As you know, I like small-world coincidences. The one I wrote about recently, which occurred at the Miami Book Fair, had a self-selecting aspect: the fact that I was talking to a fellow writer who also made his home in Florida.
But in Washington, eating lunch at Clyde’s on M Street, I experienced a pure moment of happenstance. Our waitress was a young woman who had recently moved to the city. “From where?” we asked.
“Ft. Myers,” she said. We told her we were from Ft. Lauderdale, on the other coast. She said she’d recently graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University. I asked what she’d majored in.
“Journalism,” she said.
I asked if she had had Lyn Millner as a professor; Lyn is a dear friend and former freelancer of mine.
“Lyn is my favorite human being in the whole world!” the waitress we stumbled upon in Georgetown exclaimed.
The condo holiday party: When you spend a couple hours in the lobby with the people you usually share awkward silences with in the elevator.
Electric scooters are just the latest fad allowing Americans to avoid physical exertion.
Up in Washington over Thanksgiving weekend, I was struck by the fact that our capital, of all American cities, is the one that’s the closest to being the antithesis of Miami. It is serious while Miami is fun, grey vs. colorful (architecturally), bland vs. flashy (sartorially), monumental vs. homey, international vs. Hispanic. About the only thing they have in common is corruption.
For Americans, isn't a hatred of immigrants a form of self-hatred?
Yesterday at a little before sunset I zipped up my jacket and headed out for a walk around the island. On the south dock a man walked slowly in T-shirt and shorts.
"Don’t you think you oughta go home and put on a sweater?” a man asked from his boat. He was having drinks with his wife, both of them dressed warmly
“I do,” the man said thoughtfully. “But I’m really enjoying the feeling of being cold.”
When I came around a second time, he was still talking to the couple on the boat. The conversation had moved to the condition of the dock. At a handful of points during my walk, yellow tape and orange cones had caused me to detour onto the grass, or into the parking lot, because of loose boards.
“They oughta just put police tape around the whole thing,” the man on the boat said, holding his drink.
“We’re going to get everybody,” the man in the T-shirt said, “to lose 10 pounds.”