Sand Bees and Rain Fish

5^th January 2012

Dear Cassi,

Another of the many points of youth I can now recall is that school yard my father once called the park and how my thoughts of it changed when I became a student at that school. When I was a student at the elementary level I recall what we called sand bees buzzing along the school yard. This was a time in the nature of youth where the way the world worked was still unknown to us and we saw the sand as the birth place of these bees.

     
Some of the children would wonder how the bees would one day turn yellow and join a hive to make honey. Sand bees were black and green on our playground and we thought that all the bees of the world came from the ground of our school yard.

    
 The world can be so large and so small at the same time when you are young. All the world can fit in a thimble when you are a child and still it can be the biggest thing in all understanding.

     
Another of the things born of the sand was fish made of rainwater. It would rain, as many think it does not do in California, and some of the children would toss stone into the puddles to “make the fish jump” out of the pool.

     
There were no fish. It was just droplets of water that looked like fish to young eyes. It would never come to most of those folks that the shape of fish look like drops of water because of hydrodynamics.

     
It comes to me that some of us finally understand why the world is like this and how it came into existence. Then there are those of us who simply fail to see the importance as they grow older.  

Never let the world lose its magic,

Richard Leland Neal