A Few Days One Summer

A Few Days One Summer

I took my camera to the beach again yesterday. Not so many people as on the weekend, of course. I got out of the car with my little toy camera feeling silly and vulnerable. I wouldn't take any photos, I thought. The other day had been an aberration. A guy alone can't just walk around on the beach with a camera and expect good things to happen.

I saw two fellows going to the water with their boards. I asked them if I could take a photograph. No problem. OK, I thought, that one photo was worth the trip. It will be good, I thought. And then another fellow. Oh my, these will be truly heroic. I saw a girl step out of her pickup truck. Alone. A girl at the beach in a big pickup truck alone. I wanted to photograph her, but before I could screw up my courage, she had walked to the water. I see a girl with a big board. Sure, she says. Can you turn this way? She is youngish and her mother is with her but won't get in the picture. OK.

The girl in the pickup walks out of the water. OK, I tell myself. "Hey, I don't want to bother you. . . ." No problem. She comes to look at the back side of the camera. She wants to see the photo. "Film," I tell her. Oh.

A group of people lying about in the very shallow surf. A girl with a board and a convertible. More boy surfers. Most are curious about the camera. I take email addresses, promise to send images.

It is a curious little beach, I know, because cars can drive on it. There is fishing. There is surfing. I've decided to go back more, try a series. I think I will call it "A Few Days One Summer." How many photos make a series?

In a little while, I was drained. I realized how much psychological energy I had spent in a short time. I was done for the day. I could do no more.

Driving home in the beater, windows down, hot wind whipping through the car lulling me to sleepiness, I was happy. Sunset. Dinner alone. The night. I thought about the photos and felt silly. What was I doing, I wondered? Why would someone spend time doing such a thing? Ridiculous. I am a ridiculous man.

And so I woke long before dawn, though the dawn is finally here now, a rosy hue coloring the clouds in a cobalt sky. Perhaps I will feel better with the sun.

Half-Light

Lightening flashes, thunder crashes, plates begin to break. Sometimes it all goes terribly wrong, and sometimes we are at fault. I was. Lazy, maybe, inattentive, I place things in precarious positions. It felt as if Freud was right about there being no accidents. I clean the mess and feel sad about the cat's bowl. I put her water out in something plastic. She sniffs it, backs up, sniffs again. I wonder if there is any sentiment? Rats in the alley. I am bored. I try a film, then a book. The big, soft couch is uncomfortable. That is a sure sign of trouble. Discontent. Do I need a beating, I wonder, or am I taking one? Outside, the big storm without rain continues. Flash, bang, and rumble. The tree branches dance dangerously in gusts. Where is the rain?

Eliot said it better. I hate that hideous Mr. Eliot.

* * * * * * *

The weekend over, the Super Bowl played, the perfect season finished, I wake. Monday. People return to their daily lives. A version of reality sets in. Healing. It will take a long time.

The nurses are different and don't seem as nice. Everything has a harder edge. The floor is noisier. Unable to walk further than the bathroom, I am stuck in bed. Magazines. Television.

I am visited by a woman across the hallway. She is older, in her thirties, and of a different sensibility. Her hair is up, composed, sprayed. She wears makeup. She talks a lot, I think, just talks. I have little to say. Maybe she's bored, I think, though I wonder why she chooses me for her confidences. After a long while, she is gone. I try to read, but it is difficult. I watch television. In a little while, I push the button that calls the nurses station. A few moments later, a woman in a white uniform enters the room.

"Hello," she says. "What do you need?"

"I'm really hurting. I wondered if I can get something for it?"

"OK," she says. "Let me check."

A little while later, she comes back.

"I'm sorry. It says that you turned down your pain killer yesterday. We are not allowed to give you any now."

I just look at her for a minute. I don't know what to say, how to negotiate this.

"I wanted to watch the Super Bowl," I say dumbly.

"I'm sorry, honey, but I can't. You want anything else?"

But even without the pain killer, I sleep.

In the afternoon, my mother calls. Later, my father. They each ask how I am doing. My mother lives close by and says she will come after work. My father lives further away and I tell him not to come, that I am OK. My mother comes straight from work and stays a few minutes, then says she has to get home to cook supper.

The nurses change shifts. The one I like, the cute one, is back on duty. She comes in and says hello and tells me she will come back later to change my bandages. Dinner comes on its plastic tray. As always, I ask for more milk.

Outside my window is a lake surrounded by pines over which the sun sets. I think of the cool winter air I love so much and am tired of being inside. The air is like crystal, the lake shimmering. I imagine the breeze on my skin, the deep smell of the grasses, the deep, sweet melancholy that walking in a southern winter at sunset always provides.

After dark, when things are quiet again, the young nurse comes back to clean me. I roll to my stomach and cannot see her. I feel her hands on me, hear her voice go hospital quiet.

"Let me know if I hurt you," she says.

My mind turns round. I am naked and conscious of her. She is quiet, too.

When she leaves, I lie alone and think about her, my body relaxed but my mind a carnival. Tonight, she has said, she will bring me something for pain.

Moments later, the woman from across the hallway comes into my room. She is not wearing the hospital gown she had on earlier but something of her own. She should not be parading around the hallways in that, I think, but she is not parading around the hallways. She is in my room. And she begins to talk, her voice so much different from the nurse's voice, more like a performance than real, less intimate. She comes close to my bed, and I smell her harsh perfume. She is telling me about her husband. He is gone a lot of the time, she says. He is not at home much. She tells me she likes talking to me and moves beside me. Maybe I would come over when I get out of the hospital and on my feet. She will give me her number. I look at her like a deaf and dumb pencil peddler. I don't know what to say. When she reaches out to touch me, I feel an impulse to jump up and move, but I can't. I am trapped. Then suddenly, I don't mind as much. I do what you are supposed to do, I think. I reach up and touch her. "I can't," she tells me. "I just had a hysterectomy."

When she is gone, I do not notice the time passing. Things are different, somehow, changing. Slowly, I get myself up and shuffle across the floor to the bathroom. Leaning on the sink, I look into the mirror for a long while. I don't know, I think. You can't really see yourself in a mirror. You try, but you can't. I try looking into my eyes, but it is impossible. One or the other. Left, right, left, right.

I give up and go back to bed. The room is crepuscular. I lay in the half-light, waiting.

The Curse

I've written and written this morning, but the next part of this narrative is difficult and for once, I will go back and rework it. It must be suggestive and not graphic. It should barely suggest at all. I don't know what will happen with it, really. It may end up in the garbage. I only know that it is taking too much time this morning and I must leave it. A bump in the road.

I have been both anxious and catatonic of late. A weird and terrible combination. I am supposed to be on vacation, supposed to be somewhere else, but I have failed to make decisions, failed to book flights, so I sit in the shade of oaks and palms cast through the window by the early morning sun thinking and fretting. Where will I go? And with thinking and fretting goes my summer vacation. Frustration.

