They Change You
They change you, or they fucking should.
Or maybe they only do if you were doing it wrong to begin with.
I look over at him and there’s not a care in the world. Just a little boy and his fishing pole and the only thing that matters is within an arm’s length. That’s his world. The there. The now.
No fucked up manifestos. No sides taken. Hell he doesn’t even know that at some point in his life he’s going to be expected to take a side. A loose term, it could be anything, but some time in the near future this world is going to expect him to be on one side of the fence or another.
But not right now. If there’s one thing I can squeeze out of all this chaos that surrounds me, it’s that. Make his world his immediate area. Or stand back and do nothing at all, because somehow it’s already that way with him. Don’t intervene for the sake of your own ego, his course is straight, let it play out.
He asks for help, somehow realizing that the plastic Disney Cars fishing pole with a plastic tire for a lure isn’t going to cut it in these gold medal trout waters.
Damnit. More slipping away.
I move over next to him and he sits on my knee as I show him how to cast. He tells me he wants to catch a small one because those are for little boys and the big ones are for daddies.
I don’t want to explain to him that most of the time daddies don’t catch anything at all. Most of the time we stand on the edge of the water looking at our own reflection questioning why it distorts us the way it does. Why it shows us something of ourselves that we didn’t know was there.
It merely reflects. We interpret.
I wonder what he sees in his reflection. Likely nothing. Likely he looks past it into the depths of the water to what he’s looking for.
I look back at my reflection and then to him, wondering if I’m the man I want him to be someday.
I hear excitement in his voice. I awaken to the feeling of the erratic bending of the pole.
The present calls me back from the future. The messenger is a three year old boy.
// Fred Bohm
