Sunday I walked down to our neighborhood park, which is only a couple of small fields connected by a path running through a strait of woods along a stream. (The stream, I learned last spring after living here almost ten years, is called Oxford Branch.) Passing one of the fields I saw a very small boy, maybe eighteen months old, and his father looking intently up at the sky. The boy was pointing and saying something I couldn’t hear. I looked too, as anyone would. A bird? A plane? A cloud? All I could see was a broad expanse of blue.
I stepped out of the scrim of trees, and still seeing nothing up there, smiled at the father and asked the boy: “What’s up there?”
“Da guy,” he said, cheerful and matter-of-fact. The sky.
His father was laughing. “He’s working on it,” he said.
Stupid me, thinking there had to be something in the sky to make it worth looking at. “Yep,” I said, “It’s always up there!” as if it were a deeply profound observation. The boy smiled enthusiastically. Then he resumed his observations, and I continued on my walk.