Tonight I'm flying to Minas Gerais for five days, but just because I will be out of the country this weekend doesn't mean I'm going to shrink from my responsibilities as an American. The following story can be read now or saved till Sunday.
In 1999 the Super Bowl returned to South Florida, and the sports editor asked me to write some color stories for the Sun-Sentinel. I was given a pass that didn't entitle me to a seat but allowed me to wander around the stadium.
In the press tent before the game I wrote my first story on a laptop. Dave Barry sat three tables over, and I remember watching him, as I searched for words, typing without pause. He had no notes, and he kept his eyes on the screen as his fingers danced atop the keyboard. I wondered what he was writing and concluded that it was probably his next book, while his wife, a sports writer for the Herald, covered the game.
I finished before kick-off, successfully sent my story to the newsroom, and went in to roam. It was with a feeling of great elation that the electricity in the stadium only amplified. I was positively giddy. Walking down the steps behind one end zone, I spontaneously reached into my bookbag and grabbed my pocket Webster's. (Unused to laptops, I had brought it along as a reference tool.)
"DICTIONARIES!!" I cried, holding it high in classic vendor fashion. "GET YOUR DICTIONARIES HERE!!"
People looked up from the pre-game festivities in astonishment. I felt a small part of Super Bowl history.
I got up at 6 yesterday morning, just in time to see the third-set tie-break and the presentation of the trophies.
The beauty of watching Federer at the top of his game is that you get not only to see great shots but - when the match is over and the microphone in place - to hear good lines. All tournament long he'd been brilliant and loose, coming up with responses - to both opponents and interviewers - that defied probability. He repeatedly rose above the relentless bludgeoning (to use McEnroe's term) of modern tennis and the deadening cliches of modern athletes. He was as deft with his quips as he was with his drop shots.
Yesterday, in accepting his trophy, he became the first player in ages to describe his emotions with the words "over the moon."
It was especially gratifying to hear remembering that, after last year's final, he seemed to be on the downward slope, replaced by the indefatigable and barely intelligible Rafael Nadal. This year's Open was a victory for athletic and linguistic grace.
There was a long line of cars heading into Key West on Sunday. I turned off Truman and cut down back streets to get to Simonton, where I checked into the Southwinds Motel and learned that my chambermaid was from Zakopane.
I drove back to the art fair I'd seen coming in, and read the artistic statement of one of the exhibitors. "As a lifelong conservationist, the world is a place I have..."
"Let me know if you have any questions," the artist said.
"Would you mind a little grammatical suggestion?" I asked her.
"Are you a teacher?" she asked, after I'd corrected her lead. Her friend told her: "If you change it, I'll bet you'll sell every painting here."
Duval Street was thick with crowds reading shop window T-shirts. "Wish You Were Beer." Down at Mallory Square, a magician told a girl in the crowd: "You're too young for me. Come back in half an hour." The city of Hemingway reduced to puns, quips and dangling participles.
A more sophisticated scene reigned at The Gardens Hotel, as locals and guests listened to jazz (not far from a small pool Hemingway reportedly fell into once). Around 7 I left to stroll up by the cemetery, leaving the crowds and the music and marveling at the lush quiet and moonlit fronds. Though on Ashe Street one front porch held a multilevel platform filled with various modes of transportation - train, steetcar, mountain gondola - and numerous figures that, at the press of a button, took turns breaking into animated song.
Driving home the next day I stopped at Bud 'n' Mary's in Islamorada to see my friends MB 'n' Ron. They gave me a tour of their houseboat with its beer-commercial view of a palm-studded strip jutting into the Atlantic. Then we drove up to Morada Bay for lunch, sitting in the shade eating grouper tacos and looking out at mangrove islands. It rather made up for not having a white Christmas.
I have a funny feeling that the Heisman Trophy will go to Barack Obama.
In the Sept. 7 issue of The New Yorker, Lillian Ross wrote about female Russian tennis players, one of whom, Elena Vesnina, was quoted as saying: "You have too many things in America - you have too much fun stuff. Here you have everything so you do not have to fight. We're strong fighters. We have this fire."
Vesnina's fire was put out in the third round of the U.S. Open, part of a complete dousing of Russian women before the quarterfinals that included the #1 woman player in the world Dinara Safina. Watching Safina - and Nadia Petrova and Svetlana Kuznetsova - you would have thought the distinguishing feature of the Russians was not fire but nerves. Four of them - including the statuesque shriekers Elena Dementieva (5'11") and Maria Sharapova (6'3") - were snuffed out by the 17-year-old, 5'6" Melanie Oudin, who hails from Marietta, Georgia. The American, too-much-fun-stuff Georgia.
I wonder if Melanie reads The New Yorker.