“How can you live there?” northern friends sometimes ask Floridians after an election, especially those of us who moved here from the north. The tacit suggestion is that we should leave such a backward place. (Never mind that Broward, our home county, voted overwhelmingly for Biden). While my question to them is: “If you’re so disappointed in the state’s performance why don’t you move here and improve it?”
Last week, when people were marveling at the long lines at polling stations, and taking comfort from them (large numbers of Americans politically involved), I remembered an article I read many years ago in a British magazine. The author argued that the habitually lackluster turnout in American elections, rather than a disgrace, was a sign of the nation’s health. It is in corrupt, disastrously mismanaged countries, he noted, where the population (if allowed) flocks to the polls out of desperation.
And I thought: We’ve become one of those countries.
Today I think, even more sadly: We’re that unique country that comes out in droves for corruption and mismanagement.
There is a story that Sergei Rachmaninoff, after presenting the score for his Vespers, was asked by the choirmaster how he expected the singers to hit such difficult notes. The great composer replied, “I have faith in my countrymen.”
Yesterday afternoon I watched Part I of the excellent Netflix documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. I knew that he had been the heartthrob of the bobby soxers, but seeing the old footage made me realize that he had been a precursor of the Beatles, the group that would eventually, temporarily, make him irrelevant.
I also knew that he had gone from a fresh-faced crooner to a master of phrasing, but I had always assumed the transformation had been seamless if necessarily - for the precise emotion in all those saloon songs - painful (thank you, Ava Gardner). But the documentary showed the hard times in between when, amazing to imagine now, no one wanted anything to do with him. This dark period created the man we think of today when we hear the name Sinatra, the man a freelancer by the name of Don Gillmor captured in the lede of a travel story about Chicago I published in the Sun-Sentinel:
“Few cities make me feel like Frank Sinatra. Not the literal Sinatra, hoarse and bloated, eating eggs, as Kitty Kelley described, from the naked stomach of a prostitute – most cities make me feel that way. But the mythical, Songs-for-Swinging-Lovers Sinatra, jacket slung over one shoulder, fedora cocked to the side, a man unburdened.”
Hania had a flat tire yesterday on I-95, just south of Woolbright Road. In the hour that she stood on the shoulder waiting for AAA – a friend had been killed by a distracted driver on an LA freeway while sitting in his car – one car stopped. It was filled with Central Americans who, in minimal English, eagerly offered to help her.