Yesterday evening in Delray Beach I was in a restaurant, waiting to use the men’s room, when I noticed that the man in front of me was wearing a cap with writing in Hebrew on it. I asked him what it said.
“Guess,” he said.
“Israel,” I said.
Apparently I was way off. He went through the letters phonetically, but I still had no clue. Then he enlightened me:
“Yankees,” he said.
Yesterday, Hania and I drove down to our lawyer’s office in Coral Gables and signed our wills. It was one of those rites of passage moments – like graduating from college or getting married – but without the celebratory aspect. At one point three secretaries walked in to witness the signing, and then signed the copies themselves, and when all the papers had been gathered there were no hearty congratulations. The sense of relief – surely not accomplishment – I felt that we had finally done the deed was accompanied by a sense of doom.
Driving home on I-95, I thought: Now if we die in a car crash people will say, “Well, they signed their wills just in time.”
I have always liked my dentist. The first time I went to see him, in 1990, he looked in my mouth and declared: “There’s a lot of work I could do in there but until something starts bothering you we’ll just leave it alone.” My affection for him grew even stronger this week when Hania received a reminder from him to make an appointment. It was printed like an old Florida postcard, “Greetings from your DENTIST” it read, with the letters of the last word filled with tropical scenes. Underneath, instead of “Wish you were here,” were the words “Hope you can make it…”
A friend and fellow travel writer wrote to me recently about how incurious many young people are these days. (He's a couple decades younger than I am.) I wrote back to him that incuriousness is nothing new, though today it has a political component - the idea that one group of people has been so prominent for so long that there’s nothing new to discover about them. It’s absurd, of course, on multiple levels, though it gives the incurious a perfect excuse for their incuriousness.
Yesterday evening, after attending the reception at the Coral Gables Museum for the finalists in the annual photography contest (of which I was one), Hania I went next door for a bite at Books & Books. The foyer was crowded with young people who, I learned from our waitress, had been there for a drawing class. They were soon replaced by a large crowd speaking Spanish. Many in this group were also young, but better dressed, a number of the women in dresses and high heels. They filled the west room to hear to a discussion between two Cuban dissidents. At one point I went to the men’s room, where the two men’s voices came through speakers placed above the urinals. It was just like at the ballpark.
I spoke with a friend over the weekend who teaches high school English and is worried about the new guidelines regarding Black History. "Instead of '12 Years a Slave,'" he said, "it’ll be '12 Years an Unpaid Intern.'"