“And then suddenly….last summer…”Oh how ineffably cruel, the car that takes you away, away from that bay. How cruel the jet that takes you from the sparkling sands and jet-blue skies!
Too soon by a half! I’m suffering from post-traumatic non-stress syndrome.
As a European trapped in an American’s body (and white tennis shoes) - at least when it comes to love for vacation time - I think that ten months since my last vacation are in European months equivalent to at least twenty-two.
Too short. Sat-Sun-Mon and a little nub of Tuesday, which was cruelly compacted into 9-10:30am beach reading “The Historian”, stretching out in the sand languorously as a cat with feet in the cooling sand, and then a 10:30-11:15 run around town before one last green gemstone water splashing shore sprint.
Eccentric Florida house
“A day at the beach” goes the popular phrase, something that consoles in that it seems to specify the proper unit of time for the activity – a day, not a week, and since we had more than a day but much less than a week it felt okay, I guess, though if I had my druthers I’d live there, though that also provokes a cliché: “beach bum”.
The aqua-waters that speed by 60-East seem to taunt. We traded forty-five minutes of pool time for a trip to an antiquarian bookstore in downtown Tampa. It was a compromise decision, for even a bookstore can’t eliminate the pull of sun and beer. A bookstore that closed too early on Monday eve to visit was called “Haslam’s” and my wife said it sounded Muslim and so I thought it funny when I read praise from the brochure: “Over the years, Haslam’s has been a Mecca for the city’s book lovers…”.
Running down the run-down Mandalay road along the beach you can see why ex-pats from the North descend here to live out a Jimmy Buffet song. The boxy motels along the sun-drunk lane lends a fittingness to Florida’s claim as the last home of Jack Kerouac.
Reminds me of a college town, with the sleepy, sunny mornings, the shopkeepers just opening up at 10am, the modest squat houses of ‘60s & ‘70s vintage with “For Rent” signs. The languor in the air. The young people and cigarette smoke, the beer-drinkers in the stoop.
Beer, like heaven and hell, transcends time at Clearwater Beach. At the sit-up window outside the Mandalay Grill a middle-aged couple are happily consuming beer, an hour and a half before noon. At Kelly’s, a sign redefines the word ‘hour’: “Happy Hour 12-7”. This too was college, when alcohol wasn’t just for lunch & dinner.
I always imagine vacations as Larry Hagman days. Hagman, the actor who played JR Ewing, had at least two eccentricities. One, is he spent one day not uttering a word, a natural enough thing for an actor given how he spends his or her time. Their way of resting. The other is that he went though every waking moment slightly tipsy. It cost him his liver, but I figure I can do the same for a few hours daily while on vacation.
T-shirt sighted: “Give me a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll sit in a boat and drink all day.”
Sitting poolside at sunset, quivering palms before a pink-orange sky make it look like the cover of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” album. In the background there’s live music, a guy singing a Jimmy Buffet song: “Son of a son of a sailor”.
A balcony – oh the power and romance of a balcony! It’s like…alchemy. Fifty feet above the ground I can see a hundred and eighty degrees of land & seas: the low-slung buildings of Clearwater city, the far ‘scrapers along Clearwater Beach, the palms below me, the pool beyond that, the ocean beyond that.
But please don’t feed the seagulls. Please. It feels like the Hitchcock movie at 8:30 in the morning. They come in liked crazed kamikaze pilots, screeching and waking the dead. One poops inches from my books. When you have a couple hundred neighboring balconies all it takes is 1% of your neighbors to decide to feed the birds and chaos results.
The following morning I woke up early, before 7am, and it’s still dark. But then the light starts to strengthen and the first gull does a drive-by, a solitary sweep of the balconies, hoping that the early bird gets the Dorito. A harbinger of coming unpleasantness. Soon his friends will join his screeches and soon someone will be fool enough to throw a potato chip and then we’ll all suffer for it. Sure enough, two minutes later and they come not as single spies but small battalions. It’s time to go to breakfast.
One of the pleasures of this hotel is the free daily NY Times. The Times is tolerable when free and it’s a weekday (their slogan: ‘50% less bias per page Monday thru Friday!’). And they hired Amy Welborn so they can’t be terribly bad, but…
But nothing is more civilized than lingering over a cup of morning java and reading the paper. David Brooks has an interesting editorial saying how covering the political season this year has impoverished his sense of wonder. He writes of C.S. Lewis and how the medieval view of stars and asteroids was not as rock-like machines, but full of energy and verve and intelligence.
The lock waitsSteven mentioned how bad form it is to criticize another blogger’s poetry. Silence is best in that situation; why tear down? I think writing poetry is like sex in that even if you’re terrible at it you’ll still like it. Which is why far more people write than read poetry. Writing prose also must be sufficiently universally pleasing to warrant so many blogs.
attached to door or safe,
Some stationary value.
A key moves
agile and unencumbered
seeks the lock.
A miracle it seems
that key finds lock so often,
such that to the uninitiated
it looks effortless.
The beach is my library, my gym, my solarium, my writing venue, my nature sanctuary, my concert hall, my drinking joint….Today started with a leisurely read of “Geography of Bliss”, then by 2:30 or so a 45 minute jog watching the pelicans dive and fall as thunderbolts and then music and beer.
