I Knew That, When Needed, Mountains Would

As I Get Considerably Beyond The Biblical Allotment Of Three Score Years And Ten, I Feel With Increasing Intensity That I Can Express My Gratitude For Still Being Around On The Oxygen-side Of The Earth's Crust Only By Not Standing Pat On What I Have Hitherto Known And Loved. While Oxygen Lasts, There Are Still New Things To Love, Especially If Compassion Is A Form Of Love.

In Our Family, There Was No Clear Line Between Religion And Fly Fishing.

Now Nearly All Those I Loved And Did Not Understand When I Was Young Are Dead, But I Still Reach Out To Them.

I Had As Yet No Notion That Life Every Now And Then Becomes Literature—not For Long, Of Course, But Long Enough To Be What We Best Remember, And Often Enough So That What We Eventually Come To Mean By Life Are Those Moments When Life, Instead Of Going Sideways, Backwards, Forward, Or Nowhere At All, Lines Out Straight, Tense And Inevitable, With A Complication, Climax, And, Given Some Luck, A Purgation, As If Life Had Been Made And Not Happened.

When I Was Young, A Teacher Had Forbidden Me To Say "more Perfect" Because She Said If A Thing Is Perfect It Can't Be More So. But By Now I Had Seen Enough Of Life To Have Regained My Confidence In It.