JUST DRIFTING

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Today, October 1^st, is a beautiful sunny cloudless lazy day with a temperature up near 80. Being that there will be so few of these days left soon, I decided to take my sketch pad and drive over to Lake Ronkonkoma, with nothing in mind and a pad in hand. On a lonely Tuesday afternoon about 1:00pm off I go and arrive at a section I never go to, a beach and playground with picnic tables and trees, an ideal place for a hot day. With the calmness of the lake, the sky cerulean overhead and the calm roaming of the lake by geese, mallards and the spot shading of tall trees, there is nothing I wish to sketch or study, nothing seems to inspire me.

I am starting to feel lonely, or at the least transparent, no one to talk to, no one to share a joke or observation with, just the sense of being isolated in this picturesque or bucolic world!

At a picnic table sits a lonely figure, a young man about mid-thirties or early forties. A laptop is open as he studies it while battling the sun high overhead. He stares into the portal of everything relevant in this world, while ignoring the world itself. A father with his little daughter, maybe 2 years of age walk along the water’s edge, watching the geese float by in single file, one family eying another in God’s little acre. Across the way sits a very colorful playground, filled with other young children, some shouting while their parents sit on the park benches that surround the park and just watch.

I wonder if these are unemployed people fighting to keep busy in a slowed down economy, or did they just take this beautiful day to play hooky?

Across the lake is an old restaurant, been there for all the 30 or so years I’ve lived around here, and it was very old when I first arrived. The tavern being dismantled by a huge crane and crew of men, splintered pieces of frame and skeletal framework from craftsmen of yesteryear are all that is left of the historic place, one piece of life being replaced for another.

And with this going on, all this life and destruction, I am uninspired! Amid all the natural beauty, all the gift of weather, and the freedom to enjoy it, I can’t inspire myself, there is nothing I wish to see for the first time and record it’s impressions on my mind and soul.

Sadly I return to my car, and like the lazy day and serenity of the lake, I drive at a leisure rate of speed, just watching the world, like the geese, drift by.