So, first of all, it’s very hot, 92 degrees. Life everywhere is busy, a challenge. Tornadoes, rain, grifters and fraudsters everywhere on line and on the phone. Life is good, life is life. Life can be bad. But, in Florida, (for a change) life is…HOT! And HUMID!
It was, for a small reason not worth recounting here, a kind of important day for my friend Diane. She asked if we could go for an ice cream. Sure. Of course, I had to admit, out of hot boredom, I’d already finished off the remnants of a carton of ice cream in my fridge and, being a person who shouldn’t eat too much sweet stuff(by order of the doctor), should also avoid any more ice cream.
But, you know what? Ice cream is my drug of choice. I hope to kick the habit, but for now, I wouldn’t mind a fix.
So, we venture out for ice cream. We first searched the internet for any really GOOD ice cream parlor with homemade ice cream. Something different or better than the Dairy Queen or Coldstones. We knew of one a long way off. We both had scheduled events, so a ‘long way off’ wouldn’t do. So it was Coldstones — about four miles away. Make it five. Everything is far off down here.
It’s mid-afternoon, the end of May in Southwest Florida, the time when many people who moved here from the north ask: why the hell did I move here? But then, you think about the snow and ice (not ice cream though there’s plenty of that everywhere in America), the often UNair conditioned heat and humidity, the chill and sun in season when you expect spring weather, the cost of living, the politic (depending on your politics), and you’re content. And also, there’s the eternal novelty of exotic Florida flora and fauna that now and then lets you imagine you’ve moved into a Disneyworld post card — and the longing for the monochrome, one-flavor ice cream of the north and the cracked and broken streets and the realization that, essentially, all American has, to a great degree, become basically a sprawling standardized wilderness of shopping malls — and the dislike of Florida goes away. You say: here I am, I’m in the Sunshine State!! Horay!!! (And thank God for life’s coming glory in any flavor.)
(A pause here to note that a Florida friend is returning from a trip to Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and has been sending me pictures of roaming bison and lakes and streams and forests …and snow-covered mountains…and my mind goes there. Yes, away from this. That’s the American I want. But then, I know, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho…they have their other ugly ‘American stuff’ where the people REALLY live. And, of course. Try buying a loaf of bread on a mountain…or getting an oil change…you might get ice cream at the Visitor Center….)
Then, you get out into the heat — and the traffic. And you remember: absolutely EVERYBODY, it sometimes seems, has moved to a state that is essentially what maybe God intended to remain a swamp, not a blacktopped iteration of Purgatory. And you have well-to-do people in Mercedes, not so well-off people in twenty-year old cars with duct-tape windows and doors, and you have people who can’t afford cars on bicycles, and people who apparenty can’t afford even a bicycle on foot — and they are all out there in the heat at the next big intersection (and where I am there is nothing BUT big intersections.)
So we pull up in a lane at the NEXT BIG INTERSECTION, and wait for the long, long light to change. We are about the sixth car in line in the right lane. (Did I mention that it’s hot — and my AC is not totally getting the job done.) The light changes, finally, and the kid (or guy or other hybrid form of life) in the old muscle car in front of me — doesn’t move. I beep gently. He still doesn’t move. All the traffic in front of him has gone. There is fifty yards of empty space. Maybe he’s had a stroke. Maybe he’s texting. Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s staging a protest on behalf of his favorite cause and will soon jump out waving a Palestinian flag or an Israeli flag or an American flag…
I once again gently beep. (A New York or Boston driver at this point — or, for that point, most people, would have lain on the horn.)f
But finally, my fellow mortal in the low red sporty car with the black rear window louvers suddenly, slowly comes to life, languidly puts his arm out the open driver window — and I do not believe he gave me an obscene gesture. That truly would have been uncalled for. What he did was half-wave two fingers with one curled back. Now, that might be a surly gesture of disdain that someone reading this will recognize. I prefer to see it as a reluctant acknowledgement that he was “otherwise engaged” in his life behind the wheel doing something, even if it was thinking or breathing, that was more important than my need to get through the red light — a kind of, ‘yeah, yeah, whatever…’ and he proceeded to roar off at high speed toward the still-green light as it was turning yellow, his muffler extremely, intentionally loud – and he sped right through the red light when it had been read a good two seconds, and left me and the driver behind me to sit out the next two-to-three minute cycle of the traffic light.
NOw, I was not angered by this. I chose not to be, and it is always good to choose not to be angry. It was not worth it. I suddenly, in my mind, opened my mental college sociology book and thought of the wild, weird, dangerous, happy, crazy mix of people in the world, many of us motorized — thought of those who drive angry, depressed, drunk, drugged, insane…
Then, as we proceeded on the big, wide hot, speeding HOT roadways of multifarious human beings through two or three more big intersection among bikes and cars and pedestrians ..and a crazy-appearing, homeless blond young woman in black shorts and a black midriff, sunburned and heavily tattooed, carrying most of her mortal possessions, walking with a very large, obviously very overheated dog on a leash — walking across the intersection against the ‘red hand’, forcing me to stop for her, hoping the person behind me didn’t rear-end me as the woman slowly (talking to herself) made it with her poor dog to the other curb…..
The ice cream was mediocre. Actually, this being a ColdStone franchise with notably mediocre ice cream….we didn’t have high expectations. We were the only customers. The two young girls who waited on us appeared bored, struggling to be congenial (and failing) and, to me, had somehow tapped into the general indifference-ruptured-only-by-the medley outside their glass enclosure-their air-conditioned franchise. For outside are those dangerously indifferent drivers and crazed homeless souls all around, awaiting them when they ended their shift. I paid with plastic, tipped them 15%. I could have avoided the little screen that gave me no choice and dropped a dollar bill in their jar which the other dollar bill there.
But-whatever. I just wanted to eat my bad ice cream, add to my blood sugar, and get the hell “home.”
But, it’s all life. And life is good. Life is life. And I haven’t got an ache in my body. (Whereas the guy who peeled off through the red light — someday he’ll miscalculate….and will hurt all over…)
19 Cent Notebook 