Glistening sunlit points on the river observed from a picnic bench. Essay had been read about the poet Wordsworth. Having run just over five miles, the midway point, I walked past a row of blue plastic portable toilets set up for the July 4th celebration, then sat at this weathered picnic table bench. Sun, grass, water…. Saw underbellies of three airliners overhead. Two nearby teenage girls watching over three very young children, taking pictures of each other modeling in front of the departing planes.
I seemed to know at the time, resting at the picnic bench, that this, in my limited understanding of things, was to be the most important moment of the day (which I seem now to prove to myself by writing of it) though it was not a personally very eventful day, like most. (The sense of rest, the sense of “taking it in”, was perhaps what had made this moment seem so important.)
Beside the two teenage photographing gals watching capably over the three young children, there was a young man by himself at a picnic bench down the way, engaged in his rigorous personal exercise regimen. The cranes across the river, projecting salient over the squat marble of the town, reminded me of the birds in a Tintoretto painting I’d seen exhibited a few days before at the West Wing, as they were all pointed the same way because of the wind — “just like the birds in the painting,” I’d been thinking.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 