September 04, 2001 - 19:45 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

The Last Days Of Summer

Labor Day's tour around the lake showed us some of the sights of the countryside including the nests of eagles who stay there, a pelican or two and other critters. We pretty much saw how the prairie was in times past. The lake itself was once a buffalo wallow which was dammed up to provide irrigation water for farmers and is still jointly owned by the irrigation company and the state.

Along the way were some little yellow butterflys like the ones I used to see as a kid, now very seldom seen in the city. At a stop to stretch our legs a bit and hear what the tour guide had to say we saw some white butterflys flittering about. Seeing them brought to mind Robert Graves poem.

FLYING CROOKED

The butterfly, a cabbage white,

(His honest idiocy of flight)/P>

Will never now, it is too late,

Master the art of flying straight,

Yet has - so well as I?

A just sense of how not to fly:

He lurches here and here by guess,

And God and hope and hopelessness.

Even the acrobatic swift,

Has not his flying crooked gift.

ROBERT GRAVES (1895 1985)

For the rest of the tour I was half in the present, but looking through a boy's eyes.

Heather took us to a restaurant we hadn't been to eat, which was quite nice and satisfying but really too far from home to be convenient for often use.

On the way home in my mind I roamed the fields and parks of yesteryear and of school starting for the Fall - Winter Semester right after Labor Day. We boys now captive of society in a hot crowded room, a drop or two of sweat cruising toward an eyebrow. Sneaking longing looks out the window, wishing we could be at large with nature still.

The girls, it seemed, eyeballed each other in a ladylike way, checking out the new girls from the bigger city and the latest in school fashions. There was gossip of things of the summer, romances past and possible new conquests in the fall and winter and the birthday parties they attended and swapping ideas on what the new teacher would be like.

Late summer daytime temperatures were as hot as any of high summer, but coolth flowed in the evening making sleeping comfortable before the winter's heavy quilts would hamper our movements. The windows open at night still to catch a vagrant breeze and the smell of live things still growing out of doors, the occasional known sounds of neighborhood night was a lullaby for me then.

Our thoughts and gab were about the coming Hallowe'en, the capers we were planning and the expected trick or treat loot and talking about the big pumpkins we would get to make our Jack-o'-Lanterns. Helped pass our idle time, it did and took some of the sting of imprisonment away.

I hated to admit to myself that the start of school added spice to my life and my wish to learn peaked, oh, far less would I ever admit to another that I liked some aspects of school starting. So, amid new things mixed with the comforting old -- I spent well, The Last Days Of Summer. . . . .

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