Ben Franklin said that beer is proof that God loves us, but that apologetic seemed a means to an end. As would seem my early fascination with whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. Back in the day my reverence for literary geniuses outpaced my reverence for spiritual geniuses such that if the Bard was Catholic that helped make the case for Catholicism more that, say, St. Francis. Perhaps this was due to thinking that saints are freaks of (super) nature and were “command performances” in that God made them saints while he made the rest of us average. But Shakespeare Catholic!? Whoa, that would be cool, I thought, because it would’ve seemed a “guy like the rest of us” (except for being a literary genius of course) chose Catholicism. Heresies we have always with us, to one degree or another.
Ceremonial first use of Guinness bottle cap opener/hat
The sand is white and powdery. What is it like? Suddenly it hits me - it is like…flour! It’s so white that the white-cap of wave matches the shore as if the wave meeting shore is a home-coming, as if wave is sand and sand is wave.
There are many things I have yet to do to make this place mine: to walk the length of the pier and explore the housing structure in the center of it. To walk in the Mandalay Grill and have a look-see. To re-visit the little ma & pop shop with the sweet Indian woman who has yet to master taking credit – she debited my Visa for $24 instead of crediting it (a good deal if you can find it). I paid cash and she said she’d void it.
I decide to move the chair close to the water and my wife says of a half-empty cup of beer: “don’t leave that cup!” I tell her not to worry, that I leave no beer, or children, behind. I suspect I’m too suspicious: we see a woman extremely well-endowed and my wife asks if I think they are real despite their sag and I say that maybe they are fake and that now some surgeons make drooping breasts to fool the eye into believing they’re natural. After while it would seem easier just to leave the natural be in order that it appear most natural of all.
Was changing channels and was momentarily (fortunately only very momentarily) arrested by the Montel Williams’ show. He had on a woman who had surgery to increase the size of her rear. I predict that tomorrow’s “virgin” will be the surgically-unenhanced girl, and that will be a turn-on. At the beach the swmsuits make Hilton Head’s look like those at a Mennonite convention. There are women with garish bruises on their thighs and buttocks. Spousal abuse? No, tattoos. Tatts are like an arm’s race (pun intended). You have to keep getting more in order to keep up with the next guy.
The Eyes Have ItThe sea is green and cold this time of year. “For watching, not for swimming,” says my wife. (Later it would get warmer.)
Mudpaste He applies
to the blind man’s eyes
till sight restored
a life fresh moored.
The reverse be true?
for the man who rue
too keen of sight
and Aphrodite’s might?
When were were kids we’d go to Lake Michigan, but one year we got to go to the ocean. In both cases the claim-to-fame was that you could not see to the other side. And yet the ocean had that exotic ingredient of salt, something our creeks, rivers and local lakes didn’t have. And the ocean had waves, serious waves, and prettier shells, sometimes serious shells.The fruit of the sea was such that poor Lake Michigan seemed a pale imitation, and in my ‘70s clericalism I thought Lake Michigan a married deacon while the Atlantic was a priest.
Steven Riddle (one isn’t tempted to call him “Steve” is one?) made an interesting observation that it is good nature is imperfect lest we turn green with envy. And yet…is there anything so perfect as the flight of a hawk, soaring above? Or the sun refracting through shade trees? Nature seems our consolation, sometimes, more than our envy. We look at our dog & sigh: “if only I loved like him”…er, I guess that is envy!
Prim and properThere’s a pelican on the beach today unable to fly. A fish-hook with line has penetrated his abdomen and shoulder and so the bird’s wings are trapped in the line. A young man slowly sidles up to grab the neck and hold it close so another guy can cut the line and deal with the hooks. The big bird didn’t fly off immediately after the “surgery” but tried his wings on the ground for awhile before summoning the energy of lift-off.
in the water
sits the pelican.
Ungainly in flight
like Orville Wright
till like a thunderbolt she falls.
Four black youths, cool & muscular walking down the beach. Leader trips over a hole in the sand and the others laugh uproariously. One says something like “check out the one in pink”, meaning the young Hispanic-looking girl in the striped bikini next to us, lying on her stomach facing away from the beach. She turns and looks up at them thinking (correctly) they meant her. I look to see her reaction but could see none.
Too many Speedos down here. My wife seems to take too keen an interest by asking if it’s usual for ‘it’ to lay upward or downward. Steven says Speedos are the European and South American influence here. Tampa has a Spanish flavor and thus feels comfortable to Spaniards and Brazilians. It’s Miami on the cheap.
British family sits next to us on our Busch Gardens visit. We are eating on a deck overlooking distant giraffe and zebra and the English family's accents make it feel so…colonial. Dr. Livingston, I presume?
I suppose the cheap dollar makes it a lot more affordable for them. The cheap dollar is due to our debt load, which is arguably due to George Bush being unable to say “no” to Congressional pork (due to an unpopular war) as well as the Iraq war spending itself. So maybe they are here in Florida as a result of an evil Middle Eastern dictator? Interconnected are we?
Polemics is the last refuge of a scoundrel, especially down here, but it comes to mind that some pro-aborts point to the death penalty as proof of pro-life hypocrisy. Indeed, I used to think that it was crazy pro-lifers supported the death penalty if only for tactical reasons – why in the world give not take the death penalty red herring away from our opponents? That is naive, I suppose, as changing hearts and minds seems little affected by red herrings. I would not think the welfare state was a good idea even if Democrats like John Kerry gave more of their income to helping the poor.
There was a group of veterans at the airport, being flown to Washington D.C. as gratitude for their service to our country, made possible by corporate donations. The volunteers helping the disabled vets had t-shirts that read: “If you can read, thank a teacher. If you can read English, thank a vet.”
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