Anatomy of a Friendship

?Don't look up?, he yells as he strips out another few feet ofmonofilament. What kind of nonsense is that? You're standing in asmall boat being violently rocked by a beam sea, hoping to hell you canget a motor started before the whole shooting match gets swampedand some joker yells ?don't look up'. Of course I look up. Trouble is,I don't see anything because there's an eight foot wall of water staringme in the face. Vintage Charlie, only I didn't know it then. Tears are streaming down my face but I am not crying, not really. Ifinally understand the genesis of the primal scream. I understand itstherapeutic value but I am incapable of such demonstration, too tightlycontrolled. Instead, I split wood. Breaking glass would be better,louder, more destructive, directionless, like my thoughts. Perhaps thisis why the quality of city neighborhoods can be judged by the amountof broken glass in the streets. Frustration run amok, opportunities lostbefore they ever were. Plans made and unfulfilled, unfulfillable ? I amswimming in memories, an alphabet soup of vignettes, a quartercentury of A's and G's and Z's spread over much of North America. Ithink in the present, in the past. Sometimes I can't tell the difference.Only I hear my scream. The crows, even the eagles that nest highabove our house, are deaf, oblivious. To them I am irrelevant.Levy, Robert is the author of 'Anatomy of a Friendship', published 2007 under ISBN 9780595413980 and ISBN 0595413986.