Tuesday morning I dropped my car at the garage and walked with my book to the nearby café. The book, A Sunny Place for Shady People by Ryan Murdock, is about Malta. I left it on an outside table and went inside to order.
“How’s that book you’re reading?” a young man asked me.
I told him it was very good, written by a Canadian who spent four years on the island.
“I noticed the title,” the man said. “You know, that’s been said about this place.”
I told him that “a sunny place for shady people” was, originally, Somerset Maugham’s description of the French Riviera. He nodded as if that – or at least the author’s name – rang a bell.
I took my iced tea outside and noticed that the man at the neighboring table was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls.
There’s a house in the neighborhood that marks every holiday with a lovely lawn display, usually involving inflatable figures. The current one features a turkey in a pilgrim’s hat standing atop a toppled Santa, and the handwritten sign: “Wait your turn, big boy.”
I am a judge for this year’s Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which opens tonight. It would be hard to find a better time to lose oneself in movies.
Saturday, Lionel Messi played at Chase Stadium (and scored a hat trick) while Taylor Swift sang at Hard Rock Stadium (to a record 80,000-plus crowd) – two of the world’s most famous people performing on the same night in South Florida.
My friend from St. Pete had a couple free hours yesterday afternoon so I showed him around Fort Lauderdale. Our first stop was the Old Florida Bookshop on Griffin Road. Dave is also a writer, and I knew he’d enjoy seeing the store’s high, book-lined walls inside a nondescript strip mall. William the owner told me that business was booming; apparently, someone had posted about the store on Instagram and people were now flocking to it. (My article about his shop a few years ago didn’t have quite the same effect.) And, to William’s surprise, the majority of new customers were young women. I mentioned that the majority of readers were women, but he said that, traditionally, they were not frequenters of used bookstores. As someone who is, I knew exactly what he meant. Years ago, visiting Larry McMurtry’s used bookstore in Archer City, Texas, I had noted the “asocial, middle-aged men on a mission,” adding that “you find few giggly girls in the stacks of secondhand bookstores.”
I bought a slim volume of poems by Edgar Lee Masters and we got in the car and drove to Holiday Park, as I wanted to show Dave the new Iceplex. Quite a few cars sat in the parking lot, which surprised me, as I had checked the website and seen that no Panthers practice was scheduled. Entering the chill, we saw a handful of young women practicing figure skating on the first rink, one of them tethered to a kind a harness that connected to a short pole that her coach held to keep her from falling during jumps. We walked upstairs and found the second rink filled with children while sweatered mothers sat chatting in the stands. The sight of South Florida kids ice skating on their day off from school for a hurricane was as rich as the thought of young women haunting secondhand bookstores.
Our friends from St. Pete arrived in Fort Lauderdale Beach yesterday afternoon with their two teenage sons and their German short-haired pointer. We met them for happy hour at their hotel, the Shorebreak, which accepts dogs. (It's part of the Kimpton group.) In fact, a sign in the lobby, above two water bowls, reads: “Dogs welcome. People tolerated.”
In the bar, we found a beautiful German shepherd-and-chow mix and a gorgeous Newfoundland, both evacuees from the west coast of Florida. We learned that the Newfie had not made it to the room yet because he was scared to walk down the corridor.
Shortly our friends arrived, with their pointer on a leash. Taking him in, the Newfie’s master said, “It’s like the Westminster Dog Show in here.”