the melancholy Dane - numer zwei.

It’s a long walk downtown, but I like Annapolis. I like the sidewalks. Some of them are new, clean brick or concrete, but my favorites are ancient, warped, eroded by feet, rain and time. Mostly, though, it’s the trees –– intended to be ornamental some decades ago, now full-sized, roots creating massive undulations in the brick. Beautiful little weeds grow in the cracks.

Faith has become fond of the weeds as well. A lot of the Johnnies are fond of the weeds. We’re weed people.

No crowd mills at the harbor today at 3:26 PM Eastern Standard Time. (Time zones: remember them. If you don’t, you will end up waking your parents from a dead sleep. Mine have never appreciated such error.) The clouds are the waves, and the waves are the clouds. Annapolis is beautiful.

She gets mint gelato, which is blue. I don’t take issue with mint, but blue food makes me cringe. No food is blue. Even blueberries are just a deep shade of indigo. I tell her this, and she grins and waves her gelato in my face, shouting “blue! delicious, unnatural BLUE!”

I get mango, because gelato should always be fruit-flavored, and mangos are delicious, and mango gelato is the color of a mango, as well it should be. Gelato is expensive here, but it seems as if it’s expensive anywhere. Price is not an object. Gelato must be had.

We sit by the water, and I can tell by the look in her eyes that she wants to feed the ducks. An official sign a few feet away reads: “Please do not feed the waterfowl.” Of course she wants to. It’s only natural.

“The ducks are fine without you,” I remind her. “Really.”

“They always come to see me,” she says, watching them as they swim closer. Her flipflops dangle precariously from her toes, almost ready to fall into the water below. “They know me.”

“They’re ducks. They come to see everyone.”

“Hush.”

I hush. Mango gelato drips all over my hand, and I lick it off rather indelicately. Mango gelato mustn’t be wasted.

“I’ve never actually had a mango,” she tells me.

“Never?”

“Not once.”

“I’ll get you one. They’re amazing.”

“Are they?”

“Unbelievable.”

“Mm.”

Her books are on the ground, not the ledge, and therefore significantly less likely to fall into the water than her flipflops, or she herself. She turns and picks one up –– The Republic –– and opens it in her lap. We call it Big Red around here, for obvious reasons.

“What do you think of philosopher kings?” she asks.

“Fundamentally good idea,” I reply with a shrug, “but they don’t exist. Think about it. The responsibility, the loneliness, the self-deprivation. Wouldn’t it make you crazy?”

“Well, yeah. But there must be someone.”

“There’s no one. We’re all human.”

“What about God?”

I roll my eyes. “He hasn’t been down here in a while.”

“Maybe he has,” she says. She isn’t looking at me. “We might not know it yet.”

I look at her for a moment, her little hands splayed over the pages of Socratic dialogue and, finding no words, I break off the bottom of my gelato cone and toss it to the ducks.