Sunday afternoon in Sarasota we drove to the Amish neighborhood of Pinecraft. I had heard about the Amish community in the city, and we had seen girls in white hair bonnets on bicycles downtown, but I had never explored the area.
As we expected, the businesses were closed, but the streets were animated with people riding large, three-wheeled cycles – the men in beards and black hats, the women in long dresses and white bonnets. The one-story houses often had cycles parked in front, a few had laundry drying on a line. They were small and close together, like in a compound, with tiny front yards and very few trees. Here and there a circle of people sat on a side porch. Sunday visiting. Occasionally a woman in a dark dress, her face to the sun, stretched on a chaise. I had never seen an Amish person getting a tan, at least not by lying motionless. We came across one supine woman reading a book. I stopped the car, and she got up to chat.
“Are you from Pennsylvania?” I asked her. She was. She said that she was going back tomorrow. Most of the Amish here, she told us, come down for a few weeks in the winter. I had thought that they were permanent residents, perhaps even farming here, but later I read that they had been lured down in the 1920s but found the soil unsuitable for the celery they thought they could grow. Yet they had enjoyed the sun, and the warm weather, so they started to come down every winter. And if you think about it, much of Amish life is spent outdoors; Florida gives the people the opportunity to increase the time they spend outside. And if it means riding a cycle instead of driving a buggy (Sarasota doesn’t allow horses on its roads), so be it. The woman told us that the house behind her was an Airbnb she had rented for her stay, and that next week young people would be coming for spring break. It was odd hearing these two modern-day institutions appear in the German-accented speech of a woman in 18th century dress.
We wished her safe travels home and headed down the street to the dead end. Turning around, we saw a woman in a swimsuit sunbathing in her front yard. She was from Indiana, she told us, and not Amish; she was staying in her sister-in-law's house. I said it seemed like a safe, quiet neighborhood.
“We had a break-in a few months ago,” she said. Of course, the car in front was a sign that the residents weren’t Amish, but why would burglars even go to a neighborhood where the majority of people don’t own jewelry or electronic devices? What would they find to steal – cutlery?
Monday, before leaving Sarasota, we returned to Pinecraft and stopped at Yoder’s Market. A café across the street was full of Amish drinking coffee and eating ice cream. Driving around Lancaster Country, I had always seen the Amish working - plowing fields, baling hay, tilling gardens - and it was new and refreshing to see them relaxing.
We walked through the cafe terrace and found a group of people sitting with suitcases at the back of a building with a sign on the side that said “Tourist Church.”
“There’s a bus coming soon that’s going to take them back to Pennsylvania,” an elderly woman seated on a three-wheeler told us. She wore a black sweater over a long blue dress. The young couple sitting nearby was waiting for the bus, the man in a straw hat and thick brown beard. The hats had changed from Sunday black to weekday straw. His wife told Hania that the Amish don’t travel on planes unless there’s an emergency.
“They’re supposed to get in noon tomorrow,” the woman on the cycle told me, mentioning the town of Intercourse, not sure I would have heard of it, but of course I had. (My uncle lives in Lancaster). “They don’t stop for the night. Then when they arrive there are drivers to take them home. They’re farmers, older men, who drive to make some extra money.”
A big, modern bus pulled into the parking lot. “Ephrata, PA” was written on the side. The driver stepped down and checked a list with a woman in a bonnet. Then the men started loading the luggage into the bow.
We said our goodbyes and headed over to Yoder’s Market, and then the restaurant, where I bought two slices of shoo-fly pie to go. They came in a plastic bag that read: “I (Heart) Yoder’s” and under it: “1 Chronicles 16:34.”
At home I looked up the verse:
“Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever.”
Watching the Republican response to the State of the Union address last night, my immediate thought was: When did Congresspeople start taking acting lessons?
Saturday evening I went to the Broward Center to see Bob Dylan. I wouldn’t have gone if he’d been in a big arena, but I liked the fact that he had chosen an elegant concert hall that was almost literally down the street. I still regret not seeing Sinatra when he performed there in the ’90s, even though his voice was shot by then. For Dylan, a shot voice was signature, and immutable.
Though I had heard of concerts where he didn’t even try, treating his audiences with a kind of contempt.
A multigenerational crowd loitered in the lobby. Men outnumbered women, a few of them paunchy in black, declarative T-shirts. My seat in the mezzanine was between two large males. Rick, who introduced himself first, was with his wife; Steve sat with his wife and 20-something daughter. “She told me about the concert,” he explained. “I didn’t even know she listened to Dylan.” Then he launched into a detailed history of the music scene in Detroit.
The curtain went up, thankfully, a little after 8, revealing a dimly lit stage with Dylan seated in the center at a piano. A more dignified pose, I thought, than sitting with a guitar (à la Willie Nelson). Without introduction, the band launched into the first song. Followed by the next one. After about the fourth, a woman shouted “Like a Rolling Stone!,” which of course Dylan ignored. “Gods do not answer letters,” John Updike wrote of Ted Williams’ refusal to come out of the dugout after hitting a home run in his final at-bat.
A couple times people started clapping rhythmically to a melody, then quickly stopped. They craved the shared, raucous communion of a rock concert, but the so-called Rough and Rowdy Ways tour had more in common with a recital. People listened silently, reverently, straining to make out the words of a laureate. Up in the mezzanine, I failed miserably; the most success I had was with a song about Key West.
But the voice – that voice that has been wailing in the background of my life for more than half century – had a hypnotic effect. The hall at times took on the stillness of a dream, not least because I was hearing Bob Dylan on the banks of the New River.
Outside, afterwards, I passed a middle-aged couple speaking Spanish. The woman was from Costa Rica, the man from Venezuela, though they now lived in Hallandale.
“Did you have trouble understanding him?” I asked.
“Yes,” the woman said. “But he was still great.”
I asked them about the final song. Dylan had played the harmonica and it had given me chills. I told them I thought I had heard faint echoes of “Blowing in the Wind.”
“That’s because you wanted to,” the woman informed me.
Waiting for Hania to pick me up, I saw a young man in troubadour attire – black jeans, black jacket, black hat – standing by the gate of the dressing room parking lot. He was a friend of one of the band members, he told me, and had caught only the tail end of the concert. I confessed that this was my first Dylan show.
“It’s good you came,” he said. “It’s important that we pay our respects.”
At the Tarpon River Civic Association meeting last night, Mayor Trantalis addressed the debate currently going on between the city and the county on whether the FEC tracks over the New River should be handled with a new bridge or a tunnel.
A bridge would be cheaper to build – but not to maintain – and its construction would be much more disruptive. It would further divide the city, stretching for more than a mile and rising as high as the 17th Street bridge. A tunnel would take the tracks and make them disappear underground – in effect, removing the division that exists today. It seems the obvious answer, and I was encouraged to hear that the mayor is behind it.
Monday evening, at the Villanova Alumni gathering in Coral Gables, the president spoke mostly about developments on campus, including the construction of a new library. Afterwards, I spoke to a tall, older man who said that he had gone to Harvard. (Not sure what he was doing there.) “This is the first thing I’ve been to in a long time,” he said, “where nobody talked about AI. Perhaps it has to do with the Augustinian values,” he continued, trying to explain it to himself. “Which is a good thing.”