White

It has long been known to me that I enjoy putting things on top of other things; there is, I believe, a photo of me, taken a few years ago, looking pleased with a three-story construction made out of little laminated flyers, still up on a bulletin board. Long known! Even occasionally reflected on. But somehow it escaped my attention just how many things there are on top of which other things can be put, and, contrariwise, how many things that can be put on the tops of other things there are, until, on Sunday, I put a large, heavy branch (dead and down, no worries) on top of an even larger and, presumably, much heavier congeries of rock. And then returned the next day to photograph it, actually having to rebalance it because it had fallen. And not doing a very good job of it—it was windy, yes, but also it wasn't really balanced. So I headed back once again today to get it right, and, if I may say so, got it right, achieving this aim by placing a small rock just behind the point at which it pivots. At any rate, during the fifty minutes I was about, it stayed admirably put. (It was also less windy.) To pass time before a middle-aged couple sitting directly beneath where I would be manipulated my massive wood left, I made two small rock towers, out of fairly small rocks, only about nine or ten per, reaching about a foot high; after getting the branch stable, I made three more, which, despite involving only twelve or thirteen rocks per, were considerably larger and more interesting (for one of them the rocks were resting on a triangular nest of twigs which were themselves balancing on the larger rock used as the basis for all of them).

Superbly awesome as all those were, what was really amazing was this: when I went to leave, I only got about ten feet away before someone else, coming up, asked me if I had made the structures on the boulders and then if I had seen Mystic River. An odd question. He corrected himself and asked about Rivers and Tides, which would have been striking enough if he hadn't also had a small flyer for it in his wallet which he tried to give to me. I assured him that I was aware of the movie and could remember its name fine, which is true. My initial interest in the movie came before I had ever heard of Goldsworthy, because Fred Frith did the soundtrack.

This seems an astonishing coincidence. I find myself astonished.