|
Simplicity was really the most beautiful of all. Here he was in the same cafe, having just finished dinner, and here was the open book of the dinner crowd before him, and he with no responsibilities and nowhere else to go. He drank some of his water and thought a little bit about the fish he had just eaten, and where it might have come from. He imagined Colorado, though that was a long way away, and he had never been there, so maybe he wasn't imagining Colorado at all. But he was content not to think about that, and to assume that what he was imagining was Colorado. That was what simplicity was about. He was sitting and thinking about swimming, and waiting for something interesting to happen. That was the key-- he had to be patient and try not to think about anything too hard, so that when something was about to make an impression on him he would be ready for it. After a while he felt like something exciting was trying to burrow its way into his life, so he started looking around the cafe. But at the crucial second, he had the idea that the trout he had eaten might have been from Montana, and that that was what he had been imagining. if anything exciting happened in that moment, he missed it. Then he wasted some more time thinking about Montana. He was having poor luck tonight, but at least there were people in the cafe who seemed sadder than him. There was an old woman at a table of young girls, who kept looking up at him but not really looking at him. He guessed that she was looking into the distance, to where her young-girl-ness still was. But maybe it was wrong to think that all an old woman could think about was being young again. He was happy to blame that on society though, and leave his own prejudices out of it.
|