"The problem with most people," my ex-friend once told me, "is that they don't know what they want." The words are haunting me just now. He is right, of course. We are slaves to indecision. No, not you. I am. It is The Curse.

The weekend over, the Super Bowl played, the perfect season finished, I wake. Monday. People return to their daily lives. A version of reality sets in. Healing. It will take a long time.

The nurses are different and don't seem as nice. Everything has a harder edge. The floor is noisier. Unable to walk further than the bathroom, I am stuck in bed. Magazines. Television.

I am visited by a woman across the hallway. She is older than I am and of a different sensibility. Her hair is up, composed, sprayed. She wears makeup. She talks a lot, I think, just talks. I have little to say. Maybe she's bored, I think, though I wonder why she chooses me for her confidences. After a long while, she is gone. I try to read, but it is difficult. I watch television. In a little while, I push the button that calls the nurses station. In a little while, a woman in a whit uniform comes in.

"Hello," she says. "What do you need?"

"I'm really hurting. I wondered if I can get something for it?"

"OK," she says. "Let me check."

In a little bit, she comes back.

"I'm sorry. It says that you turned down your pain killer yesterday. We are not allowed to give you any now."

I just look at her for a minute. I don't know what to say, how to negotiate this.

"I wanted to watch the Super Bowl," I say dumbly.

"I'm sorry, honey, but I can't. You want anything else?"

But even without the pain killer, I sleep.

In the afternoon, my mother calls. Later, my father. They each ask how I am doing. My mother lives close by and says she will come after work. My father lives further away and I tell him not to come, that I am OK. My mother comes straight from work and stays a few minutes, then says she has to get home to cook supper.

The nurses change shifts. The one I like, the cute one, is back on duty. She comes in and says hello and tells me she will come back later to change my bandages. Dinner comes on its plastic tray. As always, I ask for more milk.

Outside my window is a lake surrounded by pines over which the sun sets. I think of the cool winter air I love so much and am tired of being inside. The air is like crystal, the lake shimmering. I imagine the breeze on my skin, the deep smell of the grasses, the deep, sweet melancholy that walking in a southern winter at sunset always provides.

After dark, when things are quiet again, the young nurse comes back to clean me. I roll to my stomach and cannot see her. I feel her hands on me, hear her voice go hospital quiet.

"Let me know if I hurt you," she says.

My mind turns round. I am naked and conscious of her. Then she is quiet.

When she leaves, I lie alone and think about her, my body relaxed but my mind a carnival. She said she would come back later and give me something for the pain.

Within moments, though, the woman from across the hallway comes into my room. She is not wearing the hospital gown she had on earlier but something of her own. She should not be parading around the hallways in that, I think, but she is not parading around the hallways. She is in my room. And she begins to talk, her voice so much different from the nurse's voice, more like a performance than real, less intimate. She comes close to my bed, and I smell her perfume. She is telling me about her husband. He is gone a lot of the time, she says. He is not at home much. She tells me she likes talking to me and moves beside me. Maybe I would come over when I get out of the hospital and on my feet. She will give me her number. I look at her like a deaf and dumb pencil peddler. I don't know what to say. When she reaches out to touch me, I feel an impulse to jump up and move, but I can't. I am trapped. Then suddenly, I don't mind as much

Perfect Season

Sunday morning and breakfast. I want another and the nurse is nice enough to bring it to me. I drink several cartons of milk. The floor is busy with activity, carts clanging, good mornings trumpeted loudly. Today is the Super Bowl. I tell the nurse I do not want my pain medication.

"Today's the Super Bowl," I tell her. "I want to be awake."

"OK. Just let me know if you change your mind," she says, and she is gone.

Super Bowl coverage starts early. Of course, there is the run down, the history of Super Bowls and pre-Super Bowls, the All-Star games, the beginning of the American Football League. I had always loved that league. It's games were covered by a different network than the games of the NFL. After the last NFL game on Sunday afternoon, I'd switch over to the other network. It came from a town sixty miles away and was always full of snow and ghosts. It would be the second half somewhere in a western city where it was still light, but here at home, it was very late afternoon and the sun was sinking, the light turning blue then purple. And there on the ghostly screen in black and white, men would play out the drama as if it were real before small crowds in small stadiums, men with strange names like Abner Haynes and Lance Alworth and Keith Lincoln. There was actually a team with lightning bolts on their helmets. Who would not like that? And so, like a dream, the images would flicker out the final half drama, some team coming from behind on an incredible play that no one would dare to call in the other league, some double handoff lateral pass to a guard who would throw to someone all alone in the end zone, me straining to identify the real images from the ghosts squinting and sitting close in the last purple moments of the day.

And of course, there was the inevitable segment on Joe Namath who the AFL signed for more money than anyone had ever made in football before, $300,000 right out of college. And he wore long hair and white shoes and was sexy and outspoken and had changed everything when he had "guaranteed" a win in Super Bowl III and had delivered. No, there was nothing not to like about the AFL.

And today, my team, the team I had watched all season win game after game after game, was playing for the title and for a perfect season. If I had been older or smarter, I would not have had a surgery this week but would have waited one more so that I could watch the game at home with my father as we had watched all the games that season together. But I was not, nor were my parents. We took what we got, I guess, and made do.

Though I had declined my pain medication, I was still slow, still muddled. People came by, the boys all talking about the game. Lunch came as my mother arrived, but she did not stay long, uncomfortable around my friends, perhaps, uninterested in football. My father came and stayed for the game's first half. It was a late afternoon game with a longer than normal half time show, and he thought to leave in time to see the second half at home. I was struggling to stay awake.

When I woke up, the game was on. My team was winning and it was getting dark, and it was all perfect in its own way. A team from the upstart league was beating a team from the establishment, a team coached by a man who always looked like Nixon's younger brother or Bogart in "The Cane Mutiny." We were winning, and outside the air was cooling, the sky deepening. In a bit, I would take my medicine and sleep. It had happened. It had been a perfect season.

Anesthetized

I'm wheeled into the operating room on a gurney. I am on my back and looking up at the lights just as in a movie. People walk about talking, arranging things. I'd met the anesthesiologist the day before. He is there now.

"Remember what I'm here for," I tell him. "I don't want them taking out a kidney."

"Don't worry," he says. "Heart transplant, right?"

"Is this anything like the movie 'M.A.S.H.'?"

"No," he says. "It's more like 'Hospital.' Now start counting backwards from one hundred."

And I'm gone.

I wake up in pain, not where I was cut, but in my shoulders. I can't seem to move my arms. A nurse comes over.

"Hello," she says. "How're you doing?"

"My arms hurt."

"I'll get you something for that. Do you want any ice?"

"Why do my shoulders hurt so bad?"

"I think they had trouble controlling the bleeding. They gave you shots to help you clot."

Even anesthetized, that didn't sound good.

Soon my parents walk in and ask me the same thing.

"My shoulders hurt," I tell them. And then I am back under.

