PUBLIC AND PRIVATE      By Andrew Hidas I am gazing across mud flats to a public dock where a steady procession of fishers and crabbers have spent the day casting their hooks and nets to the shifting tides. Faceless and unobserved behind my patio screen, I see a young couple descend, he fishing, she in a beach chair thumbing a magazine. A feathery rain starts falling through diffused yellow light, the world gone silent and still as the woman turns her chair into an umbrella under which her lover comes to join her. It is a scene of such…