I knowthe joyof fishes in the river

“I know the joy of fishes in the river,”

Zhuangzi insists, his finalverbalflourish flashingin Huizi’s face like the diaphanous tailfins of koi roiling below them in the River Hao.

All the Master needs to know is his own golden joy, walking along the riverbank, to feel their bliss— this the reason that I, sipping foam from a pint of Golden Citrus, ripple with an ecstasy that is both my own & harmonious with that of the patrons of Funk Brewery’s Emmaus Taproom this February Sunday mid-afternoon, & it seems the only thing missing as we toast our birthdays is two steaming bowls of longevity noodles.

It’s true Pennsylvania, I say to myself, the fusion of wu-wei & roughneck chatter of young guys in watch caps & denim jackets, who talk Brady & Belichick, slap down small bets on the Big Game, who for all their swagger speak shyly to the barmaids—still girls, really—thus proving they have mastered happiness, Zhuang sez, by not thinking of happiness,

as we, on meeting, would never say, “Let’s tell such stories as will summon happiness,” but plunge into aconversation thatflows from Thoreau to the Stones to Freddy Lynn, time being the stream we go a-fishingin, as the formeropined in his Walden notebook, he whom the scholar Lin Yutang named most Chinese of American authors, comparing HDT to Zhuang in his “ruggedness,” though neitherof them to the fine-bonedflyballchaserknown as “Fragile Freddy,”

& if we in no way resemble those two disciples on the eponymous road, ghosted by a sense of someone absent, yet drafting close behind, still, when two girls manifest from out of nowhere selling Girl Scout cookies, & slide over to us in their luminousness a thank-you note stamped with a turtle shell mandala while their mother makes change,