Category: hometown
It is no fun sitting around waiting to hear from editors. It is much more enjoyable to be out somewhere imagining the calls and e-mails piling up.
But yesterday after lunch I sat on the balcony and worked on a speech. The sky had a wintry cast. A light rain started falling, tapping the palm fronds and dulling the canal. (At moments like this I try to block out the condos - both the one in front of me and the one I'm in - and imagine myself a character in a Graham Greene novel.) Thunder - February thunder! - crashed in the west. The rain fell harder, dimming my view and dampening my papers. Reluctantly, I moved inside.
Opening the door to go check the mail, I found a large white envelope propped against the wall. Inside it was a book: The Extraordinary Existence of Nadine Tallemann: A Bildungsroman. Turning it over I found a picture of the author and recognized her immediately as our second-floor neighbor. (She had never mentioned she wrote.) Turning back to the cover I read a quote from Vladimir Nabokov's Ada: "...the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance."
He walked into the press room preceded by his handlers (some robed, some suited) almost exactly 30 minutes late. But you can't fault someone for making journalists wait, especially someone who could take as his motto Herbert von Karajan's exasperated comment once to a Berlin taxi driver: "I'm wanted everywhere!"
Representatives from newspapers and television stations took turns asking questions. The reporter from the Miami Herald asked what he did in his spare time in South Florida. He said he followed his normal routine of reading and meditating. (Did the reporter expect him to say, "clubbing"?) A more pointed question was the old attack on pacifism: How can non-violence work when dealing with terrorists? He talked about the importance of education.
When he finally appeared on stage, a sold-out crowd stood and applauded. He sat cross-legged in an armchair, in his scarlet and yellow robe, and spoke about compassion. Answering questions, he sometimes gave the impression that the job of being an oracle was getting a bit tiresome. But his famous playfulness came through, as when he made fun of our president's ears.
Filing out of the hall, the crowd appeared as a mix of young and old, students and retired people. The latter were less bedizened than the usual condo crowd, and could almost (but not quite) have come from Portland. One young man said, after what was obviously his first exposure to His Holiness, "He was a lot more down-to-earth than I had imagined him." Another said: "He was funny though. He was like a funny old uncle."
For me the most interesting aspect of the day was not so much what he said - stressing the importance of compassion, selflessness, inner beauty - but that he said it in South Florida. (It was as audacious as Pope John Paul II preaching about human dignity in communist Poland.) And thousands of people listened approvingly.
Toby Barlow wrote an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Times about a Michigan couple that moved back to Detroit from Naples, Florida, giving up "endless golf" for fund-raisers and "lectures on design and sustainable development."
At the end of the piece, the author admitted that "Detroit might no longer be a city where dreams come true the way they once did." But he said his story about the couple illustrated some salient points, the last one being "how nice it is we're not in Florida."
It does get a little old, the endless golf. I played 97 holes yesterday and I had a temperature of 101. It's a good thing I don't have a job but then this is Florida, where nobody has a job, we're too busy strolling down fairways, putting back divots. Forget space programs, medical centers, architectural firms, university research, marine laboratories, art fairs, opera houses, design seminars, creative writing programs - we're all just focused on getting that dimpled white ball into its little hole. You can't walk down the street without somebody asking your handicap. You spend more time in your golf cart than you do in your Lexus. (Hey, how do you think we can all afford such an expensive game?) Our main concern with pythons is that they'll start swallowing our balls.
I'd write more but my tee time is in two minutes.
Yesterday I had to take my laundry up to the fourth floor. The dryers were spinning but the two washing machines sat empty. I filled the first one and moved to the second. The door inched open and an elderly woman walked in.
"Oh, you snuck in on me," she said with dismay. She had filled the dryers and now was returning with more wash.
"Uh, I can move to another floor," I said. After all, I was the interloper.
"No, I'll wait," she said resignedly, and then stood there watching as I loaded more dirty clothes and thought of all the women throughout the country bemoaning the invasion of their laundry rooms by laid off men.
Yesterday afternoon I took Lucas to the airport, waiting outside to make sure he made his plane. (He had switched to an earlier flight.) Cars pulled up and discharged people, often threesomes: parents hugging a traveling daughter.
A policeman told me I couldn't sit in front of the terminal, so I pulled around to the south and planted myself in a tow-away zone just in front of another terminal. More cars rolled up and more threesomes emerged. The daughter (rarely was there a son) would wave a last goodbye and walk through the automatic doors to return to college, or a career in the city - an interesting if inclement life - while mom and dad drifted back to their sunlit condo. Except for the blue skies, it felt very Russian, seeing young women leaving and the old folks left behind.
Saturday evening the family contingent - filling two Hondas - pulled into the garage at 7th and Collins and then walked across the street to Puerto Sagua. We found a table for six in the back and added a high chair for Gaby and put another chair at the end.
The Scull sisters' 3-D painting of Old Havana hung above us, Lucas sitting almost face-to-face with the woman with the face of Rodney Dangerfield. And, happily, with his back to the Mickey Mouse balloon. (This is a later addition to the painting that I find troubling: What does Disney have to do with Cuba?)
Our waitress handed us menus and said: "I'll be back in two hours."
She returned after a few minutes.
"Do you have macaroni and cheese for the kids?" Michael asked her.
"No," she said firmly. "Black beans and rice. It's good for them."
She left and immediately returned with a plate. Alex ate the rice but ignored the beans; Gaby decided that the beans were food and anything that was food was fine by him.
Shortly the table filled with plates of grilled grouper, fish in green sauce, fried plantains, more beans and rice. We washed it all down with a pitcher of sangria.
After our espressos we did a little dance past waiters and waitresses and tables filled with tourists and locals (their jackets and sweaters making the place seem even more crowded). Out on the street, as a perfect ending to the outing, a man dressed as a woman stood waiting at the light.