Et in Arcadia, Ego

I sit on a red rock slabbed into the shore bank and watch as he casts into the vast pellucid before him, the reflection of sky shimmered by ripples of bobber and bait. I have to remind myself not to blink, a flick of eye that would erase the slow counter-clockwise turn of the reel tauting the line, a movement that, somehow, keeps him real, holds him in three dimensions. The Oklahoma sun gives me back the color of the outdoors as he casts again, as the ripples fade into expansion, as he waits, placid as the waters he plumbs, timeless and content in an idyll of his own creation.

People often comment on the resemblance, say he’s a mini-me. But my echoes are not yet the whispers of rumor to him. Instead, I am a mini-him, reduced, faded, dwarfed by his possibility. He is fifteen, all of his mistakes, his regrets, his roads not taken, are but reflections of shadow still, shimmered and ethereal.

So he casts into the vast pellucid before him, as I sit on a red rock slabbed into the shore bank and watch, hopeful he catches that for which I am no longer bold enough to try.

- Paul Juhasz