Later, they wake me up to move me to my room. 20,000 leagues under the sea, I move to the new bed.

"You need to let me know when you pee," the nurse tells me. "If you don't pee, we will have to give you a catheter."

There is some sort of mush for dinner. I eat it. I ask for more. I am determined to be strong and healthy coming out of this. Eat. Drink.

My parents stay around until dark, and then they say goodbye. "We'll see you tomorrow," they tell me.

"Tomorrow's the Super Bowl," I say to my father. "I'll be awake by then."

When they were gone, a young nurse comes in. "Here's your pain medication," she says handing me a small paper cup with two pills in it. "I can get you more later tonight if you want." I have the feeling that she means "more" as in she is doing me a favor. She stays and plumps my pillows and chats with me for awhile. She is really pretty in her white nurses uniform and the little halo of a hat.

Then she is gone. I lie and listened to the sounds of the hospital, whispering, far away sounds like something coming across the water. They are gentle and sweet and comforting. I reach down and pull the blankets up over me and snuggle slowly down. The television is on, the volume low. The world is small. There are people to take care of me.

Drift and Spin

January. The little gas space heater inside the cracker box house is supplemented by one that is electric. It is January and cold, but the hiss of the heater makes me happy. I have nothing to do in the days before my surgery but wait. I love the cold air in the afternoon sunlight. Everything is diamond bright, the tall grasses in the fields sparkling beneath the deep blue. I am flooded with emotions, not about anything, but everything. I just feel. I am full.

These are the last days and nights in the little house. My father and I say nothing about that. It is our way. The perfect days pass, my father coming home in the cooling air and the deepening light of the short winter days. I remember the days he came home from work when I was young, when we lived in Ohio, when I was four or five. He would bring things, silly little gifts like candy or the big, soft pretzels he loved to smother in mustard.

I am surprised by the people who show up the night before my surgery. My mother and father are there, of course, but other people come, too. I am happy and embarrassed by it. These are my college friends, not people my parents know. They sit in the background awhile, then tell me they will see me in the morning. Awkwardly, I say goodbye. It is Friday night. The room begins to empty. The last to leave is a girl I've met at school. We've talked, but that is all. She tells me she will come back to see me. Then she, too, is gone and I am alone.

The nurses make their rounds. The lights are off, but there is a soft glow from the hallway. Outside, there is dark. I drift and spin, drift and spin dreaming crazy hospital dreams.

A Perfect Season

One of the best parts of that fall was watching football with my father. I had done this my entire life, of course, but this year in particular, our team was winning. Everything. It was "The Perfect Season," and we shared it all. Every week, we hoped for another victory, and each week, the odds of losing seemed greater. No one in football history had ever been perfect. And for us, each week brought better weather as the southern summer passed into autumn and the days became softer, the shadows longer, the skies a deeper blue. When the cooler weather came in October, the little cracker box house became live-able, and we watched Our Football Team become The Football Team. My father, never a fan, never vociferous in betting on someone else, got a big kick out of it all, I know. And each week at half time, we'd take the football into the yard and throw it back and forth just feeling the cooling of the air and the goodness of things.

Our team was good, but it more than that. I mean, they were an odd assortment of characters representing old and new values, the old and the coming worlds. They were an anomaly at every position, it seemed, fast and slow, big and small, young and old. When the starting quarterback went down with an injury, a veteran of too many years stepped in and led them to victory after victory. Somehow, everything just seemed to work. For my father and I, the week was filled by days of anticipation and days of afterglow. And the autumn passed like that, big and dream-like. If there was nothing else, there was that. A season of glories and victories.

No Words

No words today. They won't form. I will go back to bed and see what comes of that.

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches Tigers

In red weather.

(Wallace Stevens)

No Moon

I don't think that the time of the "no moon" is named the way full moon's are. It is marked on calendars and my attention was gathered by it on Tuesday. It is the darkest night of the month, of course, and the time when stars are most visible. Stars and Dark. The tides are are least dynamic then. Are people calmer, more placid? I don't know. But I am going to keep watch for it now. I am quiet and contemplative by nature, and I enjoy a tranquil life, so I may find it my favorite time. However, I like the other as well. Nature has its way. We are cyclical.

I went to the beach this weekend. The day was overcast and we decided to try a place we never go. It is an inlet where the surfers surf and fishermen fish. And so we took some Holga cameras, those cheap, plastic toys, and walked around the beach. I was scouting for a series I hope to do on surfers if I get the time and nerve. I will photograph them with a 4x5 camera in big, heroic poses. The question for me is what film to use. I will do some experimenting see.

Photographing in public places always excites me, but I have difficulty doing it with someone I know. I think the problem is the personality change I must undergo to do it. I am not usually invisible and certainly not obsequious, but being a boy and an older one at that, I am suspect any time I carry a camera, so becoming innocuous is important. I certainly don't wish to be beaten by an angry crowd, but I imagine it could happen. It could be like the ending of West's "Day of the Locust."


I find that having an old or odd camera is a great help, though. Were I walking around with an SLR with a big zoom lens, I'm sure I'd be attended to by the authorities quickly. But the little Holga invites curiosity rather than hostility. And is great for shooting from the hip since you never really focus. My companion is learning photography, and since she has the great advantage of being a "girl with a camera," when I saw a father and son coming out of the water together with wet suits and surfboards, I suggested that she ask them if she could photograph them. And of course, they were happy to let her take their picture. So, now filled with most of the deadly sins, I jumped in awkwardly and said, "Can I take one, too?"

The next surfers we saw were a mother and son, or so I thought, though she was probably his older sister. But now suffering from the last embarrassment, I approached them for the photo. And, of course, my companion said, "Can I take one, too." Again, the surfers were gracious about standing for the portrait. "This is good," I said, but my companion's face had fallen.

"What's wrong," I asked.

"I didn't advance the film. I just double exposed the last photograph."

I thought the one she had taken was probably the better one, so I threw my head back and moaned involuntarily. This did not help, and my companion went into her first photo funk. It is awful to lose a picture, but after a while, you get used to it. The ones you lose, of course, are always the best ones. That is what you think. And so dejected, my companion decided to sit on her towel for awhile. I tried to make her feel better, but I had already done the wrong thing.


I wandered off on my own then, and that is when the photos started to really come. It seemed that the beach was a movie set designed by Lissette Model.

Here are some of the results. I've shown too many here in my excitement and will be sorry later when I am scrambling for images to post, but they work much better as a series, I think. I will show you the Holga surfer portraits later. Namaste.

Quiet Desperation

That night, we ate rabbit. Forest had recently gotten married, so we went to his house for dinner. Ray, whose wife was tall and beautiful beyond anything he had rights to, was a bit henpecked and wasn't able to come. Eugene came by himself. So Forest's wife was left to cook, serve, and clean up on her own. Since his brother had died, my father had been the patriarch of the family, if in absentia, so in a way, this was a minor coming out party. Forest's wife was a pretty blond with a tiny waist and a good figure. This was the first time I'd seen her, and I was taken.

All of the boys had pretty wives which was a cause of both pride and misery. Ray and Eugene had each hunted down suspected lovers and had beaten them or threatened them with murder while holding pistols to their brains. They were criminals who had been caught and convicted for some of their many crimes. There had been little profit in any of it other than the inherent low-grade thrill and the minor ability to supplement their incomes by trading in illegal contraband and by sometimes passing counterfeit bills. Their stories for me, however, were the stuff of myth, a family mythology that I viewed from afar, coming into brief physical contact with it only once or twice a year for a few days at a time. It formed the substrate of antiauthoritarianism activity in me, though, and fomented rebellion against the "common" life, tempered, of course, by my father's sweetness and romanticism, none of which any of these boys had. This night over dinner, I would fill in more of the blank spots, hearing the old, familiar stories, of course, but new ones, too, as I was now an adult and allowed to hear things kept from me before.

"Remember the time those fellows chased you down for dating that girl on Holden Avenue. . . ." This was one I'd not heard before. Forest had been seeing a girl who had a boyfriend, and one night at the Big Boy, he'd been confronted by him and a group of his friends. Forest made it to his car, but they chased with the intent of beating him, he said. When he got stopped by a red light, rather than wait for them, he grabbed a baseball bat out of the back seat and ran to their car, jumping up on the hood and onto the roof where he began to scream, "C'mon, get out of the car you sonsofbitches," swinging the bat down onto the windows with all his might. No one, of course, attempted an exit, so when the light turned green, he beat on the windshield until it cracked and then ran back down the hood and got into his car and drove away.

"Turned out it was the mayor's son's car I'd smashed up. The police came out and arrested me for that. I had to pay for all the damage but they didn't put me into jail. I was lucky on that one."

Forest had once owned a Jaguar XKE. All the boys loved cars, loved souping them up and putting on special springs and shocks and whatever else the big racers had. "That sonofabitch was really fast," he said, "but it didn't handle worth a shit." He'd been driving it out near Mount Holly on the highway one day seeing how fast the car would go, but when he got to where the highway turned on a hill, the car wouldn't hold the road and he flew over the guardrail and through a billboard sign. "Totaled. That was the end of the Jaguar."

Tale after tale unfolded, each bigger and more outrageous than the last, culminating with the seldom told story of the time Forest and Eugene had robbed a nightclub using machine guns. There was a car chase and a get away, but Eugene was known and eventually arrested. He'd protected his brother and had gone to prison for a while. I watched Gene as the tale was told, and he seemed to morph before my eyes. Yes, he looked like a guy who had gone to prison.

I guessed that Forest's wife had heard these stories before, knew who she was marrying and got a charge from it, but looking at her through the dining room window, you wouldn't have known what she was hearing. None of it seemed to register with her. She could have been listening to a radio show or the Fuller Brush Man. Her face never changed. Her forehead never wrinkled. She simply maintained that pleasant, even smile.

Dinner over, we lingered at the table for awhile, then it was time to go. It had been a long day, first hunting rabbits then eating them. I thought back to that morning at the diner, to the cold corn field and the grayness of the day. Everything was different from what I knew.

Back in the car, my father began to talk about his brother's kids. "They grew up rough," he said. "My brother didn't make a lot of money at first and they lived in some pretty hard places. You've been lucky, and I don't want you to get any ideas about things. You don't need to do any of that kind of stuff, do you hear me? I mean it. I love those boys, but some of the stuff they've done. . . ." He shook his head. "You just don't need to be thinking like that. You're gonna finish college, and nobody can take that away from you, right? You hear what I'm saying?"

I nodded my head a bit feeling silly. I didn't need to be lectured to now. I'd already been through all that, had already had my opportunities to go wrong, but I didn't say anything. I just wanted to let him say what he thought he had to say and get it over with. I didn't want to be like them. They were like aliens to me, like things from another planet. I'd told Eugene something similar earlier when he was recounting one of his twisted stories to me.

"We don't live in the same world," I said. He narrowed his eyes and seemed to take it hard.

"We all live in the same world," he replied in a tone that held menace, and I knew what he meant for I'd seen enough of it.

There were still patches of snow on the ground. The night was cold and dark. My father was silent now as we passed through the landscape watching the headlights on the barren road. I thought of my cousins and my cousins' wives. They lived the life that surrounded them. We all do, but my father had changed that, had left to live another way. I remembered a phrase that I had learned in one of my classes that stayed with me. "Lives of quiet desperation." I thought of Donnie's wife and the look in her eyes after we talked when it was time to go home. I knew I shouldn't, but I'd been thinking about her a lot. I tried to picture her at home, sitting at the dining room table, perhaps, her husband in the living room watching television and getting stoned. We were leaving in two days, I thought. One more day, really. I felt tired. I was ready for bed.

For Those Who Think Young

Twitter, for those who think young.

The woman across the street has a daughter who just graduated from high school this year. It was a fine, private school where you go if your are both from a good family AND smart. Everyone from the school gets into the college of their choice, etc. And that makes the story she told better. It goes like this.

Her daughter went to school with a girl who had a bit of a situation this weekend. The girl's parents were out of town, and she was staying at the house alone. A couple of friends came over and the three of them got drunk. Pretty drunk. And they texted some friends about it.

Friends sent it to friends and then somebody twittered and later people began showing up. There was a party going on. The girl by now was really, really drunk, so she didn't care much that she knew few of the people who came. And in a little while, things got really, really out of hand. There were about two hundred people at this very nice home in a very nice part of town. Some of the guests, however, were apparently not such very nice people, so the party kept getting weirder and wilder. Eventually, someone drove a car in the garage through a wall in the house. I guess it was then that some of the neighbors had decided that perhaps property values might drop, and someone called the police. By the time they got there, though, the bad guys had made an exit. And of course, nobody knew who they were. Inside, the house was trashed, and on further inspection, it was found that people had stolen all the nice clothing and shoes out of the closets. China was broken and the silverware gone.

The police were clever, though. Since the girl couldn't identify any of the culprits and was eighteen and drunk, they arrested her and took her to jail. What are you going to do?

This won't keep the girl out of the college of her choice, of course. A good kid, really. It is just a matter of technology gone wild.

A blog is sooooo old fashioned now. It is practically prehistoric. Facebook is still cool (I think) because your tweets post there. As one funny internet video goes, "I can't wait for your Facebook post to see how our date went." Of course, you don't have to wait long. Kids can update the act as they perform it. It could be better than TV.

"Hey, Samantha's on a date with Eric. She's gonna keep posting so we know what's going on. She said she'd upload video, too."

Of course, somebody has to be interested in what you're up to. Tweeting to a vacuum can be dangerous for your mental health. You'd better have a social network with which to stay in touch.

And it helps to have some really understanding parents.

Rabbit Hunting

We were going hunting with my cousins, my father's brother's boys. Eugene picked us up at sunrise and drove us out of town. Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a diner for breakfast. In the coldness of the morning, the hot eggs and bacon and toast and coffee were perfect. There were no diners like this where I lived. There were no waitresses like this. There were no hills nor fields nor woods like this. We were in the north and there was snow on the ground. People wore plaid jackets and hats and huddled themselves for comfort. The dawn was long and the shadows travelled forever. Going north was going back in time. That was my theory. Nothing here seemed affected by current events. Those things arrived differently, by some slower and more minor delivery like a lost postcard that arrives some years too late. I looked out the window at an old stone wall. The waitress smiled at my cousin and asked if he wanted more coffee. She had her hair put up in bobbie pins and her face was slightly crooked. Eugene held his cup up before he looked at her, then he cut his eyes to her quickly like a movie star. She wore a pin with her name on it. Clarice. Her smile got wider. Eugene had been here before.

I was nervous and would have liked to stay in the diner longer. I had never been hunting before nor had I ever shot a gun. They had given me an old rifle my father had used a long time ago, part of the large gun collection Eugene had in a couple big cases at in his living room. I was kind of hoping for a hunting lesson of some sort but nobody thought of that. It was hunting, for god's sake. It was just something you did.

We met up with Ray and Forest on the edge of a corn field. They were sitting in Forest's car waiting for us when we got there.

"Where the fuck you been," Forest yelled at Eugene. He was pissed. "We've been sitting in the car for a fucking hour."

Ray got out of the other side with a big smile. "Hey Karl," he said to my father. "How you like the weather?"

It was grey and cloudy and damp.

Then he turned to me. "You ready to go hunting?"

"Sure," I said not at all certain what we were going to do in a corn field. I'd always thought of hunting as something they did in woods, creeping around trees and waiting by trails and streams.

My father came over and handed me the rifle, a little twenty-two, and began showing me how it worked. "We're just going to walk through the fields along the corn rows," he said. "We'll put you on the end over here. If you see a rabbit, just scare him toward the center." It seemed simple enough.

We walked down a ditch and up the other side. The ground had a frozen crust and the soil in the field was uneven so that I stumbled a couple of times before we got started. Everyone looked nervously at me. "Be careful with that gun," Ray called. "Point it the other way." I felt clumsy and foolish already with that feeling of watching every horrible motion from above. My limbs felt unattached, foreign.

Within a few moments, my feet were cold. The only shoes I had were suede, and they had already gotten wet from the snow and had soaked through to my socks. I rubbed them against one another to try to keep them warm.

"Bam! Bam!" We had scared a rabbit and my father and Eugene had fired. Eugene walked over and picked it up. "I got that one, Karl."

"Bullshit," my father said. "He was already down when you shot at him."

It was the first time I'd seen anything get shot. The rabbit was warm and limp in Eugene's hand. "Watch this," he said to my father. He had learned a new way of gutting the rabbit, he said, and then he was squeezing the rabbit in his hands, moving from the neck to the tail. A pile of guts squirted out the rabbits ass.

"Jesus Christ," my father said. "You sure he's cleaned out?"

"That's the way we've been doing it for awhile," Ray said.

Then Eugene handed the gutted rabbit to Ray who slipped it into a compartment in the back of Eugene's jacket.

"OK. Let's go."

We fanned out into the rows again and continued across the field. By now, my toes were frozen, but the cold and the quiet and the grey sameness of everything had put me into a stupor as I walked listening to the slight crunching beneath my feet. Suddenly a rabbit jumped in front of my feet. I'd almost stepped on it before it bolted. It jumped left, then right, cutting across the field toward the others, and with one motion, I brought the rifle up to my eye. I did this because that is what you are supposed to do and the others would see. Surprisingly to me, I guess, all those childhood years of playing with toy rifles had not prepared me for this, all those hours of aiming down the plastic barrels, lining up the front and rear sights, then uttering "kapow" as I pretended to shoot birds and dogs and neighbors. This was all a blur. There was no sighting down the barrel, just a quick pointing and then the squeezing of the trigger, then the metal barrel smacking me quick and hard in the eye. I could barely understand what had happened. The rabbit had run toward the group and I had followed it with my rifle not thinking about them, and I had fired toward the group. But when the rifle went off, the barrel had separated from the stock and had popped up and hit me in the eye. The whole damn thing had fallen apart.

"Jesus Christ, man, where're you shooting? You could kill somebody."

My father came over. "You alright?" he asked. I was standing, stunned. He took the rifle from me and lifted the barrel.

"What happened?" Ray asked.

"The whole thing just came apart. When's the last time you shot this thing."

"Hell, Karl, nobody ever uses it."

I had been lucky, I thought. If the gun hadn't come apart, they would be talking now about how I'd swung the rifle into the crowd, but that seemed to have been forgotten. Now, no danger, I walked the flank for the rest of the day carrying the broken gun, toes frozen, wet, and numb. The sky was grey, the umber field dappled white. I'm sure we headed north.

How Long?

How long, oh Lord, how long?

Somebody died, but I had not idea who he was. Everyone told me I did. I kept hearing the name on the news and then I saw it at CNN.com. I thought maybe he was a baseball player. He had a baseball player's name, close enough to the "Say Hey" kid to confuse me at first. But I had never heard of him nor seen him, and saying so seemed to confirm me as a liar.

Then everybody else began to die culminating with Michael Jackson. The tabloids say he was taking 10,000 pills a day. They say the boy was twisted. I admit, I'd heard and seen Michael Jackson.

Both Michael and this other fellow were fifty years old. Hard to believe. It just goes to show you.

A Blanker Whiteness of Benighted Snow

There is nothing like this Polaroid 669 film for what I am doing, and it is going, going. . . . I've tried working with the Fuji instant film, but I can't do with it what I am doing here, so there are a very limited number of images left. There have been people holding out hope that Fuji or somebody else would buy the rights to it, but nobody is going to bring it back. If it was a winning proposition, somebody would have done it by now. The Impossible Project is going to make a new instant film using an old Polaroid factory, but it is of the SX-70 type, not the peel apart which I need, that and the old positive/negative film.

It is Saturday. There is a paddleboard race at the beach today sponsored by someone I know. I am thinking of going with my camera and trying some "heroic" portraits with the Polaroid, but as often happens to me, I have a touch of catatonia. I'll tell you more about that some other time. But there are summer storms in the forecast today, and they can be dark, hard and violent.

Still, a morning at the beach with a camera in hand. . . .

* * * * *

Ohio. Relatives. I am greeted as my father's son. But all the boys and girls are growing up. We stay with my father's younger sister and her husband. He had owned a tire recap plant my whole life and was a creased, distasteful man. But he was not treated that way, and in his house, he was kowtowed and catered to. I did not like to be around him, though I had never said anything to my father about this. He was not home much, though, so I'd really had to spend little time with him in my life.

He was my aunt's second husband. She had been married when she was young and had had a son, but her husband had died. Maybe. It was always difficult to tell about my father's family. There seemed to be secrets that nobody talked about but in close quarters and then only by glances and allusions. Don't get me wrong. They were a raucous bunch when they got together, and there was much laughing and drinking and music or singing. But there were secrets shrouded in a darkness I didn't wish to investigate, and I never asked about my aunt's first husband.

When I was younger and my parent's were still married, we would come to Ohio every few years to keep in touch with both sides of the family. My mother's side was safer, all of them having lived outside the cities, mostly in the rural hollers. They were the archetypal "country cousins."

But my father's family was different. They seemed dangerous to me, all of them. They drank and smoked and drove fast cars and motorcycles and had run-ins with the law. Some of my cousins were serious criminals, but that was not something for which they were ever shunned or from which they seemed to be discouraged. Among them, my father was legendary for his strength and courage, and he was admired by all of them. My father was wholesome. He was the family angel.

My aunt had had two more sons with the Recap King, and they were the ones I'd known best, mostly the younger one who was just a year older than I. He was a grinning devil, a likable hoodlum who had learned the ropes from his two older brothers. He was like something from a '50s movie about urban gangs complete with slicked back curly hair, a leather jacket, and those short, black boots. In the brief hours we had spent together in my life, he had taught me to smoke and drink and to lust for women. With him on brief holidays, I'd broken into buildings and run through sloping urban forests evading the police. He had taken me to a spot in those same woods to spy on a fellow making love to a girl on a blanket, the first time I'd actually known what went on in that act. He had informed me about women's anatomy (to my disbelief and minor horror) and taught me to drive a car. And all of that had occurred in a single weekend when I was twelve.

Now he was married and lived in another part of the city, on the outskirts in a new suburban area. He still worked at the recap plant taking over many of the things his father had always done, so he was at work all day and I didn't get to see him much.

But his wife was a beauty, and she liked me right off. And each day, while my father and I were there, she would come by to see me. This did not set well with my aunt, of course, who was aggressive in saying so, but my cousin-in-law was not to be deterred. Each day, she would call to see what we were doing that day, and she would come to sit with me and talk. It was only that, but it was more than that, too, for there was a longing in her that was palpable. I did not think that it was merely me for which she longed, but for what I represented, something outside her married life and the sameness of friends and the old, tired routines. I was a college boy and did not work in a recap plant and by now she knew what life would be like, knew without knowing she would cook and clean and have children, knew that she would end up like my aunt.

I had never thought about my father's family before. I had only felt them. They had been a colorful break from our family routine, something larger, I thought, more experienced and fun. But now I could remember my mother's reticence about them. She did not like them, though she rarely expressed this attitude, and she did not want me to be like them. And now, unlike any one of them, I was in college, halfway through, and sitting with my cousin's wife, I began to understand what my mother had not, perhaps had not been able to, articulate. Nor, perhaps, could my cousin's wife. But when we talked, her voice became soft as her face relaxed, and she would drift, I think, as in a dream, talking and smiling and floating away.

One morning, I woke up in the attic bedroom where my father and I were sleeping, and looked out the window to see a fresh whiteness not yet sullied by footprints or car tracks, a dreamy, picture book snow that softened the corners and edges of all things. I sat long without moving trying to memorize the scene before it was spoiled by the day.

First Light

(A Holga camera and some b&w film makes the world look old)

More people, fewer resources. Fewer resources, more competition. More competition, less moral constraint. Am I missing something?

I saw "Food Inc." last night. Well done, but when I watch one side present an argument, I can't help but produce the other. Monsanto Corp. could make a documentary of its own showing how populations would starve if not for their corporate methods. And it would be true, too. I eat and drink organic. It costs a lot of money. Not every one can afford to eat that way. Twenty years ago, a study commissioned by the World Health Organization offered that if all the world's food supply was divided equally between all the people in the world, they would all eventually starve or die of malnutrition. Too many people, not enough food. One of the most compelling arguments left out of "Food Inc." is that increased food production has led to population growth rather than better fed populations. Human reproduction will outrun our ability to produce food, it seems. Collectively, our passions are stronger than our intellect. That is what all the religions tell us. That is one of the common denominators.

Trust me. I'm a scientist almost.

* * * * *

My father had the idea that we should go to Ohio to see the relatives for Christmas. I was excited. We might see snow.

So the Friday night we were to leave, he did not show up at the house. I sat and waited as the sun went down, then as the darkness turned to blackness. I alternated between anger and worry. Where the hell was he?

When he came home, he was drunk. I'd only seen my father drunk one other time, and that was on a bet, a story for another time. But my father had gone out with his fellow workers on a little holiday celebration, their version of a Christmas party. First they had gone to the dog track and then to a go-go bar. And now my father was ready for bed. I was indignant, of course, and felt a great betrayal. We were going to Ohio. We were going to see the family. It was akin to something sacred.

We quarreled and for the first time in my life, my father got angry at me. It was the alcohol, of course. My father had almost been court marshaled in the navy on his first shore leave. It was the first time he'd gotten drunk and he had gotten in a fight and beaten someone up very badly. When the military police tried to arrest him, he had beaten them, too, and was thrown in the hoosegow. He was only let out when the ship came under attack by Japanese war planes, and after that, the charges were dropped. That is how he told the story, anyway.

But standing in front of him that night, the story was easy to believe. There was a glassy menace in his eye that was distant and wrong and which I could neither believe nor reconcile. I said something, though, that released a small part of that demon, and with a short, pulled punch, he clipped me on the chin, a glancing jab meant to serve a warning. My father had only spanked me once in my life, and the circumstances were wrong then, too. He had always been too strong and too powerful to have the need to hurt people.

I didn't move, but I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I simply stood and looked at him for a timeless moment, waiting. And then he turned away.

"Fuck you," I yelled, and I began throwing bags into the station wagon. "Get in the car." And so drunk and perhaps undone, he crawled into the back where he stretched out and fell asleep.

I drove through the night, state after state, picking up the mega-radio station out of Chicago, WGN. I had never heard of it before. It had come to me as though through magic, I thought, and stayed with me mile after mile, state after state. I listened and thought and drove through the blackness and into the returning light. At sunrise, we were climbing through the mountains of Tennessee where the interstate was still unfinished, around the winding curves of small mountain roads, turning and turning through the smokey fog and mist, looking across the valleys and wooden shacks emerging from the trees. My eyes were beginning to burn but there was too much to see.

Something had changed, I thought, as things always do. I had driven through the night while my father slept and now drove on into the coming day, and as hungry and as tired as I was, I didn't want my father to wake up. I only wanted to keep driving, to feel the miles pass beneath me, to see the world continue to emerge from the darkness and the mist. For the moment, that was all I knew.

