Then what I had thought was a ripple in the water turned out to be—no, not a shark with hectoring John Williams music pulsing from a boom box in its stomach. It was a tiny old man in a tiny black bathing suit. He was slowly, slowly completing a lap in the next lane. When, finally, he reached the side where I was resting and watching, he came up for air. He saw me, beamed, and said, “I’m ninety years old.” It was clearly a boast, not a lament, so I followed his script and said, “Well, isn’t that marvelous” and “You certainly don’t look it” and on in that vein. He beamed some more, I beamed, and briefly we both were happy—two nearly naked strangers sharing the first little dishonesties and self-deceptions of a beautiful day in Southern California.Mine Is Longer than Yours, The Last Boomer Game, by Michael Kinsley, The New Yorker, April 7, 2008.

I catch the aspen leaf bobbing down the Pecos River, past the muzzle of my horse who is drinking in deep gulps that shoot up the length of her throat like ice cold bullets. Woody veins stand in sharp relief against what's now rice paper flesh, but used to be gold quivering up above me, showering me with riches here on the bank. The aspen leaf in my hand is thin as the horse shoes I should have had the blacksmith change out before riding up to Lake Johnson, and now Caprichosa will be carrying me down the rocky mountain path with one foot bare.

At a family event this weekend--amidst the chatter of the grandchildren, the text messaging, a twentysomething nephew's claim about how no one's wearing watches anymore that has my husband studying the one on his wrist to peals of laughter, the talk of trips to be taken, of things to be done and conquered and dreamed, the wailing of the brand new great-grand baby spiraling at least an octave or two above the fiddle playing up there on stage in the midst of all of this cowboy and western cacophony, toe tapping, and hokey knee clapping we are subjected to each and every summer as part of the family get together--I feel the current sluicing beneath the picnic table benches we are bouncing the seats of our blue jeans up and down on in time to the steel guitar music. Along with the frisson, the thrill, the possibility that we all might get a good old-fashioned talking to for our rowdy behavior.

Just like we did last year.

Although the era of skinny willow switches as deadly as dressage whips wielded badly and going to your room without supper is over. Nowadays most folks can't control their children, and what is the world coming to, and do you think it's really a good idea to let an eleven-year-old have her own cell phone, and do you know just exactly who she is talking to? I mean. Do you? The world's a dangerous place, every single solitary corner, in spite of early bird suppers and senior citizen Tai Chi.

People are whooping and hollering as the cowboy band strikes up another set, including yodeling, and in the midst of the thundering and the rollicking, I catch a pair of gray eyes beneath unruly gray eyebrows. They snag on mine in the boiling white water, in what I know is mild disapproval, quelling my Wrangler bouncing, somewhat, until they recoil like an old frayed rope that will never reach across, no matter how far any of us would jump in to try and grab it or are confused by the shadows of that dakening canyon, filled with moldering leaves in pools as still as mirrors.

The river's way too fast.