk with the fisherman on the north bank of the river as he tied to the hook and ruby lure and cast into the blank moving page and scrawled with his reel, whizz, whizz, whizz, over and over and over again until the rainbow trout flopped at his feet like a slice of the beauty that’s everywhere, everywhere, but must, nonetheless, be fished for.
