Around Here

These are my keys. These are my other keys. This is my wallet, cell phone, pocket change, etcetera. Here's what heads of state carry on their persons:

One of the strangest things about looking at old photographs is that they’re not as momentous or meaningful as I thought they’d be, “years from now”. It’s years from then now, and they’re mostly a little forlorn, awkward, or just inscrutable. “A photograph” Susan Sontag wrote in 'On Photography' “is both a pseudo presence and a token of absence...” its “qualities and intentions swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.” The photograph of Walter, because I knew him, is missing so much more than it contains. The shot of Roberta doesn’t smell like Roberta. And that skinny kid on the ladder... who is that? I feel no connection at all. Paradoxically, photographs of people I don’t know and places never seen, or seen in a new way, sometimes have an uncanny ability to evoke an emotional response that images of my own people and places do not. They’re not as overtly drained of the living nuance that seems better brought to life with simple memory. The photograph of your 10th...

Downtown Sarasota. I found a parking space at Island Park and we headed for O’Leary’s, a favorite spot on the bay, a waterfront bistro with picnic tables and live music. Pat ordered a grouper sandwich, I went for fried shrimp. White wine for all. There was a grouper scandal a few years ago. So popular is the delectable Gulf aquatic chameleon that fake grouper, everything from tilapia to pollock, was being passed off as the real thing in restaurants all over Florida. Eventually the State Attorney General’s office, following a St. Petersburg Times expose', began randomly testing grouper sandwich DNA. A lot of restaurants, who blamed their suppliers, got snagged in the Groupergate net. Authenticity has since dramatically risen, along with grouper sandwich prices. If you’re paying $10. or more for one, there's a good chance it's grouper. At one of our favorite seafood spots we noticed an offering, on the post-Groupergate menu:  a  “grouper-like sandwich.” I offered Pat a cur...

My friend Pat was in Florida on family business. She emailed from Tampa suggesting that we meet up in Venice, where she would be visiting her uncle. I remailed that I would pick her up there and spirit her off to Lido Key at 10:30 the next morning. Could I supply a beach umbrella? Pat wanted to know. What color would you like? I said. The pleasure of riding the sweep and velocity of I75 was suddenly disturbed, just outside North Port, by the flashing tire pressure indicator on the dashboard. I pulled off at the next exit, marveling at the fact that the truck’s hypothalamus was tracking my tire pressure, and into a service station to have a look. The slowly deflating driver’s side rear tire gently hissed. I looked around, and saw a WalMart across the street, its Tire & Service Center standing serenely in the morning sun. I thought it best to reflate the tire as best I could for the jog over to the Big Box. The air pump required an outrageous $.75 for a blow job - quarters only. Whi...