Whad'ya Know?

                                            On Feldman Pond:

                                          or  The Life Pondemic

                                    

           

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.

I love to be alone.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

‘Tis a backyard, still, having no pond as of yet (“we’re not zoned

 transcendental,” Feldman quips) as we come upon Feldman Pond very much in

 ‘needs a lot of TLC’ mode,’ as does our solitary vagabond,  perhaps lacking

 Thoreau’s handyman skills needed to sustain meditative life twixt house and

 garage.

          Would Henry David Thoreau, himself, have had difficulty adjusting to

the life solitary without the food, clothing, shelter and fuel supplied by the Ralph

Waldo Emerson’s upon whose Concord lawn he decamped?

          Skills with axe, sledge and knife aside, what of the transcendental skills,

the cognition and recognition?   Should our Feldman be no Henry David Thoreau,

seeking ‘not to die having not lived,’  might he be the Jiminy Cricket of “the still,

 small voice that people don’t listen to”?

         

          Feldman Pond, in “pondemic times:” all around cocooned, traffic

unnaturally calmed, little commerce save the occasional barking dog and the pedal

to metal screech of Toyota Supra MK 4’s.    

          We come upon Feldman hunkered down in ill-advised and ill-fitting surplus

desert camo, nose to breeze, smelling, perhaps, what it means to be human in this

backyard Forest Primeval, this not-so Primordial Ooze, this Parallel Universe, this

Madison, the small still voice within saying what the heck was I thinking, answered only by the Beag-a-

Poo Bella’s subtle turns of head towards the house she longs to get back into.

         

Here, the simple, yet profound, child’s wading pool water-element in lieu of pond ; there, a scraggly

hackberry run amuck ‘twixt clothes-pole and garage leaning a good 20 degrees towards Some Truth–

now a motion-light warns of passersby passing by, unseen, uninvited, uninterested, while our Feldman,

lost in thoughtlessness, aware yet oblivious, squats prayer-like and tags the outline of his left hand, like

cave dweller of old, onto the vinyl siding of his former life, abandoned for this habit, this Good Earth of a Guy’s Own.

          Here Pond is the metaphor and, simultaneously, simile.

          Verily, few things teem with the Metaphorical like Pond;

          Thoreau dipped brush in Pond and painted aphorisms while Pond did the writing,

for Pond teems with is , like, as , with non causa pro causas, unexpected turns of phrase,

mood, coloration, surface tension, dappling, waves if there’s any

kind of wind, bubbles coming from who knows what or where, the methane of Poseidon?

          Pond, friend, ally and enemy, its depths your depths, its shallows

 your shallows,  concentric circles of stones skipped towards infinity, towards the divinity of Nature.

          Boy, this place needs a pond.

For now Feldman must cast his bread upon a wading pool, dangling his line in

the aphoristic, awaiting the Homily kicking with insect legs like a Jesus Bug across

its liquid dramatic tension.

So far, this catch in his creel:

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to borrow.”

“We say time is short, yet time, by definition, is always on time.”

“Beware of all enterprises that require enterprise, and all sentences that begin with

 Beware.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because of his

 short stride.”

“I should not talk so much about myself were there anybody else around.”

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin than squash.”

“Ignore the still, small voice telling you to kill coming from your dog.”

“It’s not what you look at in life that matters, it’s what looks back.”

“Our life is frittered away with fritters.”

“The price of anything is the amount of money you pay for it.”  

“We must walk consciously to our goal and skedaddle the heck back before dark.”

 “In human intercourse tragedy begins not with misunderstanding about

 words, but with misunderstanding about intercourse.”

“What is once well done is done until it needs well-doing again.”

and “The Solitary Life could use a few Bells and Whistles.”

          For now Feldman blows out the butane torch used for both light and heat,

 curls up in refrigerator box filled with packing nuts, and, pulling the tarp over self and pup,

 dreams of what will fill his notebooks once Pond fills in.

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