Around Here

My whole family liked cars, including my mother who claimed, after her big crash in the late fifties, to hate driving, but still loved her mustang. I used to listen, rapt, to my brother and his friends rhapsodize over such mysterious and alluring automotive esoterica like "candy flake" and "bubble skirts." My dad had great taste in cars. He was always bringing home some stylish rarity that he found in his travels. One year it was a two-toned finned Plymouth whose automatic transmission was accessed with deep chunky buttons, located in the center of the steering column... the kind of buttons you used to press on the tabletop juke boxes at diners, only these buttons shifted the car instead of selecting a tune. My favorite car was the vintage 1956 black Cadillac, pristine and portentous, which I drove to the junior prom. That was back in the days when gas was 39 cents a gallon, and chrome was the coin of the realm. Here I am with my 1999 pony. When it died, I thought ...

Christmas in July but amid the twinkling lights the usual throngs Rhaphis palms flutter in the fountain’s drafty rush It’s cool as a cave While his mother shops the child in the red stroller calmly picks his nose Three teen-age girls laugh The boys in Wendy’s take it as a compliment Snatches of music lurking in ubiquitous ‘cellos: Manilow The aged couple holding hands on the oak bench filled with burning grace A wren has slipped in and swoops down to the fountain she’s afraid to land A Wiemaramer sleeps in the pet shop window I think of Snow White She shuts the car door and leaves dangling outside a swatch of green skirt

With the wildfire now doused and dissolved, clear skies have returned to the Cape. The Florida peninsula, its ribald sea-lapped profile laid supine like the beachgoers it draws, is ever swept by airs both absolving and calamitous. As resilient as it is ravaged, this ancient pile of shells is once again basking in errant showers under hot blue skies. And that's the charm and danger of this tropical tabula rasa. It is as dazed and forgetful of yesterday's brushfires and tomorrow's hurricanes, as are the sandpipers on the shore of the alligators in the reeds. But my little beach is still a bike ride away.