Chekhov; the Black Swan

The other day I was doing my usual run along the river when I looked out across it and in the distance saw a black swan. It was only a few days later that my neighbours, cycling with us back from the park, told me that it was one of the Queen's swans. The other white pair, I knew, spent more time closer to Main Street bridge. The black one, so slight and elegant with its white accent and red beak, has been closer to us lately, beached with the geese and ducks.

A pointed to it, "Is that the mommy duck?" She asked.

"It's the black swan I was telling you about," I replied. "Isn't it beautiful?"

"Isn't it beautiful. Why is it bigger?"

"It's a swan. It is a different kind of bird. Usually they are white. That one is special."

A wasn't particularly impressed. We moved on.

I've been reading my old Chekhov paperbacks that I rescued from boxes in my garage. Well, not exactly reading, but perusing. From this vantage point, twenty years on from when I first underlined passages in pencil for my Chekhov class, I can see that at least I was noting the most significant passages. In "About Love" I starred this paragraph: "A great crowd had collected to see Anna Alexeyevna off. When she had said good-by to her husband and children and there was only a minute left before the third bell, I ran into her compartment to place on the rack a basket that she had almost forgotten and then I had to say good-by. When our eyes met right there in the compartment our spiritual strength deserted us both, I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears - oh, how miserable we were! - I confessed my love to her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how needless and petty and deceptive was all that had hindered us from loving each other. I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not reason." And then he leaves her and lives alone his huge estate. Love, apparently, is feeling that and letting go.

I imagine this black swan, cruising the river alone, no mate in sight, no appropriate partner, ever, displaced to this muddy river for a few, fleeting summer months and then sentenced to a winter confinement of many more. This bird is graceful nonetheless, preserves its beauty in this backwoods, is conscious of admirers, remains strikingly beautiful among the geese, ducks, seagulls, and discarded plastic bags on the ragged strand of beach.