A pond becomes a place

 If you go by Wallace Stegner’s definition, a bit of land, a spot on the map, doesn’t really become a place until a couple of poets have sung about it.

Benthal’s Pond was too small to be a proper pond, but my father, who was a storyteller, turned it into an important place.

When he was a boy during the Depression, my father took a treasured BB gun to the pond, hoping to shoot a bullfrog. Money was tight, and my father was sure his widowed mother would be delighted to have frog legs, a delicacy served at the hotel in town. My father, who was 7, fired a shot that ricocheted off the bullfrog’s skull. My father gave the bullfrog a whack with the butt of the gun and went home in triumph.

The fact that the bullfrog was stunned, not dead, was discovered only when it began to hop around the kitchen, accompanied by screams, but not of delight.

When I was growing up, I knew which willow my father had hidden behind to bushwhack the bullfrog. The little pond was a large place in my imagination.