Long, long ago when everything I was told was believable and the little I knew was less limited than now, I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond and to the far bank launched a child's armada.      A broken fortress of twigs, the paper-tissue sails of galleons, the waterlogged branches of submarines - all came to ruin and were on flame in that dusk-red pond.      And you, mother, stood behind me, impatient to be going, old at twenty-three, alone, thin overcoat flapping.      How closely the past shadows us. In a hospital a mile or so from that pond I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes, reach out across forty years to touch once more that pond's cool surface, and it is your cool skin I'm touching; for as on a pond a child's paper boat was blown out of reach by the smallest gust of wind, so too have you been blown out of reach by the smallest whisper of death, and a childhood memory is sharpened, and the heart burns as that armada burnt, long, long ago.