So much pressing on his shoulders. So much clutter in one life. The warm sunshine on Harm's face and the beauty of the late afternoon did nothing to alleviate the tension in his mind.
It had been a long and hard case, this last one, and the fact that he and Mac had won it and that it was behind him just didn't seem to assuage the after-effects of all the stress he'd gone through during the case. The Admiral had allowed him to start his weekend early, right this afternoon, seeing how tired and worn the young man seemed. "Take some time to yourself, Commander," he'd ordered. "Relax. You do know how, don't you?" (At that little remark, Harm had thought, "Pot--kettle. Kettle--pot," but dared not say it aloud.) Mac had urged him to do the same. "If you like, we can have some pizza at Tony's for dinner later, and maybe a movie," she'd suggested. "But why not just rest this afternoon and try to enjoy how gorgeous this weather is?"
His attempts to do so had brought him to the beautiful park not far from the headquarters, full of green, overhanging trees and a lazily winding river with several sturdy wooden bridges at various points over it. He was now seated on a bench not far from one of these bridges, head tilted back so that the warm late-May sunshine fell on his face. But despite the day's beauty and serenity, he just couldn't get rid of the slight, nagging headache, or the tension of his thoughts.
He was glad the case was over, but that wasn't what was really bugging him. He loved his job, but lately it just seemed that his life was so...cluttered. So much to do, so much rush, the feeling that there just weren't enough hours in the day. How much complication could one career take? Maybe the Admiral was right...he needed more time to himself, more time to relax, but how could he relax, when there was always more clutter around the bend?
Never mind...he had to try. He tried not to think of the children's shrieking giggles as an annoyance but as something charming. Opening his eyes, he noticed the small girls on the nearby bridge (there were three of them; the oldest was probably no more than five) were doing something a little peculiar.
They were leaning over the railing, each with a stick in her hand. When the oldest girl yelled "Go!" they dropped their sticks into the water, then rushed to the other side of the bridge, squealing with delight as they looked down into the water.
Something about the whole thing rang a bell with Harm, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what. He rose from the bench and approached the bridge. On another bench, nearer to the bridge, sat the mother of the oldest girl, keeping a close eye on her daughter and her two friends. She recognized Harm, since she often passed JAG headquarters on the way to work, and nodded a hello.
He smiled briefly back, then turned to the girls. "Hi there," he greeted.
The girls turned. The slightly smaller two played ostentatiously shy, but the oldest grinned. "Hi," she said. "I'm Kaitlyn. This's Amy and this's Emily, I'm five'n'a'half and Amy's five and Emily's gonna be five her next birthday which is in June and we're all gonna go to kindergarten in the fall."
"Well, thank you for that wealth of information. I was just watching what you were doing over here...were you playing some kind of game?"
"Poohsticks," piped up Amy.
"Poohsticks..." Harm repeated. Again, something clicked.
"It's called Poohsticks cause Pooh made it up," Kaitlyn continued. "You drop your stick on the one side of the bridge and then you see whose stick comes out first and whichever one's does is the winner."
"Yes..." Harm muttered slowly... "...yes...I do remember..." Pooh discovering the game quite by accident while watching a fir-cone slip down the slow-moving river on a lazy late spring afternoon like this one. A sunny afternoon with the light slanting in through the trees and reflecting off the river, filled with the back-and-forth calls of birds and the scents of new-sprung grass and leaves and sun-warmed earth. He suddenly realized that he knew that kind of afternoon well, for it seemed that so much of his childhood had all been contained in just such an afternoon....Why, even with Pooh on everything from bathmats to baby clothes lately, he hadn't really thought of those sunny Pooh afternoons for...
"Wanna play, mister?" Kaitlyn asked.
"Play? Oh...sure...I mean...I'd like nothing better," answered Harm, the first real smile for days coming to his lips.
"Now you gotta make sure you get a stick that's a little different from everyone else's," Kaitlyn continued, clearly the leader of this little band. Harm almost burst out laughing...he thought he wasn't going to be ordered around anymore today since he left the Admiral's office, and here was a five-year-old girl..."What's your name, mister?" Kaitlyn was asking.
"It's Harmon. Harmon Rabb. You guys can call me Harm if you like."
They giggled. "Harmon is a funny name," Emily tittered. Ah, the honesty of childhood.
"It suits me well enough. And it was my daddy's name, too." Yes, his daddy...these days he felt more at peace with the memory, and could remember the good times with a strangely sweet mixture of sorrow and joy. It was Dad who'd liked to read Pooh to him, who'd taken him to see the Disney Pooh movies, who'd bought him a few vinyl records, illustrated with Disney Pooh, but featuring Sterling Holloway reciting the classic Milne stories and poems in his inimitable style. God, he still had those records somewhere...he'd have to dig them out. By now they were at the bridge with their sticks.
"OK," Kaitlyn whispered. "GO!" They dropped their sticks in, and leaned over the other side.
"OK...I think I see one..." Harm whispered. "It looks like mine...no...I think it's yours, Emily!"
"I win!" the little girl shrieked. "Again, let's do it again!"
By now, Harm had reached even further down in his memory. "Do you remember what happened when Pooh and his friends were playing Poohsticks?"
"They saw something gray in the water," Kaitlyn replied. "And they thought it was a stick but it really turned out to be Eeyore."
"Poor Eeyore," Harm laughed. "Tigger knocked him into the water. Eeyore said that Tigger bounced him and Tigger said all he did was cough. But he didn't fool me." He supposed that nowadays he could have busted Tigger wide open in court. But there was no place for that kind of thing in the Hundred Acre Wood. And certainly no time to think of those sorts of things now.
"Tigger is funny," Amy laughed. " 'N Eeyore is funny, too. But I like Pooh best of all. 'Cause he thinks he's dumb but he isn't really."
"Most people who think they're dumb aren't really." Harm mused. "Like children...I think you guys accomplish more by playing here than a hundred guys in a hundred offices."
He remembered the little conversation at the end of the Poohsticks chapter. Pooh had said to Christopher Robin, "Tigger is all right really...Everyone is really. But then I don't suppose I'm right." "Of course you are, silly old Bear," the boy had answered. How simple to believe that, and yet how different the world would be if people were that "simple" and "naive"!
"You like Pooh?" Kaitlyn was incredulous.
"Oh, I love Pooh...Though I haven't really thought of him in a while," replied Harm dreamily as he looked around for another stick. "One of the poems said 'Wherever I go, there's always Pooh, there's always Pooh and me...' That was how it was when I was a kid...there was always Pooh. My dad liked to read it to me. And...you know...I did play Poohsticks too, with my pals, when I was your age."
"Really?" The girls were utterly awed by the mere idea that a grownup could ever have been a child.
"Uh-huh. And I betcha another thing. I betcha your children will be playing Poohsticks on a bridge one day too."
The girls considered this. But it seemed useless for anyone, Harm included, to think of a future beyond this sunny afternoon and the green trees and the slow-moving river. So they gathered up more sticks and dropped them in and watched them emerge from the other side of the bridge. And they laughed as each one won, in his or her turn, and began the game again, the sticks sliding smoothly away down the river. And somehow it was a greater source of delight for Harm than anything had been in weeks, to watch sticks float from underneath a bridge...
"Kaitlyn..." It was the mother's voice. "C'mon, it's time to go. We have to drop Emily and Amy home and go meet Daddy for dinner."
Harm looked up, surprised, to see that the sun had slipped closer to the horizon and the patterns of light and shadows on the leaves had changed. He was strangely shocked. Somehow, he had expected it to remain a sunny afternoon forever, as it had seemed to for the first five years of his childhood. Why, not once in any of those memories, in playing with his friends or creating elaborate dream-kingdoms or fishing with his father or simply listening to the Pooh stories...not once had it ever seemed rainy or cold, and always the sun had seemed to slant through the trees and the birds to call back and forth to each other in the lazy contentment of late spring. A time when he had always enjoyed himself, without ever asking how he did or if he could. A time in which the greatest pleasure was found in the simplest things. "Say thank you to the nice man," the woman urged gently. The girls complied.
"Thank you, Mr. Harm," Kaitlyn said last.
"Thank *you*, girls. So very much," Harm answered, and surprised them by leaning down to kiss each little cheek.
"And as for you," Kaitlyn's mother deadpanned, "I'm sure your mother must be wondering where you are, and you'll really catch it if you don't get home in time for dinner."
"Yes, ma'am," answered Harm in mock shyness. He watched the girls troop away after the woman. He was still looking after them when he realized the smile hadn't left his face.
Not even the thought of future work and other potentially stressful times daunted his feeling of pleasure. Not as long as he'd found Pooh Corner again. He'd thought he'd left it behind, but he'd realized this afternoon that it was important never to leave it completely. That was what made those wonderful tales so beautiful...they were really all about the sunny afternoon that is everyone's best memories of childhood, all about finding the wonder and enjoyment of the very simplest things from a game with friends to the feeling of sunshine on the stepping stones of a river to the number of pine trees in an enchanted place on the top of a forest. He'd forgotten those things, been too busy analyzing the world to simply enjoy it. And he was never so grateful for a wake-up call in his life.
Still grinning, he strode down the path. He'd take Mac up on her offer for pizza, and just wait till he told her about all this. And he'd sugget renting a movie, and hopefully she wouldn't protest when he steered her to the Disney section of the store. And he'd drop by her place again tomorrow morning and maybe he wouldn't have to twist her arm to bring her to this bridge with him.
"There's always Pooh," he murmured. "There's always Pooh and me."
It's hard to explain how a few precious things Seem to follow throughout all our lives... And as I was going I swear that the old bear whispered: "Boy...welcome home."
Believe me if you can, I've finally come back to the House at Pooh Corner by one, What do you know, there's so much to be done... Count all the bees in the hive, Chase all the clouds from the sky... Back to the days of Christopher Robin, Back to the ways of Christopher Robin, Back to the days of Pooh.
In loving memory of A.A. Milne and Christopher Robin Milne. You cannot know how you captured childhood for all of us. As to all you readers...may all your afternoons be sunny...and if you go down to the nearest bridge to play Poohsticks after reading this...I'll have done my work well.