DARK CORRIDORS, SHