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This is a fine Saturday, and I'm sitting on the banks of Shadow Pond with Willie and we are fishing.

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Callie called last night and said she would be back on Tuesday.

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I told her I was feeling a little stronger, which is the truth.

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We are watching our bobbers float, and the air is so strong and clean, I keep inhaling it to enjoy it as much as I can.

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I feel slightly disembodied, almost ethereal, as if I were floating too, drifting in the azure pond of sky outside of time and age.

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Willie has done miserably in school and he has expressed a few regrets.

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I told him about his cousin in Greensboro and he only nodded and shrugged.

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But there is something different in his demeanor, a clear recognition of my predicament,

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perhaps my inability to learn or teach, both of which make my life rich.

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But both are slowly returning.

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Willie shows me how to bait a cricket, patient, graceful as wind.

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I lost my cricket to the weeds.

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I'll catch it, I say.

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Ah, let him go, Doc, Willie says.

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Ain't nothing to him but legs and they don't cost nothing.

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He grabs another from the cage and hands it to me.

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This time I get it on and feel the power of death I have over it flow through me like blood.

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The brim takes the line, and I feel the power again.

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The mystery of this earth spread out before me under the growing shade of trees along Shadow Pond.

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I feel a quiet grandeur in the earth, swelling like an organ note,

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and I rejoice that I am here and that I can breathe in the pure grace of the natural world.