The End of Something

My days at the junior college were coming to an end, but I didn't know to which university I would go. I would be able to go anywhere I wished for the state allowed a junior college graduate entrance into any state college. Deciding had never been my strength.

But two things happened before the end of the term that determined much of my future. The first was that I would need a third operation before I went back to school. The previous operations on my pilonidal cyst had been unsuccessful. I went to a second doctor who had developed a new and radical surgery for their removal. It was awful, but I would be in bed for quite a while.

The second was that I met a girl. It was nothing, really. She had gone out with a friend of mine, but now we were seeing each other at school after class and talking quite a bit. It was easy for me for I had no thoughts of asking her out.

The term ended and I had a degree. So they said. I didn't have a degree in anything, just a degree. My father and I laughed about that, but he was proud of me, I knew. Christmas came and the weather was nice, even in our cracker box house. The skies were blue and the air gentle on your cheek and the fields that surrounded us had turned a golden hue. Dusk came early and before the light was gone, I loved to watch the cars drive with their headlights on remembering what it was like to ride with my parents when we looked for Christmas presents, remembered the excitement and my feeling deeply the holiday displays that decorated the town.

But there was not much of that for me now. Tommy and Dee put up a metallic tree in their little government apartment that didn't seem to mean much. I was speaking to my mother a little now as my parents negotiated about how I would be cared for after the operation. They decided to rent an apartment close to where my mother worked so that she could care for me. But that was all. There would be no swapping presents, no Christmas celebration. And since the place I lived with my father was so small, we did not bother putting up a tree.

And so the year ended. Soon, I would have an operation and be living on my own. I registered at the local university since I would be under medical care for some time and couldn't leave town. There was no need to make a decision. Everything was uncertain.

Whatever Works

I wonder occasionally why I want to spend my efforts messing up perfectly good photographs. It takes a lot of time. But an old hotel seems to call for a certain mood. I don't know. There are many roads to nowhere and we can take only so many. Some more than others, sure. Perhaps it is wrong-headed to subscribe to the "journey, not the destination" philosophy. Perhaps the destination is what matters. We will remember Obama, but what about Ron Paul?

Speaking of Paul, I saw "Bruno" the other night. It is not a good movie, but Paul is certainly the loser in it. I don't know that he can overcome the image he portrays there.

Last night, I went to see the new Woody Allen film "Whatever Works." I went expecting to be disappointed. The reviews I read said the movie was flawed and mediocre. Maybe having low expectations helped, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The critics don't like it when Allen pairs an older man and a younger woman. But it is truly funny. The old guy is no hero, just a pathetic schlemiel who deals with fate, fatalism, and self-delusion. Think Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale." The movie resounds with one of Allen's favorite themes--Luck. There is no big plan, he suggests, so take the small morsels of happiness wherever you can find them. He is talking to himself, obviously, but it is fun to listen in.

The movie is made for a small audience, so I won't recommend it. We walked into the theater at then end of the previews and were the only two there. Just before the movie began, a woman walked in alone. And that was it, just the three of us. Most people wouldn't like the movie, I know, but I don't like the films that most people like either, so there's that. As Allen says, whatever works.

Sooner or Later

Nobody I knew when I started college was there any more. Everyone from the Blue Devils was gone. Joe the Muscle Man was gone. Terry the Health Professor was gone. Some had transferred to other places, some had joined the service, and some had simply disappeared. I'd had a date--a single date--that had been just short of bad. But my life had changed, and I could feel the difference.

Tommy and Dee had had their baby, a girl, and had gotten married in a ridiculous affair at a small town courthouse. Now they were ensconced in a new public housing apartment complex where I would occasionally stop by, but not very often, for Tommy was either working or sleeping and Dee was hanging out with other new mom's in the complex. Even with housing assistance and food stamps, life was a struggle and the burden of it hung heavy everywhere. When I did see them, there was little to say, so we would look at the baby for awhile and then I would leave. And it would seem to me that Tommy would look relieved.

The Presidential election had me excited, and for the first time in my life, I could vote. I argued politics at school with some older guys who were William F. Buckley-style conservatives, fellows who knew more about politics than I, fellows to whom I had gloated during the primaries. But in November, McGovern lost in a landslide, and it seemed tragic and wrong to me who had longed for an overthrow of the smug piety of the old regime. I learned during the campaigns that some of the icons I had grown up watching--Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, and a host of others--were Nixon supporters, and suddenly, they were lost to me, too.

After the Europe trip, Leonard had decided to take some time off from school. I didn't see him much after that, but one day I was talking with a mutual friend and heard a thing that sent me spinning. Leonard had been living with his girlfriend and her brother since he had returned from Europe in a funky apartment in a house downtown. His father, who had left his mother a year before, had a young new girlfriend who Leonard openly despised. His father, a mildly macho man who had not gone to college and who had a complex, I think, since his brother was the Commissioner of Agriculture in our state, had confronted Leonard several times about his lifestyle telling him he had to move back to his mother's house, but one of Leonard's friends, one of the hoodlums I had known, a really rough kid, had threatened Leonard's father with a beating and that was the end of that. The shifting hierarchies with which I was being confronted were dizzying, but there seemed to be no end.

Leonard's girlfriend's brother was gay and had started an organization at the new, local university he attended. The university was a bastion of conservatism and "gay" was a new word to me who had grown up in a world that considered homosexuals as queer, so I was quite impressed, if stunned, that this boy would be so public about his sexuality. I thought of Leonard and his girlfriend and the bohemian lifestyle that they were leading, and I compared it to my life which I'd thought was moving along nicely, but the changes now seemed merely superficial. Internally, things were happening, but to an external viewer it was all invisible. I still lived with my father and spent my nights at home. In the course of a few months, Leonard had gone to Europe, moved in with his girlfriend, and. . . the real shocker. . . Leonard had announced that he was gay!

When my friend told me this, I could feel the world tilt. What?! And with a big grin, he told it to me again. Was it true? I began to think about Leonard. In high school, he was a conservative boy, was a member of all the right clubs. He was tallish and had a big, winning smile that he showed easily. I had spent the night at his house, had slept in the same bed. Was he gay then, I wondered? Then I thought of him walking around the house wearing little shorts and a pair of clogs he had gotten in Europe while he fixed us French toast. I thought of that and a hundred other little things with wonder.

"Leonard has taken up with his girlfriend's brother," said my friend, " but they are all still living together."

Jesus Christ, I thought. What would I say to Leonard if I saw him again? I pictured him with the thin young brother of the pretty blonde, wondered if they all slept together, wondered if that was incest, tried to picture Leonard and the boy holding hands. Then I thought about how attractive his girlfriend was, how sophisticated and strange, and I wanted to see her. I felt my desire rise. Then I thought of Leonard. Jesus Christ. Crazy, erotic Leonard. I'd always felt a little superior to him, I realized, had felt myself above him somehow as being more worldly, more daring, more experienced. I had thought of Leonard as a bit of a nerd. Jesus Christ.

