Around Here

My friends Walter and Joseph, who virtually adopted me in my late teens and became something of a surrogate family, and about whom I will some day write, left me with a cache of memories and lasting treasures of all kinds, both virtual and tangible. One of those is a handful of record albums, some of which I have begun digitizing. I'll post selections from some of them from time to time. The first from what I'll call the Salem Village Collection (that's where they, we, lived) features "the original piano artistry" of Jonathan Edwards with vocals by Darlene Edwards. "It takes great skill to go wrong that carefully..." Walter said of the "Edwards'" work. This was back in the smoky and freewheeling late sixties, there was always a handful of artsy hedonists hanging around, and we'd do anything for a laugh. Once we dyed Barney, the sheep, plaid (we had to finally tether him out back when passing motorists started driving into the ditch). We...

When I woke Saturday morning it struck me that I could drive up to Sarasota if   I felt like it, and that’s what I did. Half the kick was meandering up there,  stopping at anonymous but familiar-looking fast food spots, sitting in air  conditioned booths looking through glass at the highway and palm trees,  without a plan in the world.  Sarasota is an arty town. There’s an opera company and a film festival. Ballet. The big Dali collection. Galleries galore. All kinds of Music. But its Greenwich  Village grit has, like that of so many other old Florida locales, been swept away  in the storm of regentrification. This time on a more grandiose scale. The city,  when I got there, was congested and spiked with cranes. Towers were sprouting  everywhere, and construction walkways obliterated familiar storefronts. I had  contacts there, Bill, Stephanie, but I didn't want to look anybody up. I wanted to  wander around taking shots and watchin...

"Tuna is always nice, but if I never have to taste another drop of Miracle Whip, I'll be thrilled."

pairs of lotioned limbs grow tan on white deck chairs sometimes a page turns a hibiscus bud skips across the chalky deck prodded by a breeze crows drop crusts of bread into the blue pool, a few sink to nevermore styrofoam noodles the color of crayons float in bright water the black and white cat crouches, lapping water slyly then feigns indifference a ring of house keys a pair of yellow flip flops lie in striped shade her gaze enjoins the umbrella’s taut shadow of whom does that girl dream?

Yesterday I drove thirty miles south along the beach road to see Bobby. A  designer, he lives in what was a model house a few blocks off the beach that he  picked up some years ago for less than market value, even for back then, before the boom drove prices through the hole in the ozone layer. The house is all poured concrete and glass, cosseted in raphis and bougainvilleas - shadowed,  polished, darkly bright. Bobby was telling me about the ten-year-old son of a  client who had accompanied his mother to a meeting there. The boy had  remarked that the house has a certain “transparency” which it does. We laughed at the boy’s sagacity. “Transparency!” Bobby repeated incredulously, having  noticed my amusement. He made a pitcher of bloody Marys. We listened to some new iTunes. After a while we threw a backpack together and went to the beach. We found a depression in a bank off the dunes at the south end of the beach and put down towels. A couple of boats wer...

Wherever you go in Florida , you’ll cross paths with an anole. Especially taken with the little lizards are newly transplanted homeowners, thrilled by the prospect of spending balmy, exotic lives where palm trees drop coconuts on cars, and the little reptiles perch on rocks, translucent crimson dewlaps flashing territorially in the endless summer. They eat ants and crickets and can be kept as pets… but why bother? They’re just as much fun peering at you through your kitchen window or hanging from a fern on the porch. Perhaps because of the housing boom, a rather lot of the little beasts are suicidal, running directly under your feet as you pass. Hopping from one foot to the other to avoid them does no good. They have an uncanny knack for finding the Shoe Of Doom. Suicide by bicycle is also a trend. One day, halfway to the beach on my motorcycle, I looked down and saw one perched on the handlebar, face to the wind, like a dog in a pickup, master of all it surveyed. I was enjoying its ...

You don't understand why you've lost his embrace once a kiss was enough to feed multitudes now the jam and croissant and the morning's soft mirth are declined because they're "half eaten." Is it so unforeseen his pursuit of Eros the highest and best and most beautiful was not just a rhapsody wrapped in your name but a doomed questing passion you loved and "forgave"?

My party animal neighbors set off fireworks in the street on every other holiday. Yee-ha!