Dear Me Letter: Baby Lake

Dear Me,

For nine years I’ve lived in Silverlake and from my small light blue house on the hill can see the lake which named this area. For that nine years I’ve driven down Rowena, lined with sweet houses and some small sweet businesses, to get to the health food store and other places.

On the northwest corner of Rowena and Hyperion all you can see from the street is a bank of bushes rising upwards several feet behind a chain link fence, growing one block down to the next street where only the sweet homes and trees continue pleasantly. For the past few years when passing that corner I’d hear “Find me. Find me.” I ignored it as a trick of the mind until last Friday when my dog Daisy and I were driving past and I decided to take a sudden right turn.

The next three-quarter block of ivy-hidden mystery locked me in an unexpected anticipation. Each second teased me by pretending it was a year. Finally it popped to view: a baby lake nestling in a square block.

Now the larger lake is two miles around and about a good half mile from this little one. I wondered if the little lake did something the big lake didn’t like and was spat out over that good half mile distance in the middle of a dark rainy night when no one would notice.

I shared these thoughts with my neighbor, Mr. Timms, who was known to jog around the lake in any kind of weather at any time of the day or night. After I stated my theory of how the little lake became itself, he looked at me square-on and said, “As a matter of fact -- and it’s a fact I have kept to myself -- years ago I was jogging in a downpour around the lake about two in the morning. I heard a thunder crack but saw no lightning. I looked toward the sound and saw a huge geyser shoot out from the north end of the lake and like a fat wet rainbow it arched over my head into the sky then headed northwest toward Rowena and Hyperion.”

Then he asked me how I knew. I lied an acceptable truth and told him I just guessed. I later thought he might have understood that people aren’t the only ones who communicate. I could have asked him if he’d ever heard that if people talk to their plants they grow better, or that one of the greatest pianists of our time has been known to talk to his piano.

The next Wednesday I saw a column in the Silverlake Independent, “Lake Spits Half a Mile.” The column was headed “Tall Tales by Thomas Timms.”