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 * Fishing on the Susquehanna in July ||||  ||
 * by [|Billy Collins] ||

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure-- of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one-- a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table-- trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame

I Ask You
What scene would I want to be enveloped in more than this one. an ordinary night at the kitchen table, floral wallpaper pressing in, white cabinets full of glass, the telephone silent, a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think about all that is going on outside-- leaves gathering in corners, lichen greening the high grey rocks, while over the dunes the world sails on, huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table there is nothing that I need, not even a job that would allow me to row to work, or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4 with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here, the clear ovals of a glass of water, a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin, not to mention the odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall, and the way these three candles-- each a different height-- are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me if I lower my head now and listen to the short bass candle as he takes a solo while my heart thrums under my shirt-- frog at the edge of a pond-- and my thoughts fly off to a province made of one enormous sky and about a million empty branches.

If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
 * Billy Collins - Today**

that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day.

Nostalgia
Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework. Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon, and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow." Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone. Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room. We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang. These days language seems transparent a badly broken code. The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big. People would take walks to the very tops of hills <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">recapture the serenity of last month when we picked <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Even this morning would be an improvement over the present. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">letting my memory rush over them like water <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I was even thinking a little about the future, that place <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">a dance whose name we can only guess.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I wonder how it all got started, this business <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">about seeing your life flash before your eyes <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">could startle time into such compression, crushing <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
 * The Art Of Drowning**

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">After falling off a steamship or being swept away <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">turning the pages of an album of photographs- <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">How about a short animated film, a slide presentation? <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph? <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash? <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Your whole existence going off in your face <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography- <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">here, some bolt of truth forking across the water, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">an ultimate Light before all the lights go out, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">But if something does flash before your eyes <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">a quick blur of curved silver darting away, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">having nothing to do with your life or your death. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">leaving behind what you have already forgotten, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">its white flag waving over everything, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the landscape vanished, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and beyond these windows
 * Snow Day**

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the government buildings smothered, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">schools and libraries buried, the post office lost <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">under the noiseless drift, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the paths of trains softly blocked, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the world fallen under this falling.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">In a while I will put on some boots <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and step out like someone walking in water, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and the dog will porpoise through the drifts, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and I will shake a laden branch, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">sending a cold shower down on us both.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I will make a pot of tea <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and listen to the plastic radio on the counter, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">as glad as anyone to hear the news

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">that the Kiddie Corner School is closed, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the Ding-Dong School, closed, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the All Aboard Children's School, closed, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">along with -- some will be delighted to hear --

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the Toadstool School, the Little School, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Little Sparrows Nursery School, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and -- clap your hands -- the Peanuts Play School.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">So this is where the children hide all day, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">These are the nests where they letter and draw, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">where they put on their bright miniature jackets, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">all darting and climbing and sliding, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">And now I am listening hard <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">in the grandiose silence of the snow, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">trying to hear what those three girls are plotting, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">what riot is afoot, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">which small queen is about to be brought down.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Tonight the moon is a cracker, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">with a bite out of it <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">floating in the night,
 * Invention**

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and in a week or so <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">according to the calendar <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">it will probably look

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">like a silver football, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and nine, maybe ten days ago <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">it reminded me of a thin bright claw.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">But eventually -- <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">by the end of the month, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I reckon --

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">it will waste away <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">to nothing, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">nothing but stars in the sky,

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and I will have a few nights <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">to myself, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">a little time to rest my jittery pen. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">And I start wondering how they came to be blind. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and I think of the poor mother <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">brooding over her sightless young triplets.
 * <span style="color: #f88000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 19px;">I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice" **

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Or was it a common accident, all three caught <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps? <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">If not, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">if each came to his or her blindness separately,

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">how did they ever manage to find one another? <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">to locate even one fellow mouse with vision <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">let alone two other blind ones?

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">And how, in their tiny darkness, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">or anyone else's wife for that matter? <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Not to mention why.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Just so she could cut off their tails <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">but the thought of them without eyes <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">or slip around the corner of a baseboard <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">has the cynic who always lounges within me <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">up off his couch and at the window <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">By now I am on to dicing an onion <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">which might account for the wet stinging <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon," <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">which happens to be the next cut, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">cannot be said to be making matters any better.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and sauntered off the beaches into forests <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">working up some irregular verbs for their <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">first conversation, so three-year-old children <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">enter the phase of name-calling.
 * Child Development**

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Every day a new one arrives and is added <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">(a kind of Navaho ring to that one) <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">they yell from knee level, their little mugs <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">flushed with challenge. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">They are just tormenting their fellow squirts <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">or going after the attention of the giants <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">way up there with their cocktails and bad breath <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">talking baritone nonsense to other giants, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">waiting to call them names after thanking <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">The mature save their hothead invective <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">for things: an errant hammer, tire chains, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">or receding trains missed by seconds, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">though they know in their adult hearts, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">for his appalling behavior, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">their wives are Dopey Dopeheads <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">before stepping onto the first wave. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Soon I am walking across the Atlantic <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">thinking about Spain, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">checking for whales, waterspouts. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">I feel the water holding up my shifting weight. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.
 * Walking Across The Atlantic**

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">But for now I try to imagine what <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">this must look like to the fish below, <span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing