Hooky Beach

It's all over

2009-06-06T23:22:00.000-05:00

...here

Feral carts 2

2009-05-08T05:18:00.029-05:00

Fascinated by traffic, feral carts have been observed loitering at bus stops for days at a time.

Some carts have been kidnapped and pressed into a life of servitude.

Dereliction, a junk food diet, and intoxication are all too common among the feral cart population.

Separation from their former community and feelings of isolation lead shame-based ferals to withdraw.

Some adjust to feral life with exuberance. Having lost their taste for supermarket fare, many have been seen stalking small game.

After having been returned to their former stores, some ferals self-ostracize.

Bonding among feral carts can be intense. Many remain by their fallen until they are rounded up by supermarket recovery teams.

Siesta Key

2009-02-03T10:06:00.009-05:00

Chilled loops spiral through dappled air.
Out there, beyond the shops, the trees,
the surf's ceaseless rush keeps ragged time.
In the pool dry posture thaws into atavistic coils.

The customary channels have dried up. We transfer want
routed through firewalls and Berne.
You called me by a moody name.
In the dunes memory declines to a sense of heat.

"They're in-house," he said, the parsley fries. Menu, magazine.
A muted blare keeps pace, assuming a ground state of desire.
In the cove the anhingas listen only
to the fatalistic saga of the leaves.

Out riding

2008-12-06T20:20:00.004-05:00

Be a blessing.

Around here 2

2008-11-19T11:08:00.005-05:00

I traded in my Mustang for a Ranger. The pony was pushing 10 and starting to manifest intimations of mortality. There were just a few Rangers for sale at the dealer, I was surprised to find. Seems the little 4-cylinder classic is moving, albeit slower than in years past, so I got a pretty good deal. There were rows and rows of F150s and their bigger siblings. My first fuel-efficiency calibration on the new truck revealed an mpg score of 22 in mixed driving. About the same or a little better than the Mustang. The scooter gets close to 100.

Inspired by one of Uncle Zoloft's comments, I sprang for the pickup as a companion for Firefly, my main wheels now, which I can load on the Ranger, as a means of extending the scooter's range... and other truckin' tasks. Then it's on to some nearby town for a little leisurely and aimless exploring. I wouldn't be surprised if this agreeable pair of internal combustion companions were my last.

I generally have only a secondary interest, on these outings, in a place's claims to fame... its Opera House or Big Bridge. What I like most is cruising around the neighborhoods, the back streets, local parks and beaches, habituations of commerce, soaking up everyday life, taking in novel variations of the mundane. Living near affluence makes for a nice ride, the endless tree lined streets and waterfront enclaves. At first it posed a challenge to me as a photographer. What can one say about the pleasant? Eventually I got over it. They have their moments, really, these gulf coast suburbs, no less ravishing than a canyon's, as quirky as a cat's.

Along the way, I'll stop at a fast-food place for a burger and coke, a pizza stand for a slice and a beer... quietly reveling in the joy of the readily available. It's an off-the-shelf life for me. On these treks the spirit, and my monkish temperament, join to appreciate, and sometimes bless, the world they see. I don't linger, indulge entanglement. Though in practice the meaning of those terms for me is more intuitive than not. You play it by ear, by heart, play it as it lays...

slide show here

Sandcastles 2008

2008-11-16T12:01:00.016-05:00

I stopped by the Fort Myers Beach 22nd annual sand sculpting competition last Monday, the day after the event, and after everyone had gone home. I didn't do the big shoot I did last year, but a few of the entries caught my eye. A classic iteration of the theme was nicely rendered in the sculpture above.

A modernist spiral... reminiscent of the deco mood that swept Florida in the 1920s and is still prominent in places like Miami.

A topical piece on the recent federal bailout of the credit sector... a gruesome touch was achieved with the wire 'hairs' sticking out of the banker's shoulders and bald head. I deeply suspect that crusty old villains all have at least one extra-long errant hair growing out of a shoulder.

First place went to Paris Vacation by Thomas Koet. Wonderfully articulated, the punchy piece reminds me of a retro travel poster or a pop-up.

Fort Myers sand is said to be exceptionally suited to sculpting - fine textured, dense, "like buttah." It's amazing what some of these international masters can coax from the sand with just a few tools, skill, and a lot of imagination.

Mosquito control

2008-11-13T07:43:00.011-05:00

Almost a decade ago, I worked for one of the beach newspapers. The pub was between cartoonists, so I volunteered to come up with a few while the paper sought applications for the gig. My sense of humor didn't always go over that well. Here's one I called 'mosquito control.'

What friends are for

2008-11-10T09:03:00.013-05:00

The boy got spooked... after scaling a limb too far. He was quickly helped to safety by his friends. No questions asked.

That was the night that was

2008-11-06T20:03:00.014-05:00

I watched the returns come in on election night with campaign volunteers, first at Paula's house, with my canvassing partner Cathy. Paula was nervous and depressed, after I'd told her earlier in the day about Rachel Maddow's pessimism. She was tired, having canvassed the neighborhoods every day for weeks. By nightfall there was something about the finality of the polls closing in Florida that suddenly lifted my spirits. I had the strongest feeling, that I couldn't explain, that Obama had bagged the elephant. Exhausted, we had collectively skipped a final assignment to "keep voters in line" at one of the precincts, but speculated, punch-drunk, from our couches in front of the TV about how that was expected to be accomplished. Money and candy were discussed. I suggested tasers.

After Pennsylvania went blue, I left Paula and Cathy, in considerably better spirits, and headed for a local sports bar to meet up with my friend Stu. We go way back. Stu and I had goaded each other into volunteering, but it was really Stu who got the ball rolling. Cathy was worried that the scene at the bar might turn into a brawl. But it turned out that the local democratic club had booked the second floor, so it was an Obamalama party. I joined Stu and his wife and son at a booth which, like all the other booths, had its own flat-screen TV. Stu and Nancy were drinking tequila, I ordered a beer.

It was wildly fun to flame the republicans, loudly and in public, and root for Barack as each new flip, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, splashed across the big screens and people cheered and hugged. The sense of moment was palpable, and seemed to concentrate and heighten everything. Then suddenly the dominoes were falling all over the map, including those big blue ones right up the west coast. The rest, as they say, was history.

Today I went for a "long long ride on my motorbike." I was ready.

A sweet park on a small basin where blue crab and yellow-fin can be netted and hooked. There's a charcoal grill, as in most parks. I've had lunch here with visiting family. Or I'll drop in with a coffee and a New Yorker, or nothing at all, and just watch the water for a while.

Yes we did

2008-11-05T00:00:00.008-05:00

I don't underestimate for a moment the challenge of the road ahead. But for tonight and tomorrow...

Around here 1

2008-11-02T10:04:00.002-05:00

Life goes on, bra. Time to take a break, look around. God is in the details. And the Buddha, I've been told, is just as happy in the transmission of my motor scooter as he is in the sea and sky, the sun in your eyes, and the smile that gives my soul wings.

slide show here

Give change a chance

2008-10-28T15:17:00.013-05:00

In the last days now before the election, the race in Florida is tightening as predicted. We've been seeing more Obama lawn signs - those, that is, that have escaped the epidemic of sign theft. One couple that we talked to on Saturday had lost their Obama sign to theives the night before. They were livid, of course, and we were all left to wonder about the motive behind it: by stealing the signs, the vandals think... what? That they're making the candidate himself disappear?

The evangelical-controlled republican party has been rife with superstition for some time now. Ballot initiative 2 in Florida for instance, would not only constitutionally prohibit same-sex marriage, but also "the substantial equivalent thereof..." No government-recognized domestic partnerships. This over-kill initiative is so mean-spirited that none other than Jeb Bush lambasted it when its petition fell short four years ago. The goal of this measure, it seems, apart from the usual ploy of baiting conservatives into the voting booth, is to deter divine displeasure, and somehow save heterosexual marriage. The 50% divorce rate, like the 9/11 attack, can be traced directly to the nation's growing acceptance of homosexuality, you see. But as one unmarried straight couple we met, who had voted against the measure, pointed out, it puts them and their family in jeopardy too. One sign I saw in Naples said "Vote No on 2. Save our families." But in the fundamentalist-imagined universe, health care benefits, pensions, civil rights in general, are extended only to those who are permitted to submit to the proper state-sanctioned religious ritual.

One crusty duplex we visited turned out to be a "bad address." The former tenant had moved out. The old lady who greeted us at the door, surely a woman with little more than social security to sustain her, upon seeing our Obama buttons snapped "Get off my property!" Superstition, apparently, or "the substantial equivalent thereof" trumps everything in the minds of some... including their own self-interest. Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?", though already a little dated, is a good primer on the phenomenon.

The quirkiest encounter was toward the end of the day on Saturday. One of our last calls was on somebody named "Ono." Imagine our surprise when we pulled up to the house and there, stretched between two trees, was a huge home-made Obama sign saying "Give Peace A Chance." The guy who answered the door, who turned out to be a volunteer, had made the sign. But he wasn't Ms. Ono. He didn't know Ms. Ono. Turns out she was at another address that we'd already logged as "moved."

The thing that surprised me the most on these treks into the neighborhoods I thought I knew, were the number of contacts on our list that were "bad addresses." Apartments, condos, and houses which, once approached, turned out to be empty, abandoned, foreclosed. Houses I thought were neighbors. And that, as I look around the city, is the legacy of the last eight years made sadly tangible. Empty houses, uprooted families, properties gone to weed. From modest apartments to solemn McMansions. Not even a dog to welcome or warn. Nobody. Nothing.

In normal times, I'd favor a somewhat divided government but not this year. The old guard has to go. I'd like to see Obama and Biden, should they win the White House, get the support in congress they need to take the country in a new direction. Give change a chance.

Boo who

2008-10-17T16:40:00.059-05:00

I've been busy canvasing for the campaign. It's been a good, if exhausting, experience. I'm glad I finally connected with the local democratic organization.

Amid neighborhoods sprouting Halloween lights and apparitions, the door-to-door has been a hoot. At this hour the mood of the McCain camp is generally withdrawn and grimly hunkered-down. The Obamans are hopeful and quietly exultant. What remains of the undecideds seem to have qualms they can't quite articulate.

The Halloween demographic is varied too, and oddly reflects its human counterpart...

Joe Biden in Fort Myers

2008-10-09T06:55:00.037-05:00

As some of you know, I volunteer for the local Obama campaign. Last night vice presidential nominee Senator Joe Biden came to Republican stronghold Fort Myers for a standing room only rally at Alico Arena on the FGCU campus. I've always liked senator Biden... bright, articulate, a really decent guy with a refreshing and comprehensive grasp of the issues. "Depth" was the word that kept coming up to describe Biden's performance in the v.p. debate.

The crowd at the rally was diverse. Seniors, boomers, families... but young folks and students seemed to be the dominant presence.

In a striking contrast to republican v.p. hopeful Sarah Palin's marching band/cheerleader-laden show at Germain Arena on Monday, the democratic candidate's appearance at the university was an issue-driven, no-frills, informative event, and evoked enthusiasm with ideas rather than with the hype and smears that have come to characterize the republican candidates' campaigns in the final weeks of the race.

Florida Senator Bill Nelson warmed up the crowd...

Senator Biden takes the stage to a rapturous standing o.

Biden is always at ease, though passionate, a seasoned statesman. You get the feeling that he can't be thrown off balance... he speaks from his heart and mind. They're connected. He has a good voice. The senator's talk was characteristically issue-oriented and addressed the economic crisis, health care, education, and foreign policy, among other things. Citing McCain's benefit-taxing healthcare plan, Biden repeated his debate zinger that McCain's plan is "the ultimate bridge to nowhere." Somewhere in the crowd an infant yelped. "I don't blame that baby for crying," Biden quipped.

Citing presidential candidate John McCain's much-vaunted image as a maverick, Biden pointed out McCain's record of unflagging support for the Bush administration. "That's not a maverick, that's a sidekick."

In a swipe at a McCain strategist's recent statement that if the campaigns "keep talking about the economy, we lose", Biden said that the American people, and the Obama campaign, are not about to "turn the page" on the crisis, as the McCain camp had hoped, until they elect a leader who can "write an end to the story" that we can live with.

Noting the recent downturn in tone coming from the McCain camp, Biden said that the republican candidate was trying to "take the low road to the highest office in America, and we can't let that happen."

A standing ovation erupted when Biden talked about ending the misbegotten war in Iraq and bringing the troops home.

Recent polls indicate that swing-state Florida has edged into the Obama column.

Suburbiana 3

2008-10-04T08:49:00.008-05:00

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Untitled 2

2008-09-29T20:11:00.011-05:00

the last of the lobsters
have fewer aspirations
asleep until the day after
my ultramarine dream
yoga is avoided on principle

the voluptuous tourists
coughing awake
an intangible dawn

ashes
Pepsi
all fall down

Two shoe

2008-09-27T07:22:00.009-05:00

This little sonata of red white and black reminds me of the colors in a checkers game. I've noticed that close friends, especially the ladies, often somehow manage to color-coordinate.

Leapin' lizard 2

2008-09-24T20:51:00.010-05:00

Liz tagged along to the post office yesterday. On the way back, she jumped off at Brew Babies, which reopens for the season next week. Maybe she's doing some pre-season reconnaissance.

Swing times

2008-09-23T09:07:00.020-05:00

This home made little red swing has seen better days, but perhaps it's happy to be retired. I came across it on my ride. Its delicate construction suggests that it was made for a small child. But rather than being used up and broken, it seems to have been simply abandoned instead.

My favorite swing as a kid was a rope that someone had hung from a massive old tree on the bank of a creek in the woods. "The Rope" as it was know by the neighborhood kids was a favorite hang out, no pun intended, a touchstone of local kid society. Trysts took place there, and fights, first cigarettes were smoked, first kisses stolen or given, and many a tale was told in the dappled shade around its totemic knots. And many a thrill-ride, launched from the bank, ended in the creek.

I came across this variation of the theme a few years ago on one of the canals in an undeveloped precinct of the city. The trunk of the gracious old tree from which it hung was ribbed, far up into its leafy depths, with a stairway of nailed-on boards. I stumbled across the place again a while back, I don't know how I found it. The path was weedy and the clearing obscured. The rope was gone. The stairs were gone. Only a few broken remnants of the little dock remained. And the tree... silent now, reclaimed, forgotten.

Four Mile Cove

2008-09-19T11:49:00.014-05:00

click image to biggen

Eco Preserve, an old favorite on the Caloosahatchee River, is where I go to unwind and taste the four flavors of meditation: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. The boardwalk threads through a 365 acre state wetland preserve. There's a bit of wildlife, but what I like is its densely detailed, yet unchanging
walking-in-space walk. It's a good foil for rambling along in one's thoughts.

A leaf pierced by a reed when it fell to earth, or was driven by a fateful gust... so too our hearts, driven and felled.

Click image to biggen

Floating pavilions in the cove await kayak and canoe

Flowers drift in the wake of a memorial. "There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning; they're leaning out for love, and they will lean that way forever, while Suzanne holds the mirror..."

Firefly

2008-09-10T07:37:00.026-05:00

I was hanging out with my friend Ted not long ago and he asked if I still rode my motorcycle. I told him I did. He mentioned that his son was looking for a bike to get around the city with. I told him to have Michael call me. Two days later, Dragonfly was hitched to a flatbed trailer, and I was waving goodbye.

A couple of days after that, I was driving home in a rented van with a spanking new Honda Ruckus. I named my little bad boy Firefly.

I found the matching shades at Walgreen. My new torque wrench at Sears. My adolescence right where I left it. I may be a tad scarce around the virtual beach for a while. :o)

Passerine

2008-09-05T07:24:00.016-05:00

I hadn’t seen my old friend Martin in several years, not since his lover Fred died of a heart attack, at thirty-nine, in the parking lot of Ford’s shopping center in Northville. I had flown in on that cold March day, two months after Fred’s death, to celebrate with Martin, and the remnants of our old tribe, Martin’s spare and lovely memorial to our dead friend. There was snow on the ground. The dozen spring iris, sapphire blue, which I had sent ahead, Martin had stuck in the snow on the blank open lawn under the massive old willow, where we had gathered to reminisce and pray. Later, after the last of the guests had waved and retreated behind smoothly rising car windows, Martin and I were to enjoy a few days of indolence in rooms heated with fragrantly burning cherry behind March-frosted glass.

A country gentleman, whose lifestyle the momentum of heritage, and a slowly dwindling family portfolio, managed to barely sustain, Martin wove the deeply frayed edges of his circumstances, on the loom of almost spooky good taste, into gracious living.

After the Vietnam war he had stayed abroad, haunting Asian capitals for a decade. He taught English at university in Laos, studied ikegami in Japan, and brought treasures home to the “farm” in Pennsylvania. His grasp of shibui, the guiding principle of Japanese aesthetics, was firmer than that of most natives. He had a knack for transforming the most humble space into an elegant environment by the placement of an object or two, frequently an object which itself had been found at a junkyard or yard sale. This talent had to do with Martin’s frame of mind, and his ability to make that outlook fill the room—and stick. He projected an aesthetic benevolence into the space around him. And there was more than a little fairy dust involved in it all. You either tuned in or you didn’t.

“The farm,” hadn’t been a working farm in decades, although there had always been livestock around. Pets, really. In the years that I knew Martin, the animal life consisted of a number of dogs and cats, a couple of sheep, a few chickens, a burrow, and a fair collection of ornamental fowl—Martin’s passion.

Now Fred had been gone for six years. It was a brisk and multicolored afternoon in October. We were sitting in faded butterfly chairs on the “silo base” off the barn, the circular concrete floor of a silo long vanished, now a patio. A pair of guinea fowl, in their hounds tooth tweeds, were pecking amongst the feverfew.

“There’s a golden pheasant at the Staten Island Zoo,” I was saying. “I thought peacocks were something. . . macaws. But this bird tops them all. The kind of creature I never expected to encounter outside a fairy tale.”

“Gaudy as hell,” said Martin. “Lady Amherst’s pheasant is much prettier, I think.” An unmusical tinkle, the beaten-copper shards of a mobile hanging from a cedar branch nearby and nudged by a breeze, came and went like windblown leaves.

“Lady Amherst’s?”

“We’ll delve into Pringle’s Pheasant Guide after dinner. You’ll be mesmerized. Of course, your universal red rooster is a pheasant. Gallus gallus. Descended from the jungle fowl of Burma and Indo-China. Look at the plumage.”

I looked. And had to agree.

“Pea fowl are pheasants. There’s a breeder in town who sells incubatable eggs for five dollars. Fantastically hardy birds - most pheasant are. The most annoying voice you can imagine.”

“It’s the showgirl syndrome.”

“Except, of course, that the showgirl in this case is a male.”

“Exactly.”

Martin’s laugh was worldly, limber, agreeable. Years of wine and tobacco had given his already polished élan a deep and lustrous varnish. A starling alighted on the white gate, Martin took the opportunity to describe the origin of starlings in America. The United States population of the feisty grackle was descended from one hundred pair of birds released in Central Park in 1890. “That much,” Martin explained, “is undisputed.” The rest of the legend, that the anonymous ornithologist responsible for the deed had had a notion to bless the new world with at least a pair of every bird mentioned in Shakespeare, is not as certain.

One day, back in the city, I happened to recount the starling story to my friends Evan and Jane while we were walking in Central Park. We were crossing Sheep Meadow, a large open lawn that was the city’s celebration central in those days. Barbara Streisand, Diana Ross, the New York Philharmonic, all had regaled the city with free concerts there. We’d seen Elton John, in the biggest concert ever, and revisiting the site quickly ignited our shared penchant for reminiscing.

“The irony is,” Evan said, “he was way more flamboyant before he actually came out.”

“I counted four costume changes,” I said. “I think it was a record.”

“The satin duck outfit!” said Jane.

“I was watching the video tape the next day. He was singing Lennon’s Imagine. ‘You may call me a screamer,’ he said, ‘but I’m not the only one.”

“The crowd down front cracked up.”

“You had to see it. This was years before he came out.”

“Did you know,” I said, “that in this exact location the starling was introduced into North American one hundred years ago?”

“Starlings?” said Evan, “I thought they’d always been here.”

We climbed up a low outcropping of granite on the periphery of the meadow. A flat plateau, the size of a small living room, tucked under a sycamore’s grandiose canopy, awaited us at the top. From there we could gaze out over the vast lawn surrounded, from our vantage point, by the city’s immense skyline, sliced by the avenues bordering the park into sheer walls of brownstone, glass and steel.

“Nobody is certain of his name. But it was right down there, a hundred years ago, that he set loose flocks and flocks, at least a pair of each bird mentioned by Shakespeare. Among them were one hundred starlings.”

This caught Jane, a high-strung lass, off-guard. She was known to “weep at card tricks,” as the saying goes, and was sensitive to poetic imagery. She released a deep sigh, the crest of a wave that the image of all those ascending birds, I knew, some powerful elegiac moon of her own had called forth.

“Say a prayer for the starlings,” she quietly sang, the Randy Stonehill tune. “There’s no welcome for them anywhere. . .”

The sky had turned bronze.

A couple of months later, on my birthday, Jane came over for breakfast with a present in her hands, obviously a book, wrapped in the Sunday comics and a mass of curly gold ribbon. All The World’s Songbirds was its title.

Over the next weeks, I entered the world of the passerine. The book was lushly photographed, specialized, and like all such books had the captivating power, upon a reader inclined toward its subject, of a hard-core substance. The term “pore over,” is an apt one. The attention toward it that the book evoked from me had the uncritical dilation of a pore.

A Painted bunting, the color of a marbleized Easter egg, was photographed crouched among blades of fresh spring grass. Wood warblers, rust-flecked gold and aerodynamic as darts, hung from branches and fed gaping mouths with tissue-winged anthropoids. And there were the starlings. Gregarious, iridescent, pesky, voracious for insects, its worldwide population in the hundreds of millions. “The most dramatic example of the species’ success, however,” the author wrote, “comes from its introduction to North America: about 100 individuals were released in New York in 1890. It is now one of the most numerous birds in North America.”

I began haunting pet stores and aviaries. There were a number of them in New York, a city of eight million which supports an ongoing cultural critical mass. As little as one percent of New Yorkers devoted to any particular interest produces a viable market for that interest, and that reality reverberates through the city’s cultural circuits in a self-sustaining current and pulse. My bird browsing took me on an odyssey to unfamiliar places, and to unexpected pockets of regular haunts. The bird house at the Bronx Zoo was an early destination. There, in a multistoried landscaped setting, a peaceable kingdom of feathered creatures preened and socialized. The Ramble in Central Park was a whole new world when studied in the intimate gazing-pool of binoculars. Thrushes and tits hobnobbed in the gingkoes. Blackbirds and pigeons squabbled. But often a bare human haunch or furtive glance gaped out among the shrubs in this notorious region of the park and I felt, binoculars trembling under wincing brows, like a voyeur. Had I been indifferent to such chance visual encounters, I probably could have simply glanced elsewhere and moved on. But I wasn’t, and the alarmed or resentful glares in the glass banged too loudly on the drum which my incipient lust had stretched taut. Besides, my bird quest was moving into a final stage. I was now focusing on bird shops where the possibility of purchase, ownership, possession, was a drumbeat to which I knew I could dance. Then at a second-hand store on Staten Island, where Jane and I sometimes shopped after a day at the zoo, she saw a bird cage.

There was nothing quaint about it. A wire-barred cube with a removable black plastic tray at the bottom, it had three sliding doors, and two feed cups. One for seed and one for water.

“I’m buying it for you,” said Jane.

“Oh my God.”

The fate of my feathered fling was fixed. By week’s end I’d bought a Zebra Finch at a local shop.

Colorful as a guppy, the tiny creature was inexpensive enough to be... well, disposable, should my skills or temperament for avian husbandry prove illusive. He fluttered out of the pet shop’s cardboard box and landed on the small piece of branch, a long twig, that I had suspended between two walls of his cage. So diminutive was he that his movements lacked all interstice; he looked left, he looked right; he hopped around on the perch, east, west, with no discernible movement in between. His voice had a timbre remarkably like a squeeze-doll’s cry, curtailed into a brief four-note statement, repeated: da DA da da—da DA da da. The call emptied out of his open beak with a force that made his whole body shudder. This was sometimes followed by odd quiet afterthoughts of chatter and chirps, all in the squeeze-doll mode. Feisty, he was an avian Pomeranian, hardly bigger than a plump hibiscus bud, sporting black and white feathers and orange cheek spots. His cage hung suspended near the vast windows in a corner of the empty dining room, a space that I was saving for the baby grand piano that existed only as an archetypal contour in my imagination, but which I vaguely assumed would sire a concrete counterpart in due course. In the meantime, Oscar’s toy-like call echoed across a plain of varnished oak parquet. The home he was to establish in the empty room’s crystal chandelier was, as yet, but a gleam in Oscar’s beady little eye.

One night Jane called, asking if I would like to go to a Labor Day barbecue at a friend’s house on Staten Island. The house was a classic of its type: a sprawling country Queen Ann, cosseted to the point of near-assimilation in gardens both lush and neglected. It was full of people and music. The windows of every room, it seemed, were open; the afternoon was all breezes and beer.

Jane drifted off. I was temporarily pinned, by the music, the social currents, by Jane’s absence, to a comfortable blocky foam chair near a tray of cheese puffs. My attention at first half-consciously diddled, then began to consume, a young man flopped on a couch across the room. Amidst a small group of friends, Doug was descending steadily into an attractive drunk. But he had a drunk’s crafty awareness of the interest he was attracting. He was playfully incoherent. Two of his friends were wrangling over who should drive him home. Meanwhile, he’d caught me watching and began directing a little choreography in my direction.

And then the guests were drifting off and our little bunch had become a private party in a house filled with retreating voices. Jane was off somewhere. His friends, Gene and Gunther, were trying to get Doug out of the couch. He was passive-aggressively toying with their wheedling and coaxing. Doug swerved and landed dramatically in my lap, and was cheerfully abandoned by Gene and Gunther. When we got home, neither of us was quite as drunk as it had seemed…

to be continued

Pier at the end of August

2008-08-30T21:11:00.009-05:00

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Champignon de Fay

2008-08-25T15:08:00.037-05:00

The three-hundred mile wide oscillating sprinkler that was tropical storm Fay left mushroom tracks on local lawns. Most of these are probably edible macrolepiota americana, but maybe not.

We used to gather wild mushrooms as youngsters, relying on the unreliable folklore that the good ones had gills of tan to brown. The lighter the underbelly, the more dangerous the mushroom, all the way out to the chalk white Destroying Angel which, it was said, allowed victims who had ingested one to delightfully recover from acute gastrointestinal agony just before killing them.

But we knew slippery jack, and knew in exactly which pineywood understory the yummy fungi could be found. They found their way into many a stir fry, spaghetti sauce, or omelet. I brought my German boyfriend, a professional chef, with me on a Michigan outing one October. My old friend Walter, at whose house we were staying, suggested we gather some slippery jack for a roast. Off we went, and there they were: little drifted bunches, nestled among the carpet of pine needles in the white pine stand a short hike from the house. We brought home a goodly basket. Kurt was so taken with them that he went straight out the next day and picked a bunch more. And found several ways to cook and eat them all. He spent all next day in the bathroom. You never know with wild mushrooms. They're not tame. They can leave a native untouched and a visitor quite... touched. Kurt never held it against the slippery jack, which he still admired and even sampled again, though more prudently, in the weeks to come.

Today, my enjoyment of mushrooms is guided by the more reliable aphorism "There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters." The only boldness I indulge these days, is in choosing between whole or sliced ones in the produce section.

I've been making duxelles since my twenties. It's a near-paste of minced mushrooms and shallots, saute'ed in butter. Traditionally, it is used in small dollops to flavor dishes. It can be kept, refrigerated, for a few days. I sometimes like it as a spread, on buttered toast.

8 oz. finely chopped mushrooms
1 shallot, finely chopped
Butter as needed
Parsley, chopped to taste
Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté the mushrooms and shallot in butter until the mushrooms are browned. Season with the parsley, salt and pepper.

Good morning sunshine

2008-08-25T08:19:00.008-05:00

Polly wolly doodle all day

2008-08-20T08:50:00.038-05:00

Just toss it up in the air... I'll grab it as it goes by.

Bolixing forecasters, Fay chasse’d east at Cape Romano and rumba’d around us before crossing northeast, trailing rainshowers all the way. Thanks for the good wishes, my friends. There was so little clean up, that undoing our preparations took longer. We got dampened and blow dried, and not a lot more.

I have no idea how many hurricanes I’ve lived through or watched unfold on television. The first was hurricane Andrew, the second most destructive storm in U.S. history. It decimated Homestead, south of Miami, a year after I moved to Florida. The weather is actually very predictable here, and normally uneventful … except when there’s a hurricane. We lie, daydreaming, twixt tiger's paws.

I stood in an eye once. On Staten Island, when tropical storm Chris swept up the east coast back in 1988. My friend Pat and I went up to the roof and there it was, like one of DeMille’s biblical miracles, a solid wall of dark, dark clouds, a few miles out, surrounding the perfectly sunlit, sky-blue void where we stood.

Most of the Florida storms I’ve seen have passed south or north of here, and were hobbled after crossing the state, dripping wet, out of the late summer Atlantic hot tub, where they'd drunk too much rum. Gulf storms were less common, though dangerous. Then in 2004 hurricane Charlie buzz-sawed up the southwest coast before trouncing Captiva island and bowling into Port Charlotte, thirty miles north of here, as a category four storm. I was a staffer at the local newspaper. With electric power out all over the city, reporters and pj’s huddled in a flashlight-lit newsroom over volunteered laptops, trying to put together an edition of the paper.

I’d come home at night and stir-fry leftovers, in the fading light, over a Sterno camp stove on the kitchen counter. The condo itself was unscathed. An impromptu sort of festivity emerged. Friends and neighbors huddled around radio broadcasts or played games of flashlight-lit Scrabble… in the conviviality and set-asides that accompany a natural crisis shared and weathered.

The next year, 2005, shattered all previous records. Of the twenty-eight storms, seven became major hurricanes, the five worst of which, including Katrina, came up through the gulf. There were 2,280 storm-related deaths that year, and damages estimated at 100 billion dollars. Hurricane Wilma, the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, caromed off the Yucatan peninsula on October 21 and slammed into Cape Romano (as did a much daintier Fay) with a 120 mph landfall two days later. From there Wilma raced across the state, stone rolling pin brandished overhead, reaching Jupiter on the east coast just four hours later. Flintstone jokes, most of them lame, abounded. Wilma tore off a corner of the roof, the only storm damage the condo has received since it was built 36 years ago. She was the last big storm in our nabe.

Fay is living up to her name, flitting faerie-like in a capricious loop that could alight on Florida no less than four times before her fare thee well. If she drifts north, drought-busting rain will fall on Georgia. Her windy, rain-swept chiffon wafted far and wide around Fay's raggy waltz, raising floods in several counties. We were but brushed. She left my motorcycle standing, a few leaves in the pool, a few Heineken in the fridge, and enough peanut butter and potato chips to last for weeks. And blue skies as far as the eye, and Sky Cam Power Doppler Radar, can see.

Anybody got ranch dip?

Fay

2008-08-18T13:06:00.008-05:00

Heineken, check

Potato chips, check

iPod charged, check

See you on the other side.

Foam and fire

2008-08-14T14:06:00.025-05:00

We'd wash the car in our swim trunks, splashed by sudsy buckets, sprayed by shimmering arcs squirted from green hoses. Water choked with nozzles made rainbow-haunted mists in the sun. Then, dry clothed and ravenous, we'd pile into the car and drive to the drive-in where we'd order iced root beer and maybe a "long hot dog foot" as my cousin once excitedly barked into the speaker.

There is something essentially primitive, and primitively appealing, about this fire-driven vehicle, its modern shell and bearing notwithstanding. Under its hood is a crude and ancient force, refined, compressed, whose sources and smoke and domestication predate our stories.

But now we return Prometheus' fire to brother sun and our derricks, now bladed and sleek, unto sister wind, who we have learned can light and sail us home all by themselves. Perhaps our earthbound flame will grow sacramental, relegated ceremonially to our candles, Olympic cauldrons, fireworks, flambe's, and the ancient distempers and exuberance of the natural world. And the occasional barbeque. Flame-broiled stuff and washing the car, some car, in the driveway, are forever.

Multiplex

2008-08-12T13:39:00.008-05:00

I was drawn, first, to the light and composition. Then by how these two fragments of the natural world, the palm tree in its allee, the trees reflected in the box office glass, are sequestered in their fabricated contexts, one concretely, the other metaphorically.

Feral carts

2008-08-09T16:57:00.015-05:00

I see them, these feral carts, on my ride. The old ones huddled in the same old places. I see new ones in places where I've not seen one before. Cart vans sweep through the neighborhood, rounding up runaways. They always come back. I've watched them watching cars. A few can never be tamed.

Giant-killer obscured

2008-08-07T14:09:00.007-05:00

Elementary canals

2008-08-05T08:24:00.008-05:00

The city of Cape Coral is laced with over 400 miles of canals. I thought I'd get in a boat one day and explore them all. Meanwhile, some passing glimpses...

Tony loves Terry

2008-08-01T18:55:00.010-05:00

Terry wasn't a popular name among my classmates, or among my adult friends. The only Terry I remember was the one I worked a summer job with, I'm guessing we were seventeen, at a department store. Blondish, built, waspy, wound up, he radiated such verility that one suspects he could have impregnated girls by simply facing in their general direction. He was aware of this and had an aura of laughing at life. Everybody liked him.

Who's your Terry?

All the buzz

2008-07-31T08:51:00.009-05:00

A couple of weeks ago this crazy little squirrel started hanging out at the condo. I have never, in fifteen years, seen a squirrel here. Neither had anybody else.

A friendly little beast, he would follow me, would follow anybody, up and down the hall. Some of the women freaked out. He would follow you home and run up your screen door. Look you quizzically in the face. He jumped on Dan's shoulder.

We concluded that he must have been somebody's lost pet, so frank was his trust. Barbara fed him almonds. His behavior wasn't rabies-peculiar or erratic. Just unaccountably friendly.

Finally he followed a woman to the laundry room; Phyllis ran home screaming and refused to leave her apartment. She called me. I told her I had seen the squirrel and wasn't sure what, if anything, I could do, or could be done. By now I was feeling a bit protective of the little guy, while realizing that of course he couldn't stay. Phyllis was undaunted. She began making a series of phone calls, first to the police, then to various agencies, all leading nowhere.

Eventually she got in touch with her nephew who came by with a squirrel cage with a trip door. He brought peanuts with him. Sam, for that is what Barbara had named him, was an easy lure. Rich put the cage down on the lawn, threw in some peanuts, and Sam came running. Seconds later little Sam was in the bag. Rich fell in love with him. He took Sam home and turned him loose in his back yard.

Omens sometimes accompany significant events. The next day, on Monday morning, July 21, the day before Kate's shout started the avalanche that was to collapse the grand illusion that was Nicky Cooper, I picked up the phone at my condo.

"Bees, what bees?"

"Hundreds of them."

"Where?"

"On the fourth floor."

Convinced they were probably just a few paper wasps, multiplied by geriatric anxiety and myopia, I went to look.

Bees. Hundreds of bees. At one point while I was watching, a piece of the swarm simply fell off and dropped at my feet on the sidewalk like a chunk of melted snow.

Dan came out for a look. "Unbelievable," he said.

Somebody, we supposed, should do something. I'm an officer on the condo board. I picked up the phone and started making calls. It didn't take long to locate beemaster Keith. The apiary office of the state environmental agency knew him. So did our local exterminator. "We don't kill bees," he said, when I took him up to the roof to show him the swarm.

He brought up a bee box and quickly began loading bees, who seemed all too happy to be loaded, onto the blocks. Then he settled in to watch the rest of the swarm slowly migrate boxward. "Why do they like our rain gutter?" I wanted to know. "The queen." said Keith, a man of few words.

Suddenly, he was reaching into the swarm with his bare hand.

"Here she is," he said.

Gingerly placing the royal one in a special capsule, he returned her to the box, and to the company and ministrations of her subjects. The bees would be transfered to Keith's bee farm.

He told me that he'd come back that night to pick up the bees. I watched them stream, flit, and saunter into the bee box. It would take a couple of hours. "They know where their home is now," he said.

but it's not now

2008-07-27T20:36:00.008-05:00

Get back

2008-07-26T21:51:00.015-05:00

It was a picture of Jesus. A framed print, gloriously sentimental, probably painted by a starving artist in Poland. But to the eyes of a twelve year old Catholic boy it was the most beautiful Mother's Day present in the world.

When I looked at the price sticker, just below the blue Woolworth label, the sticker shock was twofold: it confirmed its inaccessibility while further glamorizing its value. The picture next to it was half that price. I switched the price tags.

I wasn't alone. My friend Kenny thought that this was so cool that he followed suit, and switched the price tag on a pair of sunglasses. Now it was a conspiracy.

The irony that I was perpetrating a fraud to acquire an image of Jesus wasn't entirely lost on me, even as a twelve year old. I did feel a little crummy. But the grandeur of this gift, the anticipated glory of my mother's smile that it would surely evoke, easily trumped that. To the checkout we stole.

And at the checkout we were nabbed. By the smoldering and singularly pissed off store manager. The police were called. The irony of the evidence was not lost on the investigating patrol officer. Nor its grotesqueness on the manager. None of which changed the facts. Whatever leniency the pathos of my motive may have inspired, the plain venality of the sunglass heist, which I had also inspired, poisoned. A ride home in the patrol car would have to take place. Kenny and I sulked and trembled in the back seat. In a vehicle whose obvious authority and sheer coolness I couldn’t help admiring.

The policeman, a hottie in his own right, stole my heart that day. He said to my dad "Don't be too hard on the boys..." But dad wasn’t feeling quite so magnanimous. Kenny was dropped off at my house to await the arrival of his parents. It wasn’t exactly a pajama party. The gang leader received the brunt of the scolding, in front of Kenny, and rightly so. With a promise of appropriate punishment to be determined. My mother just shook her head sadly. I like to think I saw the slightest hint of a smile in her eyes, which she tried hard to keep to herself.

I suspect many other gifts, given to many others, over the years, have been more or less grotesque as well. I hope they’re less of a dead mouse than they used to be. The first gift that I gave anyone, independently won and inspired, was a hand-made lady's "fan" that I won for my mother at the school fair. I was six. The fan was, in fact, a yellow fly swatter decorated with glitter and edged with blue marabou feathers. But it was the most gorgeous object I’d ever seen in my young life. Mom had to have it. She was moved to tears. And nobody arrested me that time. Get back... Get back... Get back to where you once belonged...

Ghost spotting

2008-07-23T07:19:00.037-05:00

I'd heard that there was a ghost in the swamp. And finding myself with nothing particular to do on a bright balmy day last week I set off, glazed with mosquito repellent, to see what I could see.

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary is the "largest remaining stand of ancient bald cypress left in North America," some six thousand acres in the heart of southwest Florida. It is managed by the National Audubon Society.

I was virtually alone in the sanctuary that day. But as I trekked deeper into the wild, and ever further from traffic and voices and buzz, I came to realized that my reference for the meaning of 'alone', the absence of human beings, was short sighted.

An old, lichen-dappled boardwalk threads through the preserve. There was something familiar, comforting, about those old boards, drawing me endlessly into the woods.

A Gulf Fritillary on a wildflower. Wildlife here seems to move in a primordial calm.

Alligator flags lead to a clearing and a chorus of shrouds.

Corkscrew is replete with ferns. The little resurrection fern, whose brown, shriveled leaves turn green and fresh after a shower, is joined on a tree stump by a strap fern. A fallen tree often becomes a nursery log, releasing back into the world around it the nurturing energy it stored up during its life.

Swamp hibiscus, bright stars lighting the undergrowth, are a wild species.

Josephus Somewhereatan pausing for a rest at a rain shelter.

A ruddy dagger wing. You don't want to know about its diet.

Scores of bird species are at home in the swamp. A curious white-eyed vireo eyes the curious visitor.

Birds and butterflies are fond of the fruit of the strangler fig. Seed that fall in a likely crevice on a tree quickly sprout and begin sending roots to the ground. They don't actually strangle their host. But in their relentless climb skyward, the strangler's own canopy can rob the host of adequate sunlight and kill it. Corkscrew sanctuary is close to the species' northernmost habitat, and cool winters, even an occasional frost, usually keep the strangler in check.

A lubber grasshopper vacates a swamp lily and alights on a leaf. It could be poison ivy. The swamp is dripping with poison ivy.

The remains of an old wood god.

While I was gazing into the woods, a red shouldered hawk flew right behind me, a small black snake in its beak. It landed here and screamed.

And there it was, the ghost. Sorry I couldn't get closer. A ranger stationed nearby would see to that. It is thought to be the only one in the sanctuary. They're protected in Florida and are on the Cites list. Here's a closer look at one. Dendrophylax lindenii, the 'ghost orchid', is the subject of Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief", from which the movie Adaptation was adapted. There are a few more in the Fakahachee strand, growing on cypress and pond apples, mostly in alligator infested waters.

Another epiphyte in bloom.

And then my heart stood still. It turned out to be a trio of what I took to be young white tail siblings. The sisters lurked in the dappled green, on the left of the photo, while boyo came out to stare at me sidewise. After a moment they booked, hoofs scrambling on the resonant turf. They left a scent of horses. Which is to say deer.

The sun was dipping into the western sky by the time I made my way out of the sanctuary. I stopped at McD on the way home. If I looked like somebody who'd seen a ghost, nobody seemed to notice.

One must eat

2008-07-18T08:17:00.048-05:00

So I jumped off the safari (more work than my work, come to think of it) long enough to photograph this neo-mediterranian house, built on a preserve in the southwest corner of the city. Three stories, plus an observation tower. I can maybe afford a scooter to park under the portico.

A kitchen worthy of my fettuccine alfredo.

Just 'around the corner' in this shower enclosure is a marble hot tub. That could provide a whole new incentive to get dirty. Gill, I'll be ordering some Dermalogica. A standing order.

Shells in a tree

2008-07-14T16:53:00.011-05:00

I came across this tree, upended by beach erosion, probably an Australian pine, while hiking Bowman's Beach on Sanibel Island. Its roots were hung, rather whimsically, with sea shells.

Lowered expectations

2008-07-11T09:59:00.004-05:00

Is this a new marketing strategy?

Rain, rain

2008-07-09T07:10:00.015-05:00

It rains every day now, often a thundershower, late in the day, a return to the archaic tropical cycle. I exult in this kiss of responsibility suspended, business as usual deferred. The weather's own little sabbath.

I venture out, a bike ride in the cooled and gleaming aftermath, the deepened colors, coasting through puddles, tires rinsed and blackened. In an hour it seeps away, absorbed by this ancient pile of shells. The trees drip on til morning.

July 4 2008

2008-07-05T14:07:00.002-05:00

Key of be

2008-07-02T08:27:00.046-05:00

When T.E. Lawrence was asked why he liked the desert he replied "It's clean." Sunday I awoke with a yen for Lover's Key. I went alone. There's a remote section of the beach there where the solitude and simplicity whisper vastly, intimately, to my spirit. With my body stripped and sanded, sun-burnished, my soul swims freely to the horizon. I get lost in a primal rapture out here, sweet music of surf and sky, abandoned to divine providence.

"Return of the native."

I heard an osprey scream. I grabbed my camera and looked around. It circled overhead and then swooped down to snag a fish. The raptor's piercing cry seems an ancient exultation.

Washed ashore, the seaweeds reminisce, with delicate scribbles, about the sea.

The sting of summer

2008-06-30T08:51:00.021-05:00

I got my first mosquito bite of the season yesterday, on the outside edge of my pinky finger, left hand. You know the spot. It's a favorite with mosquitoes. The bite itched intensely for a few minutes, then disappeared.

It's been said that air conditioning and mosquito control made year-round living in Florida possible. But the little salt-water mosquitoes down here are wimpy wannabees compared to the blood-sucking vampire helicopters up north. We used to come in covered with bites, one big welt, from a tramp in the Michigan woods of my boyhood. Limbs splashed with the carnage of battle. My friend Gary used to let one alight on his arm, then stretch his skin so taught around it that it couldn't pull its proboscis out. He'd watch it fill up with blood until it exploded. Or so he told me. I tried it. The sucker filled up to massive dimensions... and then flew away. I'm still pretty gullible. That was quite the bite.

But mosquitoes were minor league compared to the deer flies. Where mosquitoes are subtle and indolent, deer flies are blatant and swift. They come screaming in like F16s and their sharp bite registers instantly and outrageously. In a fit, you'll smack your own face (literally adding insult to injury) long after the little demon has already circled around, an instant later, for a go at your ear. There were whole sections of trails that the deer flies simply owned. If you weren't clothed from head to toe (a burka may have worked), your only hope was to run, arms flailing, through their hood, as fast as possible. Which, like trying to outsmart the rain by running through it, seemed to produce shortened, but accelerated, exposure.

We do have fire ants. I thought I was immune by now, not having noticed a bite in some time. But I must have parked my bike on one of their outposts at the beach a couple weeks ago. I was chaining the bike to a no parking sign when a swat team scrambled up my leg. They're fast, in an earthbound, methodical sort of way. By the time you've felt the first sting, you're likely to acquire a few more before they're all brushed off. Maddened swarms have been known to kill small animals and seriously harass cattle. They dig in with mandibles, then inject, with a tail sting, a shot of Solenopsin, a toxic alkaloid venom. The sting commonly produces a small, painfully itchy pustule that can break open and drain, crust over, break again, and drain some more. It should be pointed out that the ants attack when disturbed; they don't hunt you the way a mosquito or deer fly would. Though that may strike the victim as a distinction without a difference.

Beach bag 3

2008-06-21T15:55:00.039-05:00

slide show here

(If you click "pause slideshow" you can then click anywhere on the image,
or use your arrow keys, to advance at your own pace.
Right click on the slideshow page to enter/exit full-screen mode.)

Somewheredriver

Fill a tall glass with ice.

Fill half the glass with Squirt

Add a shot of vodka

Top with orange juice, stir slightly. Garnish with lime.

Marvin's Room

2008-06-18T09:17:00.017-05:00

Marvin's Room is a play that is popular with community theater. The 1996 movie had an outstanding cast led by Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Robert DeNiro and Hume Cronyn. Here's my revue of a local production:

The late playwright Scott McPherson’s comedy hit “Marvin’s Room,” continues its run at Cultural Park Theatre for two more weekends. The wrenching, and often grotesquely funny play about family dysfunction and upheaval, takes on the subject of how families care for their terminally ill, and ultimately, one another.

McPherson had a composer’s knack for pastiche, and stitched together a crazy quilt that entwines chaos and comfort. In director Leo Wolfe’s production, the pastiche of McPherson’s comedy is formalized and restated in the set design: two panels of quilts are suspended in a layered backdrop that suggest comfort in the midst of impending mortality. Pieces of realistic sets, a kitchen, a living room, a back yard at night, are woven into, and out of, the design. Marvin, the terminally ill father, never leaves his bedded nook in the nether reaches of his softly lit room upstage. Though semi-comatose, Marvin seems the most normal of characters in this reunion of a family shaken and discombobulated like the letters in a game of Boggle. His all-too-aware detachment from the tragicomedy around him suggests that impending death may be the safest place to be.

The audience at a recent performance was laughing by the third line of the play and found itself unable to calm down as the play’s patches of drama and pathos began to appear. This takes the audience off guard, which finds itself laughing at moments it may otherwise have thought sacrosanct. The off-beat, on-target characters abet the iconoclastic mood, and like the Simpsons, they resonate with our experience of our own. All families, after all, are a bit weird.

Bessie (Lisa Vagner), has been the sole caregiver of terminally ill father Marvin (Jim Otto), and a dotty aunt (Lee Otto), for almost two decades. Marvin and aunt Ruth are dead-enders, both helpless in their own ways, both sustained and protected by Bessie’s sacrificial love. It’s an autumnal world, sunset-hued, and sometimes desperately funny. Aunt Ruth’s pacemaker intermittently opens the garage door, usually when she’s hugged. Marvin’s favorite pastime, a gentle rebuke to Bessie’s propriety, is to watch Ruth flick the beam of a flashlight around the walls of his room. But even Bessie’s frustrations fit like an old glove. “Why can’t you help more?” Bessie complains to dotty Aunt Ruth. “Never mind,” she reminds herself. “You’ll just make a mess.” But her impatience with her wards are fraught with affection, the kind one feels for a hapless old pet. “Dad’s dying very slow,“ she reflects, “so I don’t miss a thing.”

Into this sweetly eccentric, but oddly privileged existence, a new reality intrudes, testing the mettle of Bessie’s devotion: Bessie herself is diagnosed with leukemia. Her only chance for survival is a bone marrow transplant. Will her sister Lee (Marty Wisher), estranged since their father’s stroke seventeen years ago, be a match? And if not, will Lee’s son, Hank?

Lee agrees, for her own reasons, to pack up herself and her two kids, after springing teen Hank (Andy Tremelling) from the institution where he was placed after burning down his mother’s house. Lee and sons Hank and Charlie (Dylan Dixon) trudge back home to Florida, where they’ll be tested for their bone marrow’s compatibility with Bessie‘s.

Director Gary Wilson’s cast has been honed to vivid relief, and connects as an ensemble. Returning to the theater after a starring role in CPT’s Wally’s Café, actress Marty Wisher’s comic timing, always deft, is combined here with an ability to project the inner struggle behind Lee’s shallowness. Because Lee’s superficiality is so much fun to watch, it’s easy to underestimate her sacrifice. Setting aside her dream of a cosmetology career, on the brink of graduating from beauty school, to try to rescue sister Bessie is a gesture that has its own cost. Or is the family crisis an opportunity for Lee to flee the unfamiliar challenges of success? Such questions abound in the play’s complex threads of mercy and self-absorption. Lee has become a control freak out of sheer panic.

In an early scene Lee and Hank meet with psychiatrist Dr. Charlotte (LuAnn Guy) to secure Hank’s parole from the institution where he is being treated for his rebellion and pyromania. In the pre-release interview Hank, having long given up trying to communicate with the adults in his life, says exactly what the process requires and nothing more. Dr. Charlotte, exasperated, presses him, “Is there anything you want to tell your mother?” “Ok,” Hank tersely tosses off, without a trace of regret. “I’m sorry I burned the house down.”

When they arrive in Florida, Hank withholds his cooperation with the testing. His bone marrow is the only turf he controls. But little by little, Bessie wins Hank’s trust. A teen outlaw savant, Hank is a tale-spinner who forces those around him to face unpleasant truths. “Nobody does anything unless they get something out of it,” he tells Bessie. With an adolescent’s knack for targeting adult posturing, while ignoring his own, he exploits the visitor’s high ground and blurts “Don’t you ever wish he would just die!” Is it a question that Bessie is prepared to answer?

As Bessie, newcomer Lisa Vagner gives a centered, glowing performance. A pilot light that flickers but never dies, Bessie’s self-revelation is a gently gathering light. “I've been so lucky to have been able to love someone so much,'' she discovers. In a devastating moment in the play, Bessie describes the loss of her one romantic love, the circumstances of which challenge the audience to at least appreciate just what it is they’re laughing at, if not stop laughing.

LuAnne Guy’s multiple-character performance is hilarious, and Paul Rose’s bumbling Dr. Wally, though a bit amorphous, has a bedside manner that tends to evoke terror with his every attempt at reassurance. Lee Otto brings her formidable stage presence and wonderful vocal gifts to the role of Aunt Ruth. As the youngest character in the play, Charlie is closest (from his end of life’s timeline) to the non-existence that has liberated moribund Marvin. They’re natural allies. Free from the entanglements that plague the adults around him, Charlie sleepwalks through the play with his nose in a book, hovering above the fray like the sprite in the Fantasticks.

When the lights dim between scenes, the lingering illumination between the quilt panels reveals a cross, an abiding presence, hidden in plain sight. Whatever good samaritanism the family crisis has evoked, it arises from characters who are themselves hardly less desperate than those they are trying to save. And that, at the end of the night, is the source of the play’s authenticity, and grace.

Of a feather

2008-06-14T08:51:00.009-05:00

(click image to biggen)

An ibis, crossing the street
put on her red face and red feet.

'So sorry,' said heron, 'tis too small for sharin.'

A strange old bird is the pelican
his beak can hold more than his belly can
but instead of lunching on Mercury
he stood on its head and said 'look at me.'

Stack

2008-06-05T13:47:00.010-05:00

The New Yorker sent me another final notice that my subscription had run out. I have a pile of unread issues, mixed approximately 5:1, a literary martini, with my unread Harper's'. I'll grab an issue, March, August, whatever, from time to time, and tote it to bathroom or beach. I enjoy seeing, in passing, that stack of magazines, its reassuring height, still growing, ever more slowly, but still a bit faster than my ability or inclination to consume.

Laelia 2

2008-06-01T18:54:00.011-05:00

My laelia flowered with a rush this year. Just a week from the first blossom, every bud had climbed out of its sheath and opened, all thirty nine, her new personal best.

I was concerned; a posse of mealybugs had swept into our peaceful niche last winter. They had penetrated down into the new growth, a cottony sticky invasion. But the plant was strong. I treated it with insecticidal soap. Foliage growth wasn't as robust this year, but she's really smiling now. I had to pinch out a few flowers that had gotten chewed in the bud. She's beginning to outgrow her clay pot, I should divide her this summer.

Her lily-0f-the-valley/lilac scent arises with the morning sun.

Scooter

2008-05-29T16:52:00.041-05:00

I ran into Darren and Penny. They have matching scooters, Yamaha Vinos, I was on my bike. I know Darren from the marina, where he works, and where I sometimes shoot. He's modeled some shots...

"We're going to the yacht club for some nachos," he said.
"That's where I'm going," I said.

We met up about fifteen minutes later, me ten minutes behind. Darren and I talked about scooters until Penny was bored to tears. Their Vinos get almost 100 mpg. I'm seriously thinking about trading my motorcycle in for one. Scooter sales are booming.

I rode my motorcycle most when I was shooting for the newspaper. Photographers are the one news gathering element that must be physically on the scene of the story; unlike a reporter, you can't get your story from a phone call, though the proliferation of digital cameras and high speed connections are beginning to change that. But staff photogs are out all day. You're given a mileage allowance of course, but I didn't want to put that kind of tread, seventy miles a day or more, on the pony. The GZ 250 is a small bike, but with a top speed of 90 it had no trouble keeping up with local traffic. So I'd rod around, pulling up to crime scenes and fried chicken fundraisers on Dragonfly.

I wiped out once, on the fourth of July. I had the weekend beat, covering the fireworks. I'd parked the bike on the street and knocked on the front door of a house on the river overlooking the show. They were having a party and asked me in, offered me a drink, (declined), and let me use the dock to do the shoot... anything I wanted. When I went back to the street I found a bike with the key in the ignition and the headlight down to a flicker. I would have to run start the bike. I'd done it before, but this time it started unexpectedly and took me with it. The next thing I knew I was on the asphalt with my jeans ripped and a slice taken off my calf - as if you'd taken a cheese slicer and stripped off a slice. It was numb, but I knew that wouldn't last. I got the photos into the system somehow that night, late that night. The edit stations at the newspaper were empty, production had gone home. The numbness was starting to wear off... Back home, I took a shower and debrided the wound as best I could with a bar of soap. The pain was excruciating. The burn resembled the profile of Brazil, still does, 4" x 6" down the right side of my calf. It took three months to completely heal. The doctor prescribed an exotic antibiotic ointment that cost $65. for a tube the size of a lip balm. I think he was concerned about MERSA. I took a week off. That was three, four years ago. I told the editor that Monday that I'd slipped off a ladder at the condo. I didn't want the paper to ban my ride.

But I'm in way less of a hurry now. And dragonfly is a bit of a handful for the kind of too-far-for-a-bike trip I'm likely to take these days. So... I like the Honda Ruckus. . .

a muscley little scooter, bare bones and minimal storage. But it's only 49 cc and good for backstreets or the bike lane. It's $2k and change; I could probably get a third off that in a trade at the dealer.

I ran into Darren yesterday at the marina. He was tooling around in a golf cart. The trees at the restaurant were in flower. I had wanted to see if I could make the trip by bike, and how long it would take. Now that I was there, I was taking pictures of the trees in bloom. Darren had business at the dock. I stopped for a cappucino and headed back, into a warm breeze.

Frangipani

2008-05-27T08:12:00.007-05:00

My ride has become a quest for shady streets, for the shady side of the streets, for the shortest streets with no shade. My old summer routes seek out my bike wheels. Byways beckon, some of which the old routes acquire, others I'll never see again. Meandering, I loop through shaded parking lots, edge shadow-cooled walks: a drift toward peripheries.

I spotted Gill's beloved frangipani on a recent ride; that means it's in bloom all over the city. I set out this afternoon to see if I could find any nice ones in the neighborhooky.

They smell like they look, only better - an intensely fragrant citrusy jasmine, carried on a wave of sugar's volatile smile. They're the flowers in Hawaiian leis.

There's a rose variety; the aroma is a bit spicier than its lemon meringue cousin.

Frangipani is one of the few tropicals, at least around here, that is deciduous. It sheds its leaves in the winter, leaving behind a decorative sketch of itself through Christmas.

Here's a tree that I see on my ride. I don't know what it's called. It blossoms lavishly.

The blossoms form large globules over fern-like foliage. Within the clusters, individual flowers are quite pretty, a spotted lip accesorizing slender pistils. It's reminiscent of alstromeria (peruvian lily) that is popular in super market boquets.

Since I was on my bike, I thought it prudent to swing by the market for some groceries...

Suburbiana 2

2008-05-21T07:03:00.006-05:00

slide show here

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Shoes, shirt, silver

2008-05-16T09:26:00.010-05:00

I bought a pair of deck shoes, liked them, and bought another pair thinking I'd wear one for kicking around in and the other for more respectable outings. They sit next to one another under the sideboard by the front door, ready to fulfill their individual daily destinies. I don't always honor their designated missions, however, and over time they've gotten harder to tell apart. Seems I will soon have two pair of kick-around deck shoes. It doesn't work in reverse.

I have a T shirt that fits so well that I never wear it. I'm saving it. On the rare occasions that rise to its coutourial glory, I forget that I even own it, let alone can wear it. I noticed it on the rack in the closet yesterday and put it on. It still fits... well, to a T. I wore it to Home Depot. (My life is a breathless social whirl.) When I was walking back to my car, a guy drove by in a pickup and yelled out the window, I kid you not, "I want that T shirt!"

Bobby is back from North Carolina, or South Carolina, whichever is the mecca whence decorators go to buy furniture, and keep an eye on each other. After dinner, spaghetti, at his house, we went to a bar where a girl was selling silver jewelry at a table. He treated himself to a ring and a bracelet. Admiring his new cache, arm extended, fingers spread, he said "Clients expect me to look good."

A purple of my own

2008-05-14T16:31:00.013-05:00

Patrick and Greg have been celebrating purple. Violets, pansies, lilacs, wisteria, lavender... I was starting to wonder if I was purple deprived. Purple poor. A purple pauper.

But no, I was pleased to be reminded, I never was. On my morning walk I came across these heliotrope-hued sprites grown athwart a painted wall. The invisibility of the familiar had blinded me to the obvious... I'd had purple all along.

Let us now praise purple

of royal robes and darling blooms

of lilac wine and sanguine song

in noble veins, and dusky rooms

Majestic hue, your haunting scent

in tender violet, lilac dreams

steeps our springs and haunts our nights

with solferino memories

Like water for rice pudding

2008-05-13T10:09:00.021-05:00

I awoke to rain. There wasn't enough, it turned out, to quench the brushfire hazard, which has now entered the dreaded red zone. It was enough to delight the birds. Even the big ugly warty-faced muscovy ducks were flapping triumphantly over wafer-thin puddles.

A man in Fort Myers was charged yesterday with killing his old dog with a blow to the head, and burying it in a grave on his property. I suppose he should have turned it over to the SPCA where it would have sat in a cell while waiting to be killed by strangers. Norman Mailer wrote that a man has a responsibility, when the time comes, to kill his own dog. It's a burden of love. My friend Walter used to say that we're no longer allowed to be poor, even if we want to be. I wonder if we're no longer allowed, in some fundamental ways, to be responsible.

We confuse love and sentimentality. Jesus, love incarnate, seems to me often thornily unsentimental. I suspect that a lot of folks who prattle on about their love of the Lord, wouldn't have liked him very much. Remember that catch phrase that was going around a few years ago... "I love you, even if I don't like you." What a pious saw that is. I think only a mother, or a savior, can say it authentically. Most of the time, I'd rather be liked. Tastes more like love. And isn't nearly the wildfire hazard.

There are watering restrictions in effect, limiting sprinkling to certain days and hours. Not that it matters; our sprinkler system is broken. I almost singlehandedly persuaded the board, in the interest of water conservation, to not have it repaired, and let nature take its course. Sometimes going brown is a way to be 'green.' We're allowed to hand-water though, any time, for ten minutes. This is a set-aside in the restrictions that I sometimes indulge, late in the day. There is something relaxing about just standing there, waving a gurgling hose over parched and grateful grass. My neighbor Sara, an avid gardener, will join me in conversation, telling me about her newly planted mango sapling, while watching the rivulets at our feet slither minutely away. She'll bring me something from her kitchen. She turned up a couple days ago with a scoop of rice pudding in a teacup. She likes me.

Window on Sanibel

2008-05-08T19:28:00.015-05:00

It was a routine shoot on Sanibel, that would take all of forty minutes. Nevertheless, I decided to stay overnight on the island, blowing probably half of what I would stand to earn.

I crashed at my old favorite cottage, nothing fancy, a sentiment indulged, a few blocks from the beach. The driver's side window of my car refused to close. "You're not the only one who wants fresh air," it said. Cheeky-ass pony. At least it never rained.

The day didn't start out fresh. The smoke from a towering brush fire at lake Okeechobee hitched a ride on the high air currents all the way down here. I awoke to what smelled like somebody's burnt morning coffee. By the time I made my own, the smell had turned acrid. But once on the island, a half-hour drive from here, the cool night air had lifted, taking the ashen visitor with it.

Architecture is photographed in the morning or late afternoon, when the shadows are elegant gestures, instead of stubby underscores. I drove in to town to look at the object, its face angled to the southeast. It would be a morning shoot. That left the rest of the day for fun and games, and acquiring a tanline upgrade.

On the way home next day, I tried the window a few more times. It was resolutely agape. How much was this trip going to cost? I pulled into the parking lot at the condo, gathered up my trip stuff, and in a routine, semi-conscious gesture pressed the rocker button and the window murmered. I pressed it again, and it slid all the way up, home again home.

White lady

2008-05-05T17:14:00.011-05:00

Gardenia greet our May. The shrub in the front is in bloom, a bit sparsely this drier than average year. Gardenias are in what I call my jasminoides tribe. This is based on an alliance of scents that I believe they share... the jasmines, orange blossoms, stephanotis, tuberosa, and the incomparable freesia, said by some the exude the finest fragrance of any flower.

The gardenia will bloom for about three weeks. A couple of blossoms are enough to perfume a room.

I'm off to Sanibel for a sleepover. Take time to smell whatever you're smelling these days.

Siesta, circle, stars

2008-05-01T05:36:00.048-05:00

Siesta Key, one of the barrier islands outlying Sarasota, is a 90 minute drive from here. A string of beaches hug the western shore, including Siesta Beach itself, home of a popular Drum Circle, and a hop from Birdie's old house in Sarasota. She was in town, out of Indianapolis, for a bit of R & R in her old stomping grounds. We met up on Sunday for dinner and then hit the beach where Birdie's sister Douglas awaited us with a blanket and brownies.

I found a delicious little Inn at Turtle Beach, that was my base camp for the three day outing, on the south end of the island...

(Click on images to biggen)

The inn sits on a lagoon off Turtle Beach.

A koi pond is on the left, a barbeque grill, and the docks to the right. Kayaks and canoes were available for guests, and a few bikes.

The view from the dock. The beach is just beyond the dunes.

I made myself at home. A couple, a striking blond trophy and her humpy cigar-chomping hubby/boyfriend, were the only other guests. I saw them only once.

You'd have to play Art Garfunkel's '99 Miles From L.A.' approximately
20.02020202020202 times...

Twin hammocks, Gill.

Apres le swim.

When Birdie saw the bed she said that there should be a throne to go with it. I thought the bed was something of a throne all by itself.

Tommy Bahama seems to be the presiding influence.

View from the room.

There are few sensations nicer than changing into dry clothes after a swim.

Birdie's sister Douglas recommended the Turtle Beach Pub for dinner. Come to find out it was just two blocks from my inn. Coincidence? I think not.

I made the busy waitress to take our picture. She promptly took an attitude.

Did I mention that we had a wonderful time? Birdie had obtained a cobalt blue Sebring convertible for her visit. So after the Drum Circle, we went island-hopping far into the breezy cool night. She had just minted a wonderful collection of CDs for her trip. A scion, it turns out, of this most cultivated of Florida cities, Birdie knows her way around Sarasota like I know my way around my dashboard. An avid astronomer, she pointed out the constellation of Orion (he's the guy with the star-studded belt) in the western skies off Lido Beach. We parked to star-gaze, Brian Eno swirling subliminally around us, and speculate about the human condition. She's going to blog one day soon.

Earlier, at the Drum Circle, my inner pagan was itching to arise and make a statement. But my outer journalist was on a different page...

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Diversity rocks

2008-04-27T05:55:00.011-05:00

Remember I mentioned an art show in Island Park celebrating diversity? It was pretty cool. Here are a few shots:

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I'm off to Siesta Key for a couple days. I'm meeting the Bird for dinner, and then on to the Drum Circle, where I expect my inner pagan will be liberated. Report to follow... if I'm not arrested.

Sarasota some more

2008-04-24T12:20:00.017-05:00

I arrived in Sarasota Monday afternoon. Aunt Helen's service was Tuesday morning some 90 miles north of there. After brunch with my cousins and assorted kinfolk that morning, I returned to spend the rest of the day and another night at The Cypress, nothing on my agenda. Here's a slide show with some shots of the Inn, and a few random glimpses around town.

Nina, Vicki, and Robert were friends in New Jersey who packed it in a decade ago and headed south, determined to start a bed and breakfast under tropical skies. They had a vision. The Cypress was what they envisioned. They eventually found, and bought the old house. In due course their investment of toil, sweat, and greenbacks produced the timeless kind of old Florida retreat you've always imagined. At every turn there's some lovely, welcoming detail. A view of Sarasota Bay, dotted with sailboats, shimmers from the front porch. Breakfast, the day I left, was fresh fruit, morning-made blueberry-peach muffins, and the kind of omelet you've always imagined an old Florida inn would serve.

Our extended family, my mother's three siblings, and some nine cousins, lived within a bike ride of one another in Michigan. I would often steal into my aunt Helen's house and tinker on the piano in the basement long after her own children had lost interest in the old upright. She not only tolerated these often unmusical musings, she let me come and go as I pleased. When we did cross paths, a hug and a kiss would send me on my way. Or else something from the oven, cookies, a piece of pie, a morning-made muffin, would slow me down. We'd sit at the kitchen table talking and laughing and chumming it up the way only an aunt and her nephew ever can.

There was an old baby grand in the parlor at the Cypress. I sat down, folded back the cover, and played a few notes. It sounded a lot like aunt Helen's old upright. With nobody around, I played my Chopin waltz. The one I thought she'd like.

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Sarasota tonight

2008-04-22T19:39:00.007-05:00

I'm in Sarasota tonight, at Vicki, Robert, and Nina's wonderful B&B. I drove up to attend my aunt Helen's memorial service; she died a few days ago at 87. She was a dear old thing, and passed on surrounded by her family and their love.

I'm fond of Sarasota too, and will be joining Birdie up here next Sunday for the big Sunday drum thing at Siesta Key. Birdie can describe it better than I can. I return to the Cape tomorrow. I'll catch up with everybody in a couple days...

Cycad

2008-04-16T15:43:00.018-05:00

One of my favorite of all tropical trees is this, often called a sago palm, but wrongly: it isn't a palm at all. It's something more ancient... a cycad.

Cycads date back at least 200 million years, one of the oldest of seed-bearing plants, probably originating in the early mesozoic era. It has left fossils on every continent of the planet.

The stem along the interior of its frond is laced with huge needle-sharp spines, thought to deter ravening dinosaurs.

A beautiful one, just two stories high, though more than thirty years old, grew just outside the lanai off my bedroom some years ago. Its gorgeous head, fifteen feet across, spanned the entire breadth of the lanai, plunging the west end of my home into tropical splendor. It was killed in a thunderstorm a few years ago... I suspect by one of the small tornadoes that often accompany, like lethal courtiers, tropical storms in this part of the world. I awoke that morning to a flood of oddly unfamiliar light pouring into my bedroom. Nearly a minute passed before my brain could absorb the heartbreaking sight before me... the majestic old tree was snapped in half. It has since been replaced by a fan palm, an amiable companion, though lacking its predecessor's grandeur.

I was trimming the cycad in the front yard one day, years ago, when the tip of one of its spines poked into, and broke off in, my index finger. There it sat, stubbornly lodged, and harassing the knuckle, for almost a year. I finally managed to coax it out; it emerged every bit as sharp, pointy, and unassailed by any solution that my mere mammalian metabolism could muster, as the day it went in.

I think now that I should have saved it. It deserves a place of honorable mention, at least, alongside my kidney stone, its painfully (although, admittedly on a whole different scale) extruded sibling.

Domestic studies

2008-04-13T19:57:00.005-05:00

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Flash fiction: andantino

2008-04-08T19:15:00.008-05:00

I

The pianist walked to center stage and sat down at the spotlighted grand. The applause receded like dry leaves gathered away in a gust. In the breathless silence the pianist began playing a nocturne. At intermission he saw him, leaning against the shadowed wall, steeped in the program... His name was David. “This isn’t like me,” he said. David smiled. “Who is it like?”

II

He sprawled on the couch, sated, serenaded, adrift. David sat, bespectacled, in a t-shirt, at the piano, playing Chopin. This, then, was the moon. A summation of things loved, and him, breathing, a summer night. “This one is called ‘the cat,” David said. “Hear it? The little cat feet?” I should have been a pair of velvet paws, he thought, scuttling across pliant keys.

III

He sat parked in the driveway between the bundled palm fronds, brown and crisp, piled at the curb, and a grackle on a fence. Just ahead was David’s car. And beyond that, somewhere in the house, David. He imagined him shouldering a phone, sipping wine, taking notes, multitasking, absorbed. He backed out and drove home along the beach road, the CD playing a prelude.

Reading plan

2008-04-04T07:14:00.004-05:00

I bookmark my bathroom reading with my reading glasses. The bridge points to the exact paragraph where I left off...

Cusic Classic

2008-03-25T13:07:00.016-05:00

The annual Cusic intercollegiate baseball tourney is played here in southwest Florida, at a number of local municipal parks, over the course of several weeks. I've been very fond of these games since I was first assigned to cover them back in my newspaper days. This year I spent the morning, a couple Saturdays ago, watching the Coast Guard Academy play the Southern Vermont College Mountaineers.

Baseball is both a pleasure and a challenge to photograph. There are few places in the world happier than a ball park. I love the kick-back half empty stands of a summer minor league outing as much as I enjoy the congested excitement of the camera pit at a major league game. But the challenge to a photographer is in the game's all-or-nothing dynamic. Especially in the professional sphere, where you're lulled by long stretches of very little happening, interrupted by a sudden nerve-shattering spurt of everything happening... and plays are generally over in a few seconds.

The history of baseball is the history of the ascendancy of pitching. You can see this evolution in microcosm when you compare a little league game, splattered with hits, its often outrageously high scores, with its major league counterpart, where low, single-digit tallies are the norm. One of the most daunting challenges in all of sport is to connect with a ball thrown by a major league pitcher. A batter has approximately one second to perceive, judge, decide, and swing.

This has given rise to baseball's reputation for inducing boredom. But not for me. A superb pitch, its singularly observable trajectory, its smacking report in the catcher's mitt, its ridicule of even the greatest batter's talent, is a thing of endless enjoyment to me. To watch a great pitcher throw a no-hitter, to watch that face-off, so exposed and momentous, between throw and response, the rising tension and excitement that accumulates around each one, is a great sports experience. And of course a big hit, a crowd-rousing hit, a home run hit, is still a standard metaphor for transcendent success.

A lot has been written about the zen of baseball, its elegant, infinitely playable geometry, its spaciousness, the observability and sense of moment arising against that spaciousness. "A simple game riddled with nuance and complexity," writes Bruce Hoffman. "A team sport in which each player stands alone. A game of excellence in which failure is the norm... Baseball is infinite. It has no limits of time or space. There is no clock. The foul lines extend indefinitely beyond the field of play. Even the outfield wall is only there for convenience."

But now I can almost feel someone itching to talk about steroids, salaries, and scandal. So this is where I throw a curve and divert your gaze back to the tranquil and relatively innocent fields of the local ball park. To the college boys, amateurs all, who do it for love. The Coast Guard beat the Mountaineers 12 - 2. Not quite little league. But lots of balls in play. And a spring morning's worth of great bobbles, collisions, slides, popups, green grass and sunny skies.

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Oh happy day

2008-03-23T06:55:00.006-05:00

Christ is alive. Religion is dead. All you need is love.

Saturday

2008-03-21T06:01:00.009-05:00

Beach bag 2

2008-03-09T08:25:00.043-05:00

Spring Break is winding down. I went to the beach today and instead of wall to wall post-teens, saw the usual scatter of locals.

I had a burrito and a coke for breakfast at McD's yesterday. When I went to pay there was no cash in my wallet... nothing. The girl rang me up on her employee discount. How sweet was that? After I hit the atm I went back and gave five dollars to Ronald McDonald House. Nice way to start the day.

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Ten things about me

2008-03-04T19:34:00.013-05:00

...that may or may not be interesting. Jef put me up to it.

I hate waste and consider it an aesthetic failure, not just a material one. I get a kick out of devising an imaginative life using cheap, off-the-shelf resources. But I'll drop big bucks on a great camera or a great shirt. The best is never a waste.

I was an artsy-fartsy prodigy early in life and was madly indulged by the adults in my life, and deeply despised by a few. My sophomore year English teacher told me I have too much talent for my own good.

On hot dog day in seventh grade (every Tuesday) I ordered, and ate, five hot dogs.

I've rarely met a recreational drug I didn't like, and have tried most of them. But I find being clear-headed the best high of all, which is actually just another aspect of my thrill-seeking behavior.

I had dinner with my boyfriend and Samuel Barber at my boyfriend's apartment, just the three of us.

I can play three piano pieces from beginning to end: a Bach minuet, Chopin's posthumous a minor waltz, and Can You Read My Mind from Superman.

I have a broken heart.

I boffed a pop celebrity.

I love chocolate, though it will sometimes, and randomly, set off a blistering headache.

I have a headache.

It's good to be the pet

2008-02-28T07:14:00.005-05:00

...and sometimes it's good to be the photographer. I netted this one last weekend. Once in a while the angels lay one on me... but they don't hang around too long. You say either yes or no. You don't often get away with saying maybe.

Since feeling is first

2008-02-21T13:31:00.008-05:00

One of e e cummings "most anthologized" poems, Since Feeling Is First, was One World One Heart winner Matt's choice for this reading. And I could not, I swear by all flowers, be more delighted...

Still breakin 'em in

2008-02-15T08:00:00.003-05:00

Gilly's mockingbird

2008-02-09T11:08:00.002-05:00

The day before Gillian touched down at RSW, a young mockingbird claimed a branch in my back yard outside my bedroom lanai. A talented juvenile, he forthwith began testing his oratory skills and developing the first flourishes in what will no doubt be a formidable bag of vocal tricks. He sang us to sleep last Sunday night.

The mockingbird is Florida's state bird, a songster nonpareil. The troubadors have no fixed, traditional song. Instead they make it up as they go along, picking up inspiration from everything they hear, a string of endless variations, rarely the same phrase twice, exuberant and gorgeous. The mockingbird figures memorably into southern literature, To Kill A Mockingbird, of course, and Ambrose Bierce's haunting civil war short story The Mocking-bird. I wrote a poem about one.

Here's a sample of the youngster's stuff. He's getting better all the time. He'll soon be spouting the long, arching arias for which they're renowned and loved, and taking his act to the daylight hours and the mating big time. I suspect he'll be passing his talent along to his own little Lucianos come summer.

Make a comment, win a prize

2008-02-05T17:27:00.003-05:00

AND THE WINNER IS...

Matt of Matterdays

Congratulations, Matt. And thank you to everyone for participating. Watch Hooky Beach for a rendering of Matt's poem.

As a winning alumnus of the first annual One World, One Heart Give-away! last year, courtesy of Gillian (forever young) The Spa Girl, it is my pleasure to "pay it forward," this year by sponsoring a prize of my own.

To enter, all you have to do is have a blog, and leave a comment right here.

The winning comment, selected at random by the Violets Are Blue random number generator, will be announced here on Valentine's Day, February 14.

Drum roll, please...

The winner will win a reading, by yours truly, of his/her favorite poem, emailed in MP3 format, along with a photographic interpretation of the poem, also by moi.

The only restrictions are that the poem be in English, clean, and not Paradise Lost (sonnet length or thereabouts, please).

Learn more about the One World, One Heart online festival here.

3-D Blue

2008-02-05T11:52:00.004-05:00

It was kinda surreal, that first glimpse across Concourse B at the airport, when I saw her standing there... We recognized each other immediately, of course, live and in person, not very different from the blog buddies we had come to know, only... more so. Gillian had flown down for the day, or so we had thought, on what would turn out to be, in every way, one of the nicest days of this new-born year.

Laughter and hugs and incredulous glimpses, stolen and swapped. Then a quick pony ride home to chez somewhere, to Buble blasting Come Fly With Me and the rolled-down wind in our hair. The rest of the day was something of a blur... the kind of smile-smeared blur you see in travel commercials. I had big plans. Which, once we hit chez somewhere, quickly dissolved in our Cuba Libres and conversation and the flickering palms. When you've got Gillian and a perfect summerlike day, you don't need no stinking big plans.

Then as if to salt our long and sweetly memorable day, a touch of high drama: honoring the old 45-minute boarding headroom instead of the new one-hour rule for international flights, we returned to the airport that night only to find ourselves at the airport ten munutes late, and face to face with the airline's Stepford rep. No amount of pleading, cajoling, or rational thought could interrupt the recording in her intracranial circuitry: "The ticket desk closes one hour before the flight... the ticket desk closes one hour before the flight... the ticket desk... " Now Gillian is a sunny and very centered woman. But if I ever need some Stepford ass seriously kicked... I know who I'm gonna call. Frantic calls to non-functioning 800 numbers featuring infuriating glib recordings led nowhere. The authority at the airport authority refered us back to the airline. As the clock ticked inexorably toward take-off, calls to Gill's extraordianry internet-scouring hubby in Canada confirmed what we were beginning to intuit for ourselves: there were simply no flights to Toronto out of Fort Myers until the next day. Back to chez somewhere it would be. And that's when the giggles started... it could be worse.

Blue didn't arrive empty-handed. I thought it was Christmas. The girl (and Sheila, Mother Of Blue), gives good gift. Thank you, loveys.

After touching down at chez somewhere for a little restoration, we headed out to Cape Harbour, one of my favorite haunts, a waterfront enclave a short drive from home.

Lunch at Rumrunners, complete with rumrunners, was all about the tuna - blackened and bedded on a a salad of wild greens, and the rumrunners.

Did I mention we had rumrunners with lunch...

Celebrity couple Gillian and Joe were spotted leaving a boutique. Gill bought sparkly little stuffed mermaids for her girls.

We ordered lattes at Run Aground and found a table overlooking the marina. "Oh, look," I said, "pelicans!" For some reason this cracked Blue up.

Love that latte.

There's a sweet little beach a stone's throw from chez somewhere...

where we went to unwind into a poignant sunset before heading off to the airport and what we thought would be our last hug.

Back home after the airport snafu, we talked long into the night, laughing our butts off looking at the day's snapshots (some of which will never see the light of day). By the time our heavy eyelids began to slow the conversation, the mockingbirds were in seranade mode and sang us sweetly to morning.

We had breakfast at the airport. Blue beat me at Twenty Questions, with her stunning Buckminster Fuller, which I couldn't guess even after being led to a pro shop in the concourse and being shown a geodesically-pocked golf ball clue. Don't let her good looks fool you. The girl has smarts to throw at the neighbors.

Then she was off, this time for real, melting into the stream of Toronto-bound travelers, memories, and somewheres yet to come...

Suburbiana 1

2008-01-31T23:03:00.003-05:00

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Underground celebrities I have almost known

2008-01-28T13:07:00.000-05:00

Tayor Mead lived in the building next door to the one Bill and I shared on Ludlow Street. We'd see him once in a while in the courtyard in back feeding a stray cat. Observing classic New York sensibilities, we mostly ignored him, but we did meet at a party once. I was with my friend Dennis. We recognized him immediately of course and I took the opportunity to introduce myself. "Hi, Taylor, " I said, "I'm Joe..." Before I could finish, and wagging that great sleepy head, he said in the exact dour tone of voice that Jerry Seinfeld used decades later when greeting Newman, "Hello... Joseph." Dennis cracked up. I went to get a drink.

Pier 51

2008-01-23T10:38:00.000-05:00

I lensed a series of photographs of several defunct piers in Greenwich Village in the late 1970s, early 1980s. They were a kind of Death in Venice on the Hudson River, and each year Pier 51, the hangout and hookup favorite on the north edge of the Village, sank deeper into the drink. Ruins are sexy. With each new lurch it became more dangerous, more exotic, more alluring.

The interior, a vast dark cavern, was pierced with dusty light where gashes in its corrugated walls were opened by each new twist in its grotesque but romantic demise. At one point an unknown artist had hack sawed a handful of geometric-shaped perforations in the corrugated steel walls. The most compelling of these was a moon-like crescent cut high up in the far wall of the main warehouse's three-story cavern; the sky-light which it emitted gave the huge darkling "moon room" a cultic atmosphere that would have stirred the heart of a Mayan priest.

By the summer of 1980, the floor inside the huge space was warped at its far end to a near forty-five degree angle that dipped to the height of a full story. Seagulls sailed through jack-o-lantern chinks open to the western sky. The river glittered darkly underfoot between unexpected chasms in the sloping floor. Strangely enough, I don't recall having heard of anyone being injured by the structure itself, which seemed to wrench and stumble in secret, unobserved. The disorientation that its skewed interior environment worked on one's perceptions only stimulated the erotic playground which it had by then become. Day and night it was cruised and stalked. Turn a corner, exit a passageway, you were as likely to encounter a scene from your fondest wet dream as from your grimmest nightmare. The more inhibitions fell, the deeper the pier sank, and the more fantastic its inner landscape became. By the end of the decade, the debauched and dire 70s, the bizarre landmark finally lurched beyond any but the most dedicated access from the street. And there it sat, until the city finally had it disassembled and hauled away, a dragon dissolving in its own doomed fantasies.

Black Wednesday

2008-01-21T08:21:00.003-05:00

Bill was my roommate for a large swath of my two decade romp in New York City. We shared the loft in SoHo, the floor on Ludlow Street, the little apartment on Little Jones Street. Our boyfriends and girlfriends came and went, but Bill and I always found ourselves in one another's company after the dust had settled, after the love had gone. He was one of the brightest people I've ever known, a Loyola graduate, erudite and agreeably flawed. He pretended to never forgive me for reneging on the hair cut (he liked my hair cuts) that he won, after emptying my pockets, in one of our fiercely contested poker games. I have photographs of Bill somewhere, which I don’t feel like digging out. Suffice to say he looked a little like John Casavettes and a little like Soupy Sales. An erudite Soupy Sales with a snarl.

An actor and director, his heart was in the theater but like many others like him, he often found employment elsewhere. We met, through friends, at an art gallery in Soho that he was heading up at the time. I had done a series of studies on the old West Village waterfront piers to which he took a liking, and showed at the gallery. He eventually connected with the Public Theater, and after a spell in the literary department, was soon directing the likes of Robert DiNiro and guiding young playwrights to their first outings on stages that mattered. He was close friends with Sam Shepherd, and accepted Sam's Obie (I think it was for Buried Child) for him one year... having borrowed my Roland Meladandri suit for the occasion. One day, practically out of the blue, he looked at me, and in one of his dismissive-sounding, and therefore all the more convincing, observations said, "You're living in a state of grace."

Bill had a penchant, as did I at times, for the odd spooky moment. One night in Sheridan square, he picked up a ringing public telephone and was greeted by a friend from California who thought he had dialed Bill at home.

