Sitting around the campfire with Matt’s friends, Daryl, Robbie and Joe, Matt looked up at me and said, ” Dad, where did you get that sweater?” “It was Steven Varga’s. He gave it to me,” I answered. In the movie Seven Samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) plucks a fly out of the air with his chopsticks. Matthew is equally precise with his words, so I knew I was not yet dispensed with. An hour later, after Daryl grilled the first hamburger, ” Dad, you don’t have the same taste as Steven Varga.”

I wear it because it reminds me of Mort in the Bazooka Joe comics.

The Wanderer
I told Diane that we would meet her at the dock in an hour, thinking even if we got lost, we’d be there just after lunch. There are three, actually four ways to get to Spoons Pond from the cabin.The easiest is to walk back down the path we now successfully drive up, past the Littells, to the end of Beech Lane and then hang a left. If you’re not enticed by the two intersecting roads you’ll walk right into the water. Or, you can walk down the path, and take a short cut through the woods, behind the Littells, cutting five minutes or so from the trip. The third way is to walk in the opposite direction, back past the garden at the top of the hill, and then make an educated beeline through the woods to the pond. I remember Peter and I wandering off in that direction one day, me in my flip flops, both of us somewhere other than in our brains, and never finding the pond.
Here is Matt, confident that he could lead us through the woods, claiming to have come this way before (with me and living to tell about it? I think not). I’m following at a safe distance, compass and journal in hand. Afterall I had promised three sets of parents I’d bring their boys back, and if I fail, I want to have copious notes for a good story.
We might have been in the woods for ten minutes before we came to the backside of a cabin, near which was a slight rise with a copse of pine trees. Matt said, “The pond is over that hill.” We walked up, over and down and right out onto the dock, fifty minutes before Diane.

Confident boys stride ahead; skeptic note taker trails behind.

Trust me, the red arrow points to Daryl’s red shirt.
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