The faraway creek trickled and tickled the toes. Once we disturbed a submerged stone in its coldness. A rusted crayfish complained about the invasion of his resting place with an annoyed lethargic wiggle. "What is he and why is he?" my callow companion had asked. The sun was warmer, both there then and here now while the green pokes through in places weird and unexpected. Spring will have its way though neglected hulks of automotive chassis, abandoned mop handles and desiccated rodents' skeletons mar the beauty of my backyard hard by the railroad tracks of old Woodside. Yes, this is the cruelest month. Life throbs without while within the echoes of what was are hardly heard. Judge Judy scolds in the background. Her confidence gives a vicarious thrill. Knowing and imparting her knowledge, she excoriates and/or dismisses the slow witted dissemblers in her midst. My rooting interests migrate inexplicably toward these losers. Smartypants Judy. The creek trickles on assumedly. Now rusted Billy Beer cans, non-existent then, may still lay side by side with Mr. Crusty's descendants, the incipient country freshet not much more or less pristine than my urban world.
I wish I could hold hands with Marsha Miller. I never did. It was 1966 and "Red Rubber Ball" was playing on the radio. Its melody and words always came to mind while furtively glancing at her in class. She was petite, dark and very attractive with the flip style of the day sometimes hiding her downcast eyes. Her shyness never revealed a trace of any coquettishness, the formidability and imperviousness of her chary ways perhaps only surpassed by my own. I believe it was James Mason in "Pandora and The Flying Dutchman" (or was it in "Lolita"?), or some other worthy actor who mused to the effect: "there are certain moments in time that are so indescribably lovely and ineluctable that one cannot forget or ever quite get over them and their power." I see what my end is, but the Marshas of my days call out to me somehow still. Was not Anne Francis' "Marsha" only a department store mannequin in a haunting "Twilight Zone" episode of yore? She so wanted to live, but was obliged by the law of her race to return, as Bryant reminded us in his "Thanatopsis", to her "chamber in the silent halls of death." I hope "my" Marsha married and made babies, her timidity just a passing phase of youth's decency and a virginal viewpoint that sunrises and sunsets molded and caused to blossom by degrees into maturity, wisdom and cheerful aplomb, with her latter day, confident congeniality a fixed point for all time and her learned lessons now bearing all kinds of wondrous fruit. Would that I could offer a kind word to her, whether she needs one or not, and then disappear forever in a reverie of other pleasant, youthful ghosts.
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