Around Here

I ran into Darren and Penny. They have matching scooters, Yamaha Vinos, I was on my bike. I know Darren from the marina, where he works, and where I sometimes shoot. He's modeled some shots... "We're going to the yacht club for some nachos," he said. "That's where I'm going," I said. We met up about fifteen minutes later, me ten minutes behind. Darren and I talked about scooters until Penny was bored to tears. Their Vinos get almost 100 mpg. I'm seriously thinking about trading my motorcycle in for one. Scooter sales are booming. I rode my motorcycle most when I was shooting for the newspaper. Photographers are the one news gathering element that must be physically on the scene of the story; unlike a reporter, you can't get your story from a phone call, though the proliferation of digital cameras and high speed connections are beginning to change that. But staff photogs are out all day. You're given a mileage allowance of course, but I di...

My ride has become a quest for shady streets, for the shady side of the streets, for the shortest streets with no shade. My old summer routes seek out my bike wheels. Byways beckon, some of which the old routes acquire, others I'll never see again. Meandering, I loop through shaded parking lots, edge shadow-cooled walks: a drift toward peripheries. I spotted Gill's beloved frangipani on a recent ride; that means it's in bloom all over the city. I set out this afternoon to see if I could find any nice ones in the neighborhooky. They smell like they look, only better - an intensely fragrant citrusy jasmine, carried on a wave of sugar's volatile smile. They're the flowers in Hawaiian leis. There's a rose variety; the aroma is a bit spicier than its lemon meringue cousin. Frangipani is one of the few tropicals, at least around here, that is deciduous. It sheds its leaves in the winter, leaving behind a decorative sketch of itself through Christmas. Here's a tre...

I bought a pair of deck shoes, liked them, and bought another pair thinking I'd  wear one for kicking around in and the other for more respectable outings. They  sit next to one another under the sideboard by the front door, ready to fulfill their  individual daily destinies. I don't always honor their designated missions, however,  and over time they've gotten harder to tell apart. Seems I will soon have two pair  of kick-around deck shoes. It doesn't work in reverse. I have a T shirt that fits so well that I never wear it. I'm saving it. On the rare  occasions that rise to its sartorial splendor, I forget that I even own it, let alone  can wear it. I noticed it on the rack in the closet yesterday and put it on. It still  fits... well, to a T. I wore it to Home Depot. (My life is a breathless social whirl.)  When I was walking back to my car, a guy drove by in a pickup and yelled out the  window, I kid you not, "I want that T shir...

Patrick and Greg have been celebrating purple. Violets, pansies, lilacs, wisteria, lavender... I was starting to wonder if I was purple deprived. Purple poor. A purple pauper. But no, I was pleased to be reminded, I never was. On my morning walk I came across these heliotrope-hued sprites grown athwart a painted wall. The invisibility of the familiar had blinded me to the obvious... I'd had purple all along. Let us now praise purple of royal robes and darling blooms of lilac wine and sanguine song in noble veins, and dusky rooms Majestic hue, your haunting scent in tender violet, lilac dreams steeps our springs and haunts our nights with solferino memories

I awoke to rain. There wasn't enough, it turned out, to quench the brushfire  hazard, which has now entered the dreaded red zone. It was enough to delight  the birds. Even the big ugly warty-faced muscovy ducks were flapping triumphantly  over wafer-thin puddles. A man in Fort Myers was charged yesterday with killing his old dog with a blow to  the head, and burying it in a grave on his property. I suppose he should have  turned it over to some shelter where it would have sat in a cell while waiting to be  killed by strangers. Norman Mailer wrote that a man has a responsibility, when the  time comes, to kill his own dog. It's a burden of love. My friend Walter used to say  that we're no longer allowed to be poor, even if we want to be. I wonder if we're  no longer allowed, in some fundamental ways, to be responsible. We confuse love and sentimentality. Jesus, love incarnate, seems to me often  edgily unsentimental. I suspect that ...

It was a routine shoot on Sanibel , that would take all of forty minutes. Nevertheless, I decided to stay overnight on the island, blowing probably half of what I would stand to earn. I crashed at my old favorite cottage, nothing fancy, a sentiment indulged, a few blocks from the beach. The driver's side window of my car refused to close. "You're not the only one who wants fresh air," it said. Cheeky-ass pony. At least it never rained. The day didn't start out fresh. The smoke from a towering brush fire at lake  Okeechobee hitched a ride on the high air currents all the way down here. I awoke to what smelled like somebody's  burnt morning coffee. By the time I made my own, the smell had turned acrid. But once on the island, a half-hour drive from here, the cool night air had lifted, taking the ashen visitor with it. Architecture is photographed in the morning or late afternoon, when the shadows are ele...

Gardenia greet our May. The shrub in the front is in bloom, a bit sparsely this drier than average year. Gardenias are in what I call my jasminoides tribe. This is based on an alliance of scents that I believe they share... the jasmines, orange blossoms, stephanotis, tuberosa, and the incomparable freesia, said by some the exude the finest fragrance of any flower. The gardenia will bloom for about three weeks. A couple of blossoms are enough to perfume a room. I'm off to Sanibel for a sleepover. Take time to smell whatever you're smelling these days.