Our neighborhood is alive with young rabbits. They hop from here to there, as if they lived in a giant children's storybook written in very large print. We went last night to walk our dogs around Glendover Park pond. Beatrice, who looks like a labrador retriever in miniature, noticed nearby bunnies on two different instances. She barked. She strained at her leash. She emitted a sound that was neither quite bark nor whine. Each bunny departed in good order.
We once made a stop in Hamburg, Germany when we were on a cruise of the Baltic which a kind editor had arranged for my wife to attend so as to facilitate my wife's creation of a magazine article. Some people deride, with some justice, the "cruise-ship" notion of sightseeing--just six or eight or ten hours in a place, quickly experienced. Yet I like the throwaway camera aspect of getting a very quick impression of a new place.
The quick snapshot my mind contains of Hamburg is walking through a park with an name along the lines of Bloomgarden. All along the spacious June lawns, small rabbits hopped about. It gave the whole place a kind of child-like serenity. The botanical garden in Coral Gables, in Florida, has iguana hopping to and fro, which is also fascinating, but it is not quite the same.
I also liked that the part of the city of Hamburg that we visited had lots of high-rise apartment buildings. In the window of nearly every apartment, small cacti were in evidence. My mind "snapped" the mental impression--Hamburg is a really cool place.
I remember the bombed-out church in Hamburg from the Second World War, a single wall standing with a poignant arch remaining--reminding me not only of the sadness of war, but of a similar wall in London, from a similarly-bombed church, in the same war.
I am playing postal chess via webserver against a man from Venezuela. Playing postal chess by webserver is a delight, as one no longer has to keep up with those impossible postcards, but may instead merely log in, see the board, and make a move in each game.
My early going has been quite rocky, as I have already lost a goodish number of games, have not yet won any, and have the better position in only a few games. But I am having fun, and I can see my game returning to form as I play.
I mentioned to my Venezuelan oppponent that I would love to see the cloud forests of Venezuela,and he said that he had not seen them yet himself. I thought of all the places in this country I have not seen--the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, the rain forests in Washington, and the breathtaking areas of Montana, for example. Yet, at the same time, I begin to think that one should see the things in one's own area. It's so easy to
treat one's own area as humdrum and a bit unfortunate, when there is so much to see and experience in so many places.
I like to imagine that there is os much to see all around us. It's not the want of sights, but the want of child-like eyes that's missing.