And, as always, I had to think again. My feet were planted in gravel as the river flowed rapidly about me. Sooner or later, I would have to start swimming.

Gewgaws of the Imagination

I travel to find things I can't find at home. I'm not very much like Dorothy thinking that after an adventure everything I need is in my own backyard. No, I'm probably wrong about that. Everything I need is probably in my own backyard. Not everything I want.

I love stumbling into oddly eclectic shops or specialty stores where the juxtaposition of things sets them off. Books, for instance. I buy books everywhere. Once, so many years ago, when 4th Street in Berkley was just beginning to become a merchant's haven, I found so many weird and crazy stores it no longer seems real. Indeed, it may not be. There was a shop that sold merchandise that should never be seen together, miniature circuses and photo books and expensive pens and oddly erotic things that I can barely describe. I could scarcely breathe. .

There was a shop that sold hardware goods from around the world. I bought big brass shears there from India. Some of you may have them, but they are difficult to find any more.

In Key West, there was for a long time a store that sold strange nautical gear and other things, as well. What was it's name? It is closed now, but it was a treasure trove. Perkins and Sons. That's it! After it closed, I found a fascinating little fishing store and bought "The Book of the Tarpon," a lovely hardback copy in limited edition. The book still gives me great pleasure, but that shop is gone as well.

My shelves are filled with books I've bought in fabric stores and clothing stores and decorator's shops.

This trip, I picked up a clothing guide at Brooks Brothers on Worth Avenue. It was free. I don't what there is about the thing, but I like it and will keep it. Go. Get one. You will see.

Loathe as I am to admit it, I look at books in the Anthropologie stores, too. I find things I've never seen anywhere else. And the selection is not the same in every city.

It is not just books, of course. I have a whale's tooth I bought in a flea market in London, along with an old, brass compass and a spy glass. I have old photos purchased in a market in Mexico City and more from Hong Kong.

I think it began when I was young and my father spent a month driving the family across the country with a giant old canvas army tent and a one-wheeled trailer. Twice. Before interstate highways. We would stop at roadside stores full of oddities and occasionally, I would get some gewgaw like a authentic cowboy marionette or an arrowhead. The images were profoundly and permanently imprinted. I am scarred.

I run my eyes and hands across these things as I sit this morning in the hours before work. Talismans and Totems. Ju-Ju for the imagination.

Somebody Else's Money

Vacations are good for something, of course. We all know that. But they are not good for creativity. At least not while they happen. They are good fodder later, no doubt, when in misery and depression you can recall the images and contemplate them and figure out what they mean. But there is little interesting about somebody else's vacation. I don't know what I was thinking. Well. . . I wasn't. I just kept posting rather than putting up a "Gone Fishing" sign. I should have waited. As a result, I've gotten some nasty emails--not quite hate mail, but akin to it. And I've halved the number of people coming to the site. However, vacation will be over soon and I will go back to the reflective posts rather than the "Here We Are in Paradise" routine.

I'll tell you this; Paradise is a two sided coin. Just drive off the island, and you will find it. Much is interesting there. I will come back sometime this summer just to photograph it. You cannot do that while staying in a luxury suite. But I will go back alone and get a room at the Melody Motel or some equivalent and get up at dawn each morning and go about town documenting "real life." Much is left over from the 1960s, things that will disappear as soon as the economy comes back, for that part of Florida is booming faster than any other. I will go back.

Even Palm Beach as it was is dying. Worth Avenue is "Available." Many stores have closed. Much is "For Rent." The mother's son coined it "Worthless Avenue." It doesn't seem to have the magnitude that I remember. Maybe it was just too hot. Who knows? It is a giant throwback to something that not so many people are nostalgic for, opulence and arrogance.

But I needed the other and found a way to do it and have filled my head with images. I will be back to work soon enough, will toil and contend with ennui and routine. But for now I dream of correcting my life, of having more elegance and charm, of being tall and imperially slim, of drinking Americanos and Negronis and wearing clothing so well made that it is like wearing nothing at all. And how will that come about? Oh, I will work harder and have more drive to succeed, I will make something of myself. . . .

And therein lies the tale. The only money worth having, I guess, is somebody else's.

And so it goes.

Upgrade

Too much fun to leave. We decided to stay but the hotel was "fully committed," said Maria at the desk, a girl who, like the valets, knows my name immediately. "We would like to offer you an upgrade to the Flagler Suites," she offered. "You will have an ocean view and access to the spa and the terrace. The suites are provided with a private valet. I think you will like the room."

We like the room.

And so we frolicked in the ocean and lay about the pool and had food and drinks on the terrace. And now, I write at a desk overlooking the ocean as the sun rises.

I enjoy watching the woman's son here, already a little Kennedy, learning quickly as children do. He has no trouble using the valet. Children are always ready to rule without hesitation. They are born to it, natural aristocrats.

So for now there are only snapshots and lazy vacation writings. I will try to hold onto some of these carefree days. There are still mountains and beaches and picnics and girls in their summer dresses. There are European vacations. Something. Anything. We'll play in the sprinklers if nothing else.

Living Large

Mother and child wish never to leave. Snorkeled on a shallow reef with fish both large and small retreating to a sugary sand beach to lie under umbrellas on beach chairs drinking Pina Coladas, then to the decadently heated pool (in summer you would think this wrong, but it is not) to fall apart, then into lush towels and teak chairs. Three pools plus a separate lap pool, kids pools, saunas, cabanas, etc. The lobbies alone are worth a novel or at least the place to write one. I want to sit there for a month and see what I could write.

Now, however, we must wander down to breakfast. Someone wants to dive on the reef again. There are acres yet to explore.

Ensconced

I am ensconced in a room at The Breakers for a couple of days. I needed something grand. I don't plan to leave the grounds, just to frolic in the sea and to lie by the pool and to wander through the gardens and to sit in the lobbies. I will eat and drink and let the wind blow through my noggin. The money will run out before I'm satiated or even fixed. But that is the way of it.

I am in the company of a young fellow and his mother. I want to show him some things. He was not certain that he wanted to come, but as soon as he saw the grounds, he was impressed. I want him to feel these ocean waters, to swim in these decadent pools and dry off with these enormous, soft towels. I've told him of the labor that went into building the hotel in the early 20th century, of shipping the marble by boat from Italy, of importing artists and artisans to decorate the lobbies. I've taken him to the fishing docks where we've eaten fresh dolphin and watched giant fifty pound jacks swim through the clear water over sponge-covered rocks and pilings where parrot fish and sergeant majors and clown fish flit through crevices. It is the same marina my father took me to when I was young, though much changed now. But there are still many stories about that marina to come.

This is only a brief interlude. One day, it will come back as a dream.

Don't worry. We will not get soft. Next time I will take them to the Bed Bug Inn with its smallish pool and its continental breakfast of Folgers coffee and danishes wrapped in cellophane containers. There is fun in that, too.