Loving Angels and Wave

Sometime during my teens, around the mid 1960s, three friends and I decided to go to the lake.

The water was still as we sat at the edge, enjoying the warm yet refreshing breeze and philosophizing a bit.

Each of my friends turned out pretty well. Frank, for instance, became mayor of a California city. His father was something like an ambassador at the time, and his mother was the head librarian at a Washington DC hospital. They lived next door to my family in Sleepy Hollow (an official neighborhood in Chicago).

But young and free, just joking around, we might blurt out crazy things like, “what would happen if the lake just grabbed us and carried us away?” Just as one of us said it, from that calm lake emerged a big wave that seemed to fiercely rush at us. And as if a bunch of loving angels filled the atmosphere, we were just as swiftly reassured that something prevented us from being dragged in. The lake again was calm, and we experienced another simple appreciation of nature.