because it continues to be Saturday

I go to the other side of the house, to sit in the rocking chair to read, and there is a little metal boat out on the bay, someone fishing in this light wind. The boat is drifting, a bit. Why else fish here on a Saturday if not to drift, to go where the water does?

When I was a teenager in Annapolis, I was invited sometimes to sail with different friend’s families on summer days. We'd sail up the Severn to one cove or another, where we’d anchor and swim and doze on the deck and go with the water in the shade of the overhanging trees. Sometimes we’d be loud as we jumped into the water and we’d splash but mostly my memories are of the quiet, of how we’d all be seduced into summer water afternoon time.

The other water time of those summers grew around eleven or midnight when a friend and I would canoe out to the end and then around from the inlet off the South River where she lived. We'd never know how long we'd be out, we'd bring along a can of baked beans and a soda (and sometimes some wine we’d snitched), and we'd sit out on a sandbar or on someone else's dock, watching the heat lightning on the horizon. There’s no way to recreate what we talked about in the dark, or even that we talked, but we must have, about school or sex or the possibilities of college, all the stuff that was then for us as dark as where we were but without the lightning even. My memories of those nights have only the time of paddling, sitting, watching and I do not remember ever ever paddling back and climbing out to go to bed -- just as I have no memories ever of sailing back from those coves along the Severn when it got to be time to go home for dinner.