An odd thing happened to the two of us, one summer night. We were leaving the 8th Street Playhouse, a movie theater in Greenwich Village, having just seen Black Sunday, a thriller about an attempted act of terrorism at the Super Bowl. Just as we stepped out onto the street, we turned simultaneously to say something to one another, and soundly bumped heads. At that exact moment, I kid you not, the lights went out up and down 8th Street. In fact, the lights went out all over the city. It was as if the energy powering the city (and lurking ominously beneath that, the very idea of New York) having derived its existence from some heretofore unrealized communion between the two of us, had been jarred and disabled. In reality (a word in this instance I’m sorely tempted to enclose in quotes), lightning had struck a Hudson River substation... it was the Blackout of 1977.

We had each our disparate missions and appointments to keep that night – by the time we met up late the next day at the loft, an easy hike from the village, electric power, and a semblance of ordinary life had returned. But I was never quite sure after that whether New York City actually existed. Bill thought it diverting to play with the idea. But he maddeningly refused, the way old friends often do when pressed for a definitive answer, to confirm or deny.

I found out recently that Bill has died. He died the day after I began this piece, and the day before it was posted. Rest in peace, my friend...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/theater/25hart.html

By any other name

2008-01-18T16:53:00.000-05:00

One day in the summer after I graduated from high school, several friends, Walter & Joseph among them, piled into Billy's van in Ann Arbor Michigan and set out for New York City. We had a sublet lined up and were going to stay for the summer; I wanted to check out a couple of schools. W & J wanted a break from country life. I ended up staying for two decades.

photo:amazingnewyorkcity.blogspot.com

As we drew near the city, we were playing Judy Garland's legendary Carnegie Hall concert. Then, suddenly the city was rising before us... just as Judy launched into Chicago, her fourth encore after 25 songs and two and a half hours on stage in the Big Apple. So that was the soundtrack for our first ever sighting of Manhattan, those three decades ago. Chicago. But somehow, instead of producing a cognitive dissonance, it seemed to fit. Sometimes in a dream I find myself in an idealized and synthesized metropolis, colossal and romantic, in the throb of a dawning adventure.

Winter park

2008-01-15T21:30:00.000-05:00

Central Park, with its granite outcroppings, its pond, its brown grass, and wet black ginkos was, in late January, a charcoal sketch. An occasional red scarf, a yellow nylon parka, was the only color that winter afternoon. The rest was pale gray, sandpaper black, and cola-stained snow. But it was a pleasant little hike through the park's south end to the west side. It must have been past three o’clock by then. The sun was in the latticed branches, spoking the brindled lawns with quick black strokes. I didn’t want to look at my watch.

Far away, on the unseen perimeters of the landscape, a closely woven tapestry of tiny voices, kids released from school, was unraveling; bright threads of giggles, shouts, broke loose and drifted through the park. I stopped at a bench near the pond. There a boy under the fond gaze, and watchful shadow, of his young mother, stood throwing little clots of snow into the brightly cold and rippling water. With each splash, the boy’s excitement grew, his mother’s affectionate amusement billowed. With each handful his little nylon mitten grew heavier with wet snow. Then just as he seemed to be seriously lapsing into a rhythm, a concentration, into something nearing, perhaps, a first taste of that special frontier that a boy glimpses when first realizing that he can accurately project an object through a magically captured quantity of transparent real space, he aimed a little snowball into the pond, and his mitten flew off his hand with the snowball. It landed on the surface of the water, spun, and was quickly caught on the breeze and carried out into the pond. The boy turned to his mother in surprise. He turned back to the pond, to his briskly departing mitten, which he watched for some time before a huge wail, rising with a deep gasp from some innermost well, suddenly spilled over and was presented, with blatant plaintive abandon, to his mother. He bawled and wailed, betrayal and grief squeezed out like toothpaste from a rolled-up tube. She hauled him up into her arms and with little chortles and coos, kisses and secrets, she turned them both around to face the pond, and with the same affectionate laughter, she lifted his hand to wave bye-bye to the mitten. She then carried him around to the far side of the pond and waited for the mitten, floating light as a leaf and still drifting, scurrying, to come ashore. They had a funny good time fishing it out, with the help of a stem of wilted gladiolas, frozen stiff, that they found in a trash can. She wrung the mitten out and gave it to the boy who wasted no time putting it back on his hand, and that hand in hers.

Fog

2008-01-13T10:01:00.000-05:00

I awoke to a morning padded with a feline-scented fog, mute, and drawn intimately close. I thought of Sandburg's famous near-haiku...

Anhinga

2008-01-10T23:41:00.001-05:00

Anhinga are tropical and subtropical waterfowl of the darter family; you can see them near freshwater streams, lakes, and wetlands, perched on branches and rocks, endlessly drying their wings in the breeze. With very little oil in their feathers, their buoyancy is reduced, allowing them to dive fast and deep in pursuit of fish. They can swim underwater on extended hunts. They spear fish with their beaks, then bring them to the surface where they toss them in the air and catch them.

I found these at Lakes Park in Fort Myers. I've seen them on Sanibel and Captiva. The coloring of their lower beak and throat reminds me of the carnivorous pitcher plant. Like their cormorant cousins, they strike me as more decorative than beautiful, a subject perhaps for a Japanese painting.

HNT

2008-01-10T07:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't done one of these in a while. Here's an outtake from that special delivery.

Soup yet

2008-01-07T07:42:00.000-05:00

I decided to make pea soup from the ham bone left from my brother's roast Christmas ham. Pea soup and toasted corn muffins slathered with unsalted butter - oh yeah.

So I was walking home from the grocery store, talking to myself as usual... shut up, it's a sign of GOOD mental health. I was reviewing the contents of my shopping bag. "Ok, I got split peas, shallots, carrots, corn muffins, butter..." when the boy passing me on the sidewalk chimed in with "...potato chips and grass."

Impudent monkey. When I got home I checked the bag, just to be sure, for potato chips and grass. There wasn't any. :o(

About face

2008-01-05T12:13:00.004-05:00

I was interviewed by the local news yesterday. If I can track down a clip I'll try and post it. My 90 seconds of fame (the bandwidth is a little more congested these days) on the arts and entertainment segment boosts my exhibit at the municipal gallery, all portraits, the gist of which can be seen below. The show is a salad of portraits - local shapers, friends, and a few celebs. It runs for the month of January.

I enjoy doing portraits. Every face is a narrative, every body a landmark. The best are a collaboration between subject and photographer, a process of discovery.

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Riverwalk & rum runners

2008-01-01T16:12:00.001-05:00

I took all of three photographs in Fort Lauderdale, and no notes. In fact, I was generally only marginally conscious. In other words, I had a nice time. Christmas was all about quaffing mulled wine and singing Christmas carols, Rogers & Hart, and the Beatles around a baby grand. Yes, it was that gay. The rest of my holiday outing was about the beach, and a club or three. Here's one of the few photos that I got up enough willpower to raise the camera to my eye to take. I think it caught the prevailing mood...

Miami beach is a half hour, a twenty-mile drive, south of Fort Lauderdale. I got hauled down to Haulover beach, the north end of which is a nude beach. I learned something important at Haulover beach. Nobody looks good in the nude on the beach. Sex appeal, apparently, takes art. But among the fittest, hottest, best put-together specimens the girls, in my opinion, had the edge. One lass, lying on her back on a towell, legs bent at the knees, feet flat on the ground, little pink and blond origami blossom open to the ocean breeze... well dang, it was downright pretty. Several guys found her immediate vicinity especially conducive to standing around carrying on what they tried to pass off as casual conversation. There is something about the midday sun that is not kind to the plain facts of guy gear, at least aesthetically, much as I am inclined to feel otherwise in other circumstances.

Later, back at the house, Darryl's lorikeet bit my ear. "He really reached out and went for it!" Darryl said, rather bemused. It still smarts. The incident brought out the nursing instincts of Joop (pronounced Yope, he's Dutch), who swabbed the nip, unnecessarily no doubt, but thoughtfully, with witch hazel. Then we went for an evening walk along Riverwalk park (shown in daylight above) to see all the christmas lights, made twice merry in the river's rippled mirror. The weather was something travel brochures always promise but rarely deliver - a tropical dream come true. Warm, breezy, cool. If there's anything about Fort Lauderdale that I don't like, I haven't found it yet. It's smaller than Miami. Hipper than the Keys. Gorgeous and cosmopolitan. And, as Connie Francis damn near lamented those decades ago, it's where the boys are. A fact that, as my own decades accrue, I'm inclined to somewhat wistfully lament as well...

Back home on the gulf, I spun out the rest of the holiday with my brother and his girlfriend. Santa left my annual four lb. bag of pistachios and assorted other goodies. We had lunch at Rib City, where we eagerly waited to see which of us would get the usual ridiculously over-generous portion of baby backs. This time it was Linda. The time before that it was me. The four or five times before that it was Jack, whom we had begun to suspect had a covert and standing arrangement with the kitchen. Til the bounty finally broke my way.

It's 2008, kiddies. I went to a party at my usual haunt, a local waterfront enclave nearby where I do a lot of recent photography. This is the place...

The bar turns out a great rum runner. Here's a recipe:

1 1/2 oz light rum
3/4 oz blackberry brandy
3/4 oz banana liqueur
1/4 oz grenadine syrup
1 1/2 oz orange juice
1 1/2 oz pineapple juice
1 oz dark rum

Pour all liquids except dark rum into glass. Fill with crushed ice and stir. Float dark rum on top and stir gently.

Happy new year.

Although it's been said, many times many ways

2007-12-20T12:52:00.000-05:00

I want to wish you all a wonderful holiday. I'll be leaving for the east coast shortly, and will spend Christmas in Fort Lauderdale... I'm bringing my notebook and will try to keep in touch, time and tide permitting.

My favorite Christmas card is the one I received years ago, hand made, by my upstairs neighbor Doreen, on Staten Island. The outside shows a lovely woodcut of an angel and a Christmas star. The inside says this...

Mind without soul
may blast some universe
to might-have-been,
and stop ten thousand stars
but not one beat of this child’s heart.

Nor shall even prevail
a million questionings
against the silence
of his Mother’s smile
whose secret all creation sings

Here's lookin at you, kids... love and peace,

Joe

Life is brief, art is long

2007-12-16T07:42:00.001-05:00

At a Christmas party a couple of years ago, I received a lovely Dover paperback edition of Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets in the gift exchange. There are 154 sonnets in the collection. Controversy has raged for centuries now as to the identities of the "dark lady" and the "lovely boy" to whom most of the sonnets are addressed, as well as the mysterious "W. H." to whom the work is dedicated.

Shakespeare's brilliant excursion into the form took place during the sonnet craze that swept England in the late 1500s. Wikipedia has an excellent entry on the subject.

I thought I'd read one from time to time, or any poetry, selected more or less at random, and post it here.

In Sonnet 63, like several others, Shakespeare envisions the loss of his love's beauty to the ravages of time. In some of the sonnets, he urges his lover to marry and sire offspring so that his beauty may, through blood and lineage at least, be preserved. In others, and more poignantly perhaps, he reaches for the power of art, the written word, to trump time's inevitable triumph over the flesh. Space is the lovers' friend, Nabakov once wrote, time their enemy.

They've got mail

2007-12-13T22:47:00.002-05:00

Folks around here are fond of unusual mailboxes. This is a collection in progress...

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Here, there, and everywhere

2007-12-12T11:06:00.001-05:00

After a day in front of a monitor, I took myself out for an airing, taking a few pending snail mails to the post office. The fading day has a rather somber feeling, quiet and sparse. Intimately hushed, like after a rain. I decide to stop by McD and pick up some nuggets. I'm the only one in the drive-through. As I pull up to the window, the girl looks, with eyes as big as headlights, at my Mustang, now eight years old. "I just love that car!" she beams. "It's my favorite." Well, I like it too. We talk about that. She sends me on my way with a blessing, and a smile as big as a sunrise.

At the pick up window, the boy hands me my order, and says thank you. I say thank you. He makes eye contact. "Pleased to meet you!" he says warmly.

Well, that was a nice experience. On to the grocery store. I'm browsing around the produce section when the produce boy comes out with a vegetable cart and starts placing veggies carefully in the bins. He looks at me and says "is there anything I can help you with sir?" Produce guys don't say that. I'm beginning to feel that there is something afoot in the land. Is there an angel on my shoulder? I tell him I'm just browsing for now, thank you. He says "My name is Joe. If you need any help with anything, just ask..."

At the checkout the girl is running out of pennies. She tells the bagger that she needs pennies. She put in the call ages ago, she grouses, and now she's nearly out... Then she holds out her hand with my change, and with a smile says "But I have enough for this guy..."

I walk to my car; the sun has set and a smattering of city lights now reigns meekly over a tender, silent, night. I don't want to go home. I want to stay, here in the company of human beings, until they've all gone home.

Another Time In New York

2007-12-08T12:44:00.001-05:00

December 14, 1980, six days after John Lennon was shot and killed outside the Dakota, was a cold day in New York. 19 degrees that morning. Too cold to snow. But it did snow. The moment the silent prayer was over, and Imagine began, soft flurries fell from the sky. A benediction on the 100,000 who were there to see and be touched by it. I don't remember it being reported in the news.

All I had was a little super 8 camera back then, no technique, and no gloves. So this is what I was able to piece together...

If you can't see it here, try YouTube

Jingle all the way

2007-12-03T11:08:00.000-05:00

The annual tree lighting, complete with snow pile (real snow) and snow flurries (ingredients unknown), drew a crowd to downtown Saturday night. I don't have anything to add to what I wrote last year: Despite the hoakey artificial snow and ubiquitous t-shirts and shorts, a bit of yuletide magic always seems to materialize. The timeless brew of all things Christmas rarely fails to summon that old feeling...

Matlacha

2007-11-28T07:17:00.003-05:00

The town of Matlacha (pronounced Matt LaShay) is a small island, perforated with inlets and canals, shaped like a bird in flight, the eastern gateway to Pine Island on the Florida gulf coast. Its name is a Caloosa Indian word for "water up to the chin."

A funky little fishing village, it grew into an artsy town with a population of about 800, consisting mostly of fishermen, restauranteurs, bikers, assorted artists, musicians, misfits, and quite a few of what my friend Bobby calls "leftover hippies." (Where the non-leftover hippies are isn't clear, a parallel universe perhaps.) Matlacha is full of galleries, restaurants, bars, walkable from east to west, and an easy getaway. We go there to look and eat, or just sip cappuccinos and do what John Lennon said is people's favorite thing to do: sit around and talk.

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The Age Of Grace

2007-11-24T07:05:00.000-05:00

Here's one I wrote some time ago (apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins). It's been on my mind of late...

Glory to God for coffee beans!
For neon lights and faded jeans.
Let angels and guitars alike,
let chariots and motorbikes
and high and low by every means
sing his awesome grace.

Praise be to God for jungle drums!
For wedding feasts, for wine, for Tums.
Let parliaments, let golden pond,
let Mother T. and Elton John
and monks and movie stars and bums
dance his dazzling grace.

Avid scribes in lairs outworn
conjure canon, blame, and warn:
“Don’t eat! Don’t kiss! Don’t fart! Don’t grin!
Let uncouth humans, dust, and sin
and all subject to sacred scorn
seek out a hiding place.”

Glory to God for rockin’ bands!
For tacky praises, wounded hands.
Let golden pheasants, canyons, flutes,
Let Amy, Zeppo, sandals, boots,
all reconciled creation dance
and sing his awesome grace.

Pilgrim's progress

2007-11-22T08:38:00.001-05:00

Of all the holidays, Thanksgiving stirs for me the most ambivalence, and perhaps the least excitement, affection, nostalgia. These attachments are formed in childhood of course, and Thanksgiving, apart from my beloved Macy's Parade (I'd sit in front of the TV, spellbound), had little appeal to me. I grew up in a family that ate dinner together almost every day. The only thing different about turkey day was its lavish dimensions - and a menu that had none of my favorites. Roast turkey was overrated. Mashed potatoes, ho hum. Sweet potatoes made me gag. Cranberry sauce - ech. At least dessert was reliable.

Thanksgiving's icons left me unmoved. I didn't like the pilgrims. They struck me as geeky and puritanical. Probably humorless. I wouldn't have wanted to meet one. The purported spiritual underpinnings, to express gratitude by kissing up to the ugly turkey god and being expected to gorge on that punishing meal, simply did not register, or if it did, it was as just one more nonsensical adult conceit that children penetrate with unerring, if inarticulate, wisdom. As I grew older, my skepticism only deepened. I, for one, was always glad when dinner was over and we could get on to either piling in the car, or waiting for the doorbell to ring. For the cousin fest to start. Thanksgiving's intimations of the real magic to come - Christmas - was its one saving grace.

Of course that cousin fest, and it's many variations in the ensuing years, whether gathered elegantly with friends around cornish hens stuffed with millet, or volunteering with my best friend to serve the homeless at the soup kitchen is the real occasion, I eventually learned, for gratitude. And yes, for that gut-busting annual repast which, at the end of the day, was a sacrament of every other meal, large and small, provided by hard-working hands and thoughtful hearts.

Perhaps my most memorable Thanksgivings was in New York the year I was between apartments, out of work, out of relationship, out of sorts and alone. I was staying at the West Side Y (It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A!, and it did have its moments). I had a room facing Central Park West. I opened my eyes that November morning to see Snoopy, a very, very big Snoopy, silently floating by outside the window. He was followed by Big Bird, Popeye, Cinderella, and the rest of the colorful and colossally inflated characters. Seems the big balloons were herded unceremoniously down Central Park West on their way to Broadway. From my pillow I watched, spellbound, as they floated by... visitors from my childhood come colossally to life, and was thrilled. I don't remember if it occurred to me to be thankful. It does now.

On a clear day

2007-11-19T06:37:00.001-05:00

I'm afraid of heights. During the climactic scenes in King Kong I was scrunched so far down in my seat at the movie theater that I could barely see the screen between the heads of the couple in front of me.

"Are you afraid of heights?"

"Not really."

You don't say no to a major client. So Friday night I was handed the key to the crane, after being shown how to operate it, and insisting that I could handle it, no problem. I was on my own.

I spent most of the day Saturday watching the flag outside the condo for signs of a break in the prevailing winds. When it finally sagged against the flagpole, I headed out. The last place I wanted to find myself was in a bucket twelve stories in the air in a stiff breeze.

The crane's controls were pretty basic. One key position operated the boom from the ground, another from the bucket. Three joysticks on the control panel got me where I needed to go: one moved the boom from horizontal to vertical, another rotated it, the third extended it to its maximum, and rather reed-like extension, which was, of course, where I had to be to get the shot: a view that will be displayed in the condominium development sales center as a back-lit panorama. Other controls actually drove the crane, on its massive tires, but those I would not be needing. It was already positioned for the shoot, in a driveway next to a curb, at the development site.

Turns out I had to go up three times over Saturday and Sunday to get the right lighting, and the shot, that I wanted. Steeling my nerves once was a challenge. By the third outing I was a basket case.

On the first try I managed to get up high enough to clear the towering australian pines to get a reasonable view of the river. 'That's high enough' I told myself as I remembered the warning You don't want to go up without side braces if there's any wind. I thought of the massive side braces that companies anchored their cranes with before attempting to deliver an air conditioner to the roof of my puny five-story condo building. This crane had no side braces, and would be ascending twelve. Now here I was at the end of a chopstick high above mother earth trembling in a breeze that seemed to be gathering momentum. I looked down, and adrenaline surged in a wave as I gazed at the ground that I was trying unsuccessfully to turn into an abstraction far, far below.

Eventually I got up the nerve to let go of the bucket's guard rail and bring the camera to my eye. Thank heaven (which could have read my thoughts at that height) that the camera was set for 1/1000 of a second. I needed to get a 360 degree panoramic series of shots, which meant I had to line up landmarks in the viewfinder, never taking the camera down from my eye, while turning my body completely around, in stages, on a platform with the footprint of a large dishwasher, suspended in the ether, while a freshening wind, and the adrenaline leaking out of my pores, was beginning to make my hair stand on end. The ride down was lovely. With each milimeter of planet earth reacquired my spirits rose.

The second shoot was iffy from the get go. The local weather channel clocked the wind at 14mph, which was nibbling at the edge of go-ahead. But the sky was magnificent and I decided to launch. The entire ascent, including the final, hair-raising extension, was maddeningly slow, as the gears and chains churned away with their grim determination. Halfway up the buffeting started. Nothing catastrophic, but enough to put my nerves on edge. Then as I was nearing what felt like a safe reach above the treeline, the stabilization alarm started beeping. The car was shaking. I cut the motor and the alarm stopped. I grabbed a few quick shots and headed quickly back to earth.

The third and last go was the most promising. Beautiful, cloud-strewn skies and a light breeze. It produced the images you see here. This time I decided to go for broke and push the crane to the max. I had been warned to be prepared for the jolt when it topped out. I wasn't. It hit with a jar that caused my knees to buckle. Holy Mother of Mercy! When the basket stopped shuddering, I slowly regained enough wherewithall to rise out of the crouch I was in and, holding on with one white-knuckled hand, slowly brought the camera to my eye with the other. I seemed to be miles above my previous climbs. I began shooting. Not daring to let go, I had to awkwardly twist halfway around to get the first arc of shots, feeling for the guardrail while changing my hand position, with desperate blind grabs, as I went. Rationality was fled. I somehow managed to ignore the swimming landscape below long enough to get a fix on the quivering horizon in the viewfinder. When I finished shooting, I brought the camera down with a dreadful breathless stealth and managed to slowly, carefully, untwist my legs so that I could face the controls...

Operating the crane required coordinating one's foot on the pedal that cranked up the motor, while moving the joysticks that retracted and pivoted the boom. At this point, and still suspended high in the sky, I looked down at the joysticks and found that their arrows and illustrations were now completely indecipherable. I stared. I puzzled. I almost laughed. Would I ever get down? Would I have to reach into my pocket for my cell phone and dial 911? No I wouldn't. I didn't have the will power to let go of the railing long enough to dig into my pocket. I shoved the joystick in what looked like a likely direction. With an appalling lurch the the crane began inching forward. I looked down and its massive tires were slowly crawling toward a curb. Oops. Wrong move. I took my foot off the pedal and everything stopped. While the boom swayed, the motor wound down. The australian pines rustled below. Boats in the far blue river left trails of white. It was odd. The peaceful scene was suspended in a bubble of woozy terror. I looked at the control panel again and this time the elixir of rational thought washed over me like a powerful drug. I pedaled the motor up again, moved the joystick in the "retract" direction and the slow, blessed descent began.

The agency was wowed by the photographs. I was told client would be pleased. Good. Perhaps word will get around that I took the pictures. I'm seriously considering denying it.

Once upon a time in the sand

2007-11-15T07:40:00.000-05:00

Kevin regarded the beach, the shore, as one of a handful of elemental environments: the desert was another. As were the woods, the mountain, the metropolis.

He gazed out at the Gulf from the lanai, and it occurred to him that on this, their third vacation together, he and Mitch had seen four of the five. They had skied outside Aspen, at the mountainside cabin of Kevin’s uncle, a retreat rarely used, and as pristine and spare as the distant peaks of Mount Elbert at dawn. The following year, it was the rain forest, the Brazilian Amazon, where they had seen butterflies, flashing blue neon, as large as coupons, flitting amidst steaming tree ferns. Now they were on the Gulf, the cozy beach on Sanibel Island, stretching mile after minimally-developed mile. Of course Lake Michigan, in their own Chicago, was itself oceanic: the Great Lake had the sea’s vacant horizon. But Kevin could sense that the Gulf, and the ocean beyond, was another presence altogether. He had read somewhere that two-thirds of the planet’s population lived along these edges, be they the village riverbanks, or the vast coastal beaches, of the world. The bulk of humanity, it seemed, had not strayed far from the nurturing fringe, the nexus of the earth’s two great domains.

“I’m famished,” said Mitch, with a yawn, padding out to the lanai and hugging Kevin from behind. “I never wake up famished at home.”

“It’s the air.” said Kevin.

“Famished and sleepy. That’s what vacation does to me. I just want to eat and sleep.”

They ate at The Conch. Eggs, ham, home fries, bagels. . . when the waiter removed the ruins of the breakfast, Mitch noticed a blurb in the newspaper:

“Did you see this? There’s a sand castle contest at Barton Beach. Today and tomorrow.”

“And we forgot our shovels and pails.”

“No this is some serious castle building. The winner gets two tickets to Maui.”

Sure enough, when they reached the outskirts of Barton Beach they saw the contestants, in their official marked-out sites stretching for a mile up the beach, already at work, surrounded by clusters of onlookers. Kevin was amazed at the variety, in both subject and style, that the sculptors drew from the sand. Romance, architecture,
whimsy. . . the simplicity of the medium only exposed the artist’s styles more clearly. “I can’t believe you can do that with sand,” said Mitch.

The first piece they saw was a fitting emblem: a large circle of fish, each slightly bigger than the last, devouring the tail-end of the next. Competition at its grimmest, thought Kevin, stripped of artifice. The sculpture had a medallion-like simplicity, declaring its theme in a single take. Mitch, of course, zeroed in on its erotic possibilities.

“None of the fish look that upset,” he said. “Looks like they’re enjoying it.”

The expressions on the creature’s faces did belie their predicament. With their huge eyes and thick smiling lips, they were imbued with cartoony glee.

“It’s a game of tag,” said the sculptor, a portly Richard Dreyfus in granny glasses who was kneeling inside the hoop of fish.

“Reminds me of Matisse’s dancers,” said Kevin. “Where they’re all holding hands in a circle.”

“It’s the aquatic version,” said Kevin.

“The Synchronized Tuna team.”

The beach had a festive, carny atmosphere, like a street fair. Vendors had set up stands here and there along the shore. Beach-goers, in scattered, trailing bunches, paraded gym-tuned bodies and well-oiled flab. Waddling tikes chased fleeing gulls. Teens taunted. Top-40 FM came and went. Groups shifted, in small amorphous schools, from site to site, watching the artists work.

There was a scale model of Mount Rushmore. A pair of chimpanzees sitting on a tree stump. An expertly rendered frieze of a randy Neptune, wielding a trident and riding a bucking dolphin. And endless variations on the classic castle, from medieval fortress to midtown tower. One young woman had created a massive cow skull, a la Georgia O’keefe, that had an uncanny bleached realism. She was using modeler’s tools.

“There must be a sand sculpture circuit,” said Kevin. “Some of this stuff is amazing.” Mitch found an official program in a trash basket, listing all the contestants and sponsors. The judging was to take place that day.

The largest crowd was gathered around a site right off the Mango Club. The handsome young man, sun-burnished and incisively gestured, was constructing an entire Medieval ruin, presently shaving a wall smooth with an old plastic ruler. There was a draftsman’s precision to the work. Palaces, courtyards, towers, etched with hieroglyphics, precisely scaled and carefully decayed— it all had the exhilarating mien of a movie set. It was detailed and fake, artificial and eye-popping. And he was working the audience. An acquaintance had brought him a drink from the bar and set it down on the sand. “It’s from Gil and Joanne,”

“Oh, no you don’t,” he barked. “I’m not touching that. There’s probably a sleeping pill in it.” His friend laughed. “No way, Ho - zay. I know the Hutchinson’s all too well.” He quipped for the crowd, while smiling directly at Kevin. The smile didn’t linger. It was a hustler’s kiss, on target and deftly deserted.

Mitch elbowed Kevin conspiratorially. “We’ve got plenty of coffee back at the hotel, don’t we?” he said far from inaudibly.

“Well, maybe I should have lunch at your place,” the guy retorted.

Kevin looked at Mitch. The gathering had gone quiet. “You ready for lunch?” he said.

“I’m always hungry,” said Mitch, blatantly riding the come-on, and the hush it had invoked. What the hay. They were out-of-towners.

Kevin turned back to the young man. “You’re call, man. Care to join us?”

He immediately stood up, dropped the ruler, and walked away from the site as if it were so much cardboard. “Say no more,” he said. It was a silly, but effective star-turn. They walked off to the restaurant. There was one bald chuckle from the crowd, quickly swallowed up by the crowd’s own swift collusion to recover.

“Guard the kingdom,” he called back, to no one in particular.

They didn’t get past the bar. Ray (that was his name) ran into friends, they ordered drinks, and decided to eat there. The pick-up exhilaration abated somewhat in the cool of the restaurant, but lurked shimmering in the shadows. The company was mixed: a girl named Brenda, a sullen and pretty blond. And a guy named Owen from Sanibel, a hunk in a tank top who held Mitch’s chair when they sat down at the table. The room was half-open to the beach and the gulf breeze; it smelled of beer and mangoes. Kevin inhaled and was elated. The place thudded and twanged with Parrothead Country.

There was, as Kevin had suspected, a regular sand-sculpture elite, traveling from beach to beach in a contest circuit more established than one would have guessed. It had its own celebrities, past and present, its fans and folklore.

“Five thousand is about average for top prize,” said Ray, setting his drink down on a table littered with Tex-Mex munchies. His voice had an aristocratic, if sultry, transparency; it couldn’t be bothered to lie.

“Amazing,” said Mitch. “You could actually make a living at it. If you were good enough.”

“Oh, Ray’s good enough,” said Brenda.

“That’s the problem,” said Owen.

“I am going back - you’ll see,” Ray seemed to protest. “Next term. I promise.” He turned to Kevin and Mitch.

“Ever been to Maui?”

“It’s on our short list,” said Kevin.

“Mine too,” said Brenda. “Of top ten places to avoid.”

“I’m avoiding jalapenos,” said Ray, scooping up a fajita. “They singe my sinuses.”

Mitch sipped his beer. “And other places,” he said. That produced a rush of mirth and a nice little thaw.

“That’s what beer is for,” said Owen. “We won’t let you run dry.”

“Beer and jalapenos,” said Kevin. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

“Yeah,” said Mitch. “Nothing helps you to relive yesterday’s jalapenos like a good hangover.”

Amid more laughter, a couple appeared—tan, bead-strewn, colorfully crumpled, in their own force field of good spirits.

“Hello, Ray,” the man said, nudging Ray playfully. “Planning on racking up another blue ribbon?”

“Ha! Gilgamesh! If you don’t swipe it. You didn’t think I was gonna fall for the Valium-laced margarita, did you?”

“Hey, we’re desperate. We’ll try anything.”

“Kevin, Mitch. . . this is Gil and Joanne Hutchinson. My arch-rivals from Cal Tech. They’re mission, which they’ve decided to accept, is to follow me to the ends of the earth and steal my prize money.”

“Yeah,” said Joanne, “the crumbs left in your wake.” She extended a hand to Mitch across the table. A fine sprinkling of sand fell on the nachos.

“As if anybody else had a chance, huh?” Gil said to Brenda, giving her a friendly little jostle.

“As if.” Brenda said.

Chairs were dragged over and the Hutchinsons scooched in. “I’m famished!” Joanne exclaimed, and a waiter appeared. Kevin watched Owen fill Mitch’s glass, and watched Mitch’s skittish indifference. A little hunk himself, Mitch wasn’t very impressed with pumped-up people, even thoughtful ones, but he was easily swept into the charismatic orbit of someone like Ray, who struck Kevin as someone who could stir infatuation by just showing up. But he’d never stop there. He ran with it. Effort, in more than one lexicon, is love. And the effort that a handsome guy like Ray expended on winning affection was, if not love, a beguiling first-cousin of love. Was it narcissism? Not exactly. But he had a narcissist’s generosity; he shared himself instinctively. A man like that would leave the wrong kind of partner feeling marginalized and bitter, and Brenda’s disapproval hung in the air like bitter smoke. Are they married? thought Kevin. Her obvious displeasure, its proprietary vibe, suggested as much. But Ray’s come-on at the beach had seemed more than just friendly…

The Hutchinson’s drinks arrived, and a dozen tacos.

“I heard Billy wants to retire,” Gil was saying, as he reached for the Tobasco sauce.

“Oh he’s crying because he couldn’t get a site by the boardwalk,” said Ray. “As if it really mattered.”

“He’s a sculptor?” Kevin asked.

“Neptune and Flipper,” said Joanne. “It’s famous.”

“We saw that!” said Mitch.

“He spent the winter in St. Lucia on that piece,” said Gil.

“Billy is a phenomenal artist,” said Ray. “Everybody knows it. It’s just that Boticelli on steroids is not every judge’s idea of a good time.”

“But he acts like a siamese cat on Sudafed.” said Owen.

“We know this. He’s more volatile than—”

“Yes?” said Gil, after a tactical pause.

“More volatile than—”

“We’re waiting, Ray,” teased Mitch.

“You think of something, Kevin,” said Ray.

“Than crepes flambé‚ in a sauna.” The quality of Mitch’s laugh told Kevin why Mitch had been swept into his orbit.

“Does Julia Child know about that dish?” said Mitch.

“Presentation is everything,” said Ray.

Brenda got up from the table. “Excusé moi,” she said, begged out unmemorably, and left. Yes, well. Ahem. Fidgets and coughs.

But Brenda’s departure didn’t leave much of a dent, except in Ray’s mood. They bantered on a while longer but a transparent, if distant, disquiet was upon him. Finally he leaned back in his chair and stretched, raising neat creamy biceps. “Well. . . back to the sand mines.” He got up from the table.

“Oh, rats,” said Joanne. “We were hoping we could lull you into distraction.”

“And nearly succeeded. . .” He dropped a twenty on the table. Kevin tried to give it back.

“We invited you,” he said.

“Now you’ll have to come back tonight.” Ray gently pawed Kevin’s arm. “There’s a party for the sculptors, and I know I’m going to be thirsty.”

“Yeah, it starts at, what, seven?” said Owen.

“When is the judging?”

“Six?”

In the buoyant disorder of departures, the gathering quickly dissolved. Owen followed Mitch and Kevin to the door.

“Don’t forget to call,” Owen called after them.

On the way back to their hotel, they passed Ray’s site, but stayed well on the periphery. He wasn’t bantering with the crowd this time. He was seriously engaged in the work, while the audience stood mesmerized. The fantasy ruin was acquiring a deep grandeur in the afternoon light. Its convincingly rendered architecture unhinged one’s critical perception. It looked like the real thing, glimpsed from afar. As he carved the loaves and cylinders of sand, Ray, hallucinatorily outsized, knelt deftly coaxing a fable into being.

Back at the hotel, Kevin and Mitch played backgammon on Mitch’s pocket set, inlaid with ivory and teak, a gift from his grandmother. Kevin was the better player; he was at home in the game’s abstract landscape. But the dice often rolled in Mitch’s favor and in backgammon the luck of the roll is half the game. Later, they lay entwined, in simple warm-blooded contentment, and stared out the window at the crows that came to take sips of the pool and then fly away.

The rest of the afternoon was a cozy domestic outing, touched with love’s delicate grief. Kevin made coffee while Mitch stood in the shower, immobile, his arms crossed over his chest and his hands on his shoulders, in a near-fetal soak-out, until the water turned tepid. A cup of coffee was waiting for him on the lanai.

Kevin stood massaging Mitch’s shoulders and smelling his damp hair.

“What do you want to do about tonight?” he said.

“You mean go to that party?”

“Um-hm.”

“I don’t know now. I was hot to go before. Now I like it here.”

“Yeah,” said Kevin. “Me too.”

They went down to the shuffleboard court. It lay somewhat secluded behind the bathhouse, shaded by palms and surrounded by a hedge of some waxy-leafed shrub with fragrant white blossoms. Kevin liked the colors: the dark green alleys, the worn benches painted red, the yellow scoreboard. It had a British clubby feel, rich and broken-in. An indolent game, shuffleboard facilitated, like pool, a level of conversation near free-association. Mitch had a feel for the game’s dynamics, the physics of the moving objects, their paths, velocity, and interaction. But he didn’t always win. Kevin’s bumbling sallies, while often wildly ineffective, seemed frequently to pay off, a source of irritation to his partner.

Whooshing down the alley, Mitch’s puck struck with a clack, the cluster came briefly alive, clattered, then stood reconfigured.

“He was coming on to you,” said Mitch.

“Well. . .so it seemed.”

“Seemed! C’mon, chooch. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

“He was using me to get to you.”

“Give me a break.”

“Who are you ticked at, him or me?”

“Both.”

Kevin’s shot nicked Mitch’s disk, nudging it into the OFF space. He noticed that a well-dressed couple several alleys over had settled in for some quiet eavesdropping.

“I can’t believe that shot. You weren’t even looking,” said Mitch.

“That guy Owen had you surrounded like a linebacker.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I thought he was going to carry you off bodily to his lair in the Melaluca trees. I’m not sure there was anything I could have done to stop him.” Mitch cracked up, and the well-dressed couple looked covertly fascinated. “I’ll bet he’s got a pet cougar in his room. ‘Oh, don’t worry, he’s friendly,’ he’d say as he starts unbuttoning your shirt. . .”

This time Mitch’s puck went wide, but bumped another one of his onto the line. They disputed over the scoring.

“It’s right there on the rules,” said Kevin, referring to the scoreboard. Mitch went to see for himself.

“I don’t agree with your interpretation,” he said, and turned to the couple for a second opinion. “Is that my point or not?”

“I believe your piece is out of play,” the man said, with kindly authority.

Mitch accepted the ruling cheerfully enough, but Kevin was a bit stung by having been subjected to verification. He felt, in fact, a little more betrayed than he knew was warranted.

They rented bikes and drifted into town. They went to the Hook and Ladder Gallery, an old converted firehouse, where art was displayed on every square inch of the multi-leveled space. The place was encrusted with art. The owner, a towering old queen tanned into lizardhood and bejeweled with turquoise, escorted them around, reminiscing about his decorating career in Murray Hill and Madrid.

Once outside in the looming sunset, they were pierced with hunger. The Fin ‘n Claw was having a shrimp festival and that sounded good, so that’s where they went. Soon their fingers were sodden with shrimp butter. The shells, translucent shards, were piled high.

“What about that girl?” said Mitch.

“Yeah, I know,” said Kevin.

“She didn’t seem real thrilled.”

“Like she’s seen it all before. And once too often.”

“Is he ‘bi’?”

“I don’t believe in ‘bi’.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I think there’re a few ‘omni’s’ out there, true. But they’re very rare. Like Ray. It’s not an orientation thing.”

“Meaning?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Ray’s a star and an artist and some kind of hero. It’s an aroma; you can smell it. Anything can happen.”

“Oh, I see.”

They wandered out into the courtyard of the little mall, all weathered cedar and densely planted. A winding exterior stairway enclosed a two-story atrium, a deep jungle plantscape, traced with sunset and hung with caged tropical birds, dangling from branches almost within reach. Sated and entranced, they drifted along, gaping at the birds. Macaws, cockatoos, conures. . . They stopped in front of a toucan, awed. The creature was immaculate, scarcely real.

“He’s absolutely gorgeous,” said Mitch. No sooner had he spoken than the bird hopped around on his perch and showed them his other side. A black velour tuxedo, with an ascot of persimmon. The big rainbow beak, comic and artful, gestured along jocosely with the bird’s appraising glances. He peered at them with an azure eye, encircled with lavender kid.

“Shit!” said Kevin.

“Unbelievable,” said Mitch.

Kevin held out his hand, and the bird tapped the cage with its beak, flew down to pick up a grape, then came back up to its perch, and looking directly at them, dropped the grape.

They locked up their bikes and went down to the beach to catch the remains of the flambéd sky. But as they poked along the shore, they knew where they were headed, had been headed since they left the hotel.

Some of the refreshment stands had packed up and gone, but there were fresh crowds, fewer seniors and more adults—party people. The sculpture sites, torch-lit now, had become gathering spots, the sculptures serving as emblem and decor. They watched the Synchronized Tuna dance in the firelight amid bare feet and sunburned faces.

The first prize-winner they saw was the Hutchinson’s piece. It had taken Third Place. It was a plaque-like replica of the Sergeant Pepper album cover. There they all were Marilyn, Brando, Dylan, the Fab Four, the whole motley crew, ranked and scrunched together in the weirdest class picture that ever was. Three-dimensional and drained of color, it had a monumental serenity that seemed after-the-fact and fitting. Several Beatles fans were here; two guys in cutoffs and T-shirts were arguing, intensely engaged, while the girls shrieked with laughter.

“Him and Paul were becoming enemies because… it wasn’t Yoko’s fault, but he was always staying with Yoko, and not with Paul, and they weren’t writing songs together.”

“Yeah, I know, so John wrote ‘Glass Onion,’ and he helped Paul along with that ‘Paul is dead’ scheme to give Paul some due credit that he couldn’t give him since he was always hanging out with Yoko.”

“Yeah, at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields,’ he says he said ‘cranberry sauce.’ I listened to it on a fifteen thousand dollar Harmon Kardon stereo this dude had in Japan and we turned it on at two hundred watts and it says ‘I buried Paul,’ I don’t care—he tried to hide the fact, and said it was a joke, but no way. . .”

“I know, I know, I’m just saying why? Why did they put that in?”

“We heard it blasting at two hundred and fifty watts, that last part, over and over and over again and you could just… you could pick it out to the max.”

“Lennon was an elf,” said Kevin. “You can’t blame Yoko for that.”

As they neared the Mango Club, the crowds grew lush. “There’s Owen,” said Mitch. He was threading his way through the bar, in a fishnet tanktop, drinks clutched in a clump high over his head. “But there’s booze in the blender, and soon it will render…” The club was throbbing, flanked by torchlight. On either side of the entrance were two sculpture sites, one of which was Ray’s. The torches sent ropes of black smoke skyward, and the air smelled like the Fourth of July: sweet, barbecued and salty. They moved up close.

There in the flickering light, the desert metropolis rose from the sand like a reverie. Pyramids, abbeys, towers and courts, architecturally exquisite; it was a composite of dreamscapes from the deepest reaches of folklore. Again, it gave Kevin the woozy impression that he was viewing an actual ruin from a distant perch. “Realm Zone,” read the marker, “by Ray Shelton.” And stuck to that was a blue ribbon.

“Shit.” said Mitch.

“Realm Zone,” said Kevin.

“Unbelievable.”

Kevin felt an arm around his waist.

“Don’t hold back, guys.” Ray had appeared between them, his other arm drawing Mitch close. He smelled spicy and sharp, like a wine cooler.

“Ray!” Mitch piped up. “Fantastic!”

“A mere Fig Newton of the imagination, I assure you.” he said, and kissed Mitch on the cheek. He was radiating poised heat. “Hey! I’m looking forward to those drinks you promised—Kev.”

“I don’t remember promising anything,” Kevin kidded, trying to catch his breath. “Mitch, did I promise anything?”

Ray slipped a folded piece of paper into Kevin’s shirt pocket.

“I want you to notice what I’m doing, Mitch,” he said, patting Kevin’s breast pocket. “In case we get separated. Don’t lose it.”

“Where you going?” said Mitch. “We just got here. Your sculpture is awesome!”

That friendly thump on the chest lingered, reverberating into the somatic roots of Kevin’s body. He wanted to chase it, tackle it. Haul it back home.

“It’s nothing but sand, Mitch,” Ray said. “Nothing but sand.”

Then Owen was there, and things were moving. Carried along on the revelry that was trailing Owen, they were towed into the bar, into the middle of the music and were suddenly having a nice time. It wasn’t a gay bar, but “art” was the prevailing presence that night, and in the wake of all the gypsy artists all was loose. Crowded, splashy, gay. The opening grungy guitar of a popular song surged out and huge whoop went up from the crowd. Dancing erupted.

“Wanna dance?” Owen shouted to Mitch, over the din.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Mitch said. As they headed for the dance floor, Kevin did a little Tarzan mime, and took Mitch’s barstool. Mitch rolled his eyes.

“He’s a big sweet goofball,” said Ray, as they disappeared into the throng. “You don’t have anything to worry about.” He turned away from the dance floor, into the bar, and pensively studied his margarita. His tiny jade earring matched the lime in the glass.

“It’s not Mitch I’m worried about. He’s a little heartbreaker.”

“Owen does seem slightly out to lunch over him. Have you and Mitch been together a long time?

“A few years.” said Kevin. He swallowed. “And you and Owen?” he asked, a tricky gambit. It took a second for Ray to tune in.

“Owen! Oh. . . we’re just friends. He’s one of the sculptors— just for fun. He lives down here on Captiva. He’s the chef at Tony’s. We met a few years ago at the first Sanibel competition.” From the far edge of the crowd the Hutchinsons, and the little bunch they were with—fans—had spotted Ray. “Ray!” they called out over the hubbub. Ray, reluctantly it seemed, waved back. They began threading their way through the crowd.

“Yeah, that was then,” Ray mused, tossing down the last of his margarita. “The sand castles were really something that year.”

“Thank you, Burt Lancaster,” said Kevin. Ray smirked. “Gotcha!” Kevin said, point a gun-finger at him.

Ray grabbed his finger. “Who’s got you?” Kevin looked away. He was hoping to spot Mitch, but saw the Hutchinsons, bobbing nearer.

Ray stood up. “Forgive me? I’m, uh… I don’t want to see anybody else, the Hutchinsons and all. Today’s been, y’ know, a little weird.”

“Yeah Okay. I can imagine.”

“I feel awful.”

“Ray, c’mon. Don’t apologize.”

Suddenly Ray misted over. Just a brief shiny wobble, but there it was. An ache that gleamed across his face from jaw to eyebrow. He got a grip on it and it went straight to his eyes. “That’s the way love is,” he said.

After Kevin lost sight of him, he watched the Hutchinsons, stranded in the middle of the room, watch him leave.

“All I wanna do, is have some fun,” Mitch came back singing... “Where’s Ray?”

“He had to leave,” said Kevin. Owen gave a wise little laugh.

“Is something wrong?”

“Girlfriend trouble,” said Owen.

“Oh.” Mitch flashed Kevin his droll skeptic look, lips crumpled, eyes raised. “She didn’t look all that thrilled at lunch. Are Ray and Brenda married?”

Owen laughed. “Brenda’s his sister. She’s just down for the weekend. It’s Billy. Billy’s his lover.”

Ray, Billy, lovers. . . Kevin felt the words, their images, expand and multiply like shots in a movie.

“Billy!” Mitch gasped. “That you were talking about? That crazy artist?”

Kevin sat there appalled and delighted.

“Um-hm. They met right here two years ago. It’s been a roller coaster ever since, I guess. From what I’ve seen of Billy, anybody’d have their hands full.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah. I guess he took off after the judging. Got an honorable mention, but he was bummed out all day. Wasn’t all that into it.”

“We saw that piece— the Neptune. We thought it was fabulous.”

“Yeah. . . so you can imagine.”

Everything stuttered and slowly wound down after that. Something must have happened earlier on the dance floor, a definitive statement, to cool Owen off. He hung out with them for a while, was gracious, but left without apparent regrets.

“What’d you do to Owen out there?”

“Told him I was a happily married mermaid. Gets ‘em every time.”

They danced a slow dance, hardly moving, just shifting laggardly around in a little circle, holding on tight.

He was a mutt, but a local big-shot kind of mutt. And no one begrudged him the status, although there was no one around at this early morning hour, and no sound but the surf, and his paws scuffing sand. His dawn patrol. He trotted down to the shore to put the Gulf of Mexico in its place. He charged at the waves, barking. He snapped at the bright water. He even bit it. A warning nip. Then, after shaking off the water with a vigor that made him almost levitate, he was off to check out the neighborhood. He loped past the marina, past the dunes, past the Lido Hotel, which stood silent and washed in golden morning peace. The remains of the sand castles drew his interest. He poked among the remnants, pawed the strange sodden fish, trampled turrets, sniffed the crusty broken faces. He found a plastic cup, and excitedly licked out its residue of sweet stale beer, chasing and nosing it through the streets and courts and crumbling splendor of a fallen city.

Then with a yelp he ran down to the shore, to the man in the water. Keeping his distance, he barked a greeting. When that didn’t work, he lurched back and crouched down on his forepaws, a playful menace. He barked some more. He stood up and stared. He whimpered. He circled away and came back. He trotted down to the water. He sniffed the toes. He sniffed the hand. He sniffed the little jade earring, the color of limes. Then he sat down in the sand and howled and howled until the people came.

When Kevin opened his eyes, he saw a crow, perched on a lounge chair outside. Iridescent purple, like an oil spill, in the morning sun. ‘What a strange thing, like a fish-scale or a butterfly wing,’ he quoted aloud.

“Huh?” said Mitch, groggily.

“Edna St. Vincent Millay, pooch,” Kevin said. Then he flung the covers off, and before Mitch could react, he fastened his lips on Mitch’s backside, and blew hard, making a loud flapping buzz. Mitch struggled free, squawking and flailing. “I hate that,” he protested, loving it.

Kevin hopped out of bed. “Did I ever tell you how beautiful you are when you’re angry?” he said.

“All the time.”

They bought coffee and corn muffins at the Seven-Eleven and ate under an umbrella at the pool. The sky, at mid-morning, was already deeply terraced; clouds mounted up in tropical grandeur, heavy, humid, sumptuously colored. They ate a while in silence. A little coterie of rain danced by, drummed the umbrella, ruffled the water in the pool, and was gone.

“Realm Zone,” said Kevin. Mitch looked up from his thoughts. “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Realm Zone.”

“It’s odd. I like it. It means the same thing. Realm. Zone.”

“But not.”

“No, because the ‘realm’ refers to something else. . . a fantasy state. But ‘zone’ is concrete and precise.”

“Exactly. A precise place of fantasy.”

They watched the sky in the pool.

“I wonder what he called it.”

“What?” said Mitch.

“The Neptune piece—Billy.”

“It’d be in the program. . .”

“Yeah, I guess it would.”

“Can I see it?”

“See what?”

“Can I see the program?”

“I don’t have the program.”

“In your pocket!”

Kevin’s hand darted to his breast pocket. He looked down in surprise.

“What the—” He pulled the folded paper out. “What the hay! I thought---“

“You thought it was Ray’s phone number?”

Kevin stared at Mitch. “Yeah.”

Mitch picked it up and opened it. “He probably wrote it inside.” But what was inside wasn’t Ray’s phone number, it was two air tickets to Maui. ‘Have a realm time,’ was all he wrote. ‘Love, Ray.’

Then it was raining for real, jumbo Florida drops, falling hard and splashing big. They gathered up the breakfast stuff, and ran for the hotel. Soon the island was swept with rain, and everything that could be washed, was.

Up in their room, on the lanai, they sat watching the downpour and thinking of lots of things. They thought of stopping by the Mango club to say thanks, but not for long. “Let well enough alone.” said Kevin.

“Yeah, man,” said Mitch. “Let it be.”

Sandcastles

2007-11-12T20:31:00.004-05:00

The 21st Annual American Sandsculpting Championship rose out of Fort Myers Beach's sugar sand last weekend. The competition was a masters' invitational. I've always loved this festival, celebrating the monumental and momentary, the fantastic and the fleeting...

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