i hope that if you are ever in a situation where you are walking with a friend, and they finally have the courage and honesty to admit out loud “i really don’t believe that i’ve done anything actually worthwhile, anything of value at all in my life”, i hope that you do not respond hamvoiced and blubbering “oh, that’s not true! and etcetera”.

it’s worth a few moment’s thought.

it is worth thinking of whether anyone has been doing anything worthwhile, lately.

there are railings along a bridge that spans the androscoggin. it is filled with spiderwebs, and the spiderwebs are filled with spiders, catching little insects in the river breeze. the spiders go back countless generations. an ancestry of spiders that have only ever known a bridge spanning the androscoggin. they sit waiting for a mosquito to get caught. they while away the time comparing their web to the one their great-great-great-great-grandmother may have spun.

on saturday night i will be the singer in a band that plays in front of hundreds of people. i can already sense that it will be anticlimatic after thirty minutes, compared to how my teenageself might have envisioned. nonetheless, i will paint my face white and i will fashion black rectangles round my eyes. the triangles will be upside down. i will be dressed in a wizard’s robe, hood up. i will carry a staff. the staff will emanate brilliant white light at its top.

There is no such lapse.

Albert & Hannah were roundabout twenty-one years old in 1907. They got married in the summer. They must have been flummoxing the countryside, deep in their blackandwhite rurals, making love in wheatfields and all matter of being so sickeningly alive beyond comprehension, as people were or are far beyond my familiar bounds.

Perhaps a wheatfield within sight of the Swafield Rectory, a few hundred yards beyond the village, on the way to or from Knapton. They made love with British accents, like jowl-less Churchill and a jowl-less Queen Victoria. Youthful and mysterious, beneath a sky snared like a trap.

This is the field in which they now grow strawberries. I picked some on July 10th, 2010. Just beyond the perimeter of an afternoon shadow of the Rectory. The shadow was on its way to Knapton. I’ll give you a ride if you wait a few minutes, i said to the shadow. I am picking strawberries.

I picked a small carton full of what would become the best strawberries i would ever eat. I paid three pounds twenty to a few teenage girls and then i put the carton on the passenger seat, which located itself awkwardly to my left. The passenger seat was a lousy conversationalist but it did better with the carton of strawberries giving it some sort of topography.

The topography was subtracted as the afternoon ran its oblique course.

Strawberry juice trickled down my esophagus like a stray dog wandering a crowded beach. I was a phantom from one-hundred and three years in the future, passing Albert & Hannah who walked leisurely along the road, with a vague sense of a great-grandson passing them at high speed, with a vague scent of strawberry, with a newly-conceived great-uncle whatshisface sleeping in a tummy, a prefetus anticipation being prepared for the likes of strawberries and America.