Dendrite Cities

On the airplane that bears me to visit my very old father though we've nothing more to say to each other, I imagine the brain as a river-city, its neural dendrites bearing messages and goods, right bank to left and reverse; the usual cargoes of fruit and beads, news, nasty rumors, code-words, pleas for money or love, messages and messengers one and the same. I caution myself not to confuse the many-spanned bridges of such cities with the more familiar bridges of, say, Paris or Prague, their buskers, hawkers, baskets of flowers, strollers admiring the view and holding striped umbrellas when gentle showers cross the sky. Like their distant namesakes, the branches of trees, the mind-cities' dendrites can snap, break loose when more fierce winds strike. If they grow back at all, it's one twig at a time slowly thickening until it can hold enough sap to bear leaves, a long, slow, uncertain healing. In the meantime only old ferries and tugboats can deliver the messages, spewing fumes, chugging to any point that resembles a pier, an effort so cumbersome that the banks, right and left, become two separate cities, surviving on their own. Do they miss their cross-river kin? At first yes. But soon each city speaks a different dialect, eventually a whole different language; creates its own history and customs. If one city's citizens should somehow cross to the opposite side they suspect the others of hostile intent, jump at once into the river, risking hypothermia, drowning, anything to escape those strangers with the terrifying resemblance to themselves. Amicable indifference would be a better solution – if not for nostalgia's sneaky ways. That left bank bakery. That right bank man with blue saxophone. The time my father held my hand in a raging blizzard.