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sunning and squirrling in the Nethermead
Saturday, March 30 2002
The weather was so nice today that Gretchen, Sally and I spent most of the afternoon in the most distant parts of Prospect Park. We rode there on our bicycles, with Sally running like the protagonist in a Mountain Dew commercial beside us. What with the weather and its being Saturday, the park was teeming with humanity, vast milling crowds of which we did our best to avoid.
The first place we went was to the banks of Prospect Lake. There we lay in the sun and thumbed through a collection of Gary Larson Far Side comics. A little white dog came running up out of nowhere to greet us and left muddy footprints on the one featuring three old men on a rustic front porch, each commenting on what sort of weather their various oversized body swellings were predicting. Sally had been stretched out in the shade some distance away, but, after seeing such a demonstration of our vulnerability, she decided to come over and lie beside us in the sun.
Off across the lake someone started playing metal drums, and for some reason this disturbed Sally. She got up and started walking away, looking over her shoulder at us with concern, wondering if perhaps we were foolish enough to stay there to just accept our fate. So we decided to relocate to a patch of grass adjoing some woods in the Nethermead.
Now Sally turned her attention to the pursuit of squirrels, a pursuit she has never found fruitful, but one that continues to interest her nonetheless. As she slowly crept up on a distant squirrel some distance away, two little girls came upon her and decided to try to pet her. Attempting to pet a strange dog with a determined look on its face is never a good idea, but Sally is a good-natured dog and simply ignored the girls, running back to rejoin us when the squirrel inevitably dashed up a tree. Evidently the girls were determined to pet her, because they ran after her, coming right into our camp. Gretchen, who does not like human children even a tiny bit, wasn't pleased.
The older of the two girls was a real chatterbox, talking in a vaguely Ralph Wiggums manner about how she used to have a dog but it had died "because of me," or so her mother had told her. (Though initially shocking to Gretchen, what the girl had really meant was that her dog had died in a heroic effort to save her life.) I was sort of interested in her story, particularly after her little sister spoke up and said something entirely in Russian. But Gretchen clearly wanted them to shove along, asking, "Speaking of your mother, is she around somewhere? Or are you here all by yourselves?" The little girl motioned off across the Nethermead to a distant cluster of people, indicating that they were her family, but that her mother wasn't among them because she is pregant and sick right now. Then she resumed talking about her dog and how it had died saving her life. "That was when I lived in St. Petersburg," she explained. "St. Petersburg, Russia?" I asked. "Yes, Russia. And I'm Jewish." With that the little girls bid adieu and ran back to rejoin their family.
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