I met a fisherman on the 1 train one night.
It would have been hard to miss him even in a packed subway car. His two large fishing rods, like a pair of periscopes, towered a good head above anyone else. He had gotten on one stop after me. Gripping his poles with one hand, a train pole with the other, he studied the subway map over my shoulder. He was tall, maybe six-two, in his mid-twenties, and could have been part Dominican, part Vietnamese—island countries.
I watched his face as his scrunched-up eyes traced his route on the map and he got his bearings. Satisfied, he looked around then settled into the empty seat next to me. He corralled his poles between his knees.
You can’t be sitting next to a fisherman on a subway and not say something.
“Catch any?”
“Not today.” This did not appear to trouble him.
I was coming from work. The idea of coming from fishing instead of your job seemed pretty sweet. “Where would one go—where would I go if I wanted to fish?”
“Staten Island. Great fishing there—striped bass. But today I went to Battery Park—off the pier. Didn’t have much time. Just an hour.”
“Not even a nibble?”
“Oh yeah, lots, but no catches. They take a bite, feel something, feel the hook, spit it out. They’re smart, those fish. You’re sadly mistaken if you think you’re in control when you go fishing.”
He sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
I said I’d take his word for it.
“You gotta be patient,” he elaborated. “You can’t go out there for just an hour and expect to catch. They feel you out. I went today just to be out there—”
“—with the fish?”
He nodded. “And on the water.”
You can get so caught up in your life in New York that you forget: We live on an island, I thought to myself—an island. “That’s cool,” I murmured.
“Night’s the best time—if it’s clear, the stars are out, fish are running—”
I could almost picture it. I saw the Empire State Building in the background.
“Once I got a shark,” he said, more animated. “A basking shark—ugly thing. This was during the day. Took hundred-pound line and over an hour to pull him in.”
“Sharks in New York—now somehow that does not surprise me.”
He laughed.
The fisherman looked at his wristwatch and said he was just going to make it in time—just barely. He had to be at work in the Bronx at six.
I noticed that his watch already said six and mentioned this.
“Yeah, I keep it fifteen minutes fast—I’m always running late. I can’t stand to stop fishing.”
“Man, that’s love.” I stood up. “I wish you no subway delays—and no more sharks.” I said so long and got off at my stop.
He kept riding. He was going to make it just in time.
At Blue Mountain Center
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
1-11-10:
O: “Every day, a word surprises me.”
_____________________
1-18-10:
O: “It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?”
I: “Love? Are you talking about love?”
O: “Yes.”
_____________________
2-1-10:
A languid Sunday, afternoon turning into evening, evening into night, night to morning.
“I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,” O says.
He puts his ear to my chest and listens to my heart and counts the beats.
“Sixty-two,” he says with a satisfied smile, and I can’t imagine anything more intimate.
_____________________
2-7-10:
O tells me about a white-winged butterfly, made dirty by city soot early in the industrial age in England, which evolved quickly from white to soot-colored. And about a city bird (pigeon?) whose song rose in volume to be heard over the honking of cars, the noise of construction, traffic.
“There are rare instances in nature of accelerated evolution.”
I can’t help thinking of how much O himself has changed over the past year.
“I’ve noticed that,” I tell him.
_____________________
6-9-10:
We are on the roof of O’s building; 7 P.M.; the breeze is wonderfully warm; the sun is setting; and the clouds, against some stiff competition from the Manhattan skyline, are far more striking than anything in sight. But O is not able to look at them because he had surgery to remove a blood clot in his right eye (which he hopes will restore some of the sight lost when he was treated for melanoma on his optic nerve). For the next few days, he has to keep his head tilted down at all times to prevent further clotting or fluid accumulation.
“Tell me what they look like,” O says. “Describe the clouds.”
I pull him in close, so his face is buried in my chest, and I look to the sky. “Well”—I’m not sure where to begin—“they are large. Very large.”
“Yes?”
“And what’s especially remarkable is—yes, I’m not just seeing things—they are not moving, not moving at all. Which is surprising, because the wind is strong. But it’s as if they are holding their pose, so I can study them, so I can describe them to you.”