Hurricaner

On Saturday I snuck down to Prospect Lake to see what the storm had done with it and found it hadn't been too rampaged. On the way I noticed small piles of browned and fibrous London Plane leaves the weather had gleaned from the trees, and found a jewelry box which I snagged for my little daughter, who I worry is getting too few chances to appreciate that kind of femininity around our house. Twist the key, and it tones away while the classic ballerina in tutu whirls slowly in front of a little mirror. Hard for me to believe that she couldn't see it as a cliche, and has never heard comb and peg Mozart before.

The lake was a sparkling emerald bleeding to sapphire when I got there, where 2 puppies on the shore nervously yapped at the geese and ducks that clearly outnumbered them. The goose I call half-beak lumbered around and I tried to get a good shot of its bizarre defect that I've come to love. The front half of its top beak has broken off revealing half of his rough pink goose tongue, and making it hard for him to eat I think. It prefers to be fed from a cupped hand full of cracked corn. When I've fed the goose, I used my left hand.

I met a man named Eugene down there, a man obsessed with the Park I think, a man who'd spent Saturday afternoon hunkered down in a shelter by the lake shooting pictures throughout Hurricane Hanna's torrent. I know he's not the only one to have done that, or at least to have wanted to. I can imagine that there are many who long to be outside when heaven plays water drums on the earth, granting significant relief to those suffering from all the dry and spiritually fruitless business of contemporary life.

Speaking of contemporary customs, I asked him if he had a flickr page, but no, he didn't, so I amused myself with the foolishness of tkaing pictures of his pictures as they appeared on his Canon's display. Among the images he showed me was one of ducks flying and he called it a "fly pass." I don't know if that's a Jamaican idiom, a birder's idiom, or a Jamaican birder's idiom, but I like it. He showed me a bird he called a kingfisher, swans with beaks plunged in plummage, water drops falling against a field of darkness, the lake shrouded by rain. Before I left he submitted to my whim of taking his picture, which I did while he gazed at the lake he loves. Unfortunately, a sunbeam made a gash through his cheek.

On the way home I found another jewelry box (?), although when I first laid eyes on the strange object I wasn't sure what it could be. It looked part frame, part small squarish casket, bearing a print of roses under glass. I found out it could open, and inside the bottom section was divided into three partitions, one holding a brown swag of velvet not cut to fit in the least, while the lid was lined with a mirror bearing a decal that read "Doyle Sailmakers." I've grown attached to it because of its strangeness and I don't think it will be too hard to hang it on the wall. With some help.