Dedicate something to my friend; acknowledge the man with his family, his job in the city, a decision at 26-years-old to buckle down, reaping benefits of a decade; may as well dedicate the lake and the mountains and the sky to the man who shared it with us: The way the pontoon ferry works is at the end of the day, after our Algonquin hanging not quite literary, he boats the ferryman back across the lake and returns alone to tie up on his own dock at Edgecliff, underneath the peregrines who are serious on their granite slabs carved by glaciers, and the two loons who sport this particular crystal the summer season long. Drunk and stoned with the best of them most enthusiastic, I jumped along for the ride. We carried the talkative Vermonter, big guy obsequiously angling for the man’s best ear, accent closer to those of the country to the north than not, slow lilt “yah, okay then, see ya.” My man turned the boat around and said “Let’s see what this thing can do.” After the goddam putting of the ferryman. Garth killed the engine in the middle, as awareness dictates, and we idled silently, gazing skyward at the sparkle that is the splintered moon. As in the best of lives, as it should happen to friends in the open space of a lake at one in the morning, blazing across our minds spit a meteor, a brushstroke of fire directly above in a swipe to the horizon cliffs, where it exploded in a burn before us and vanished; exclaiming turned to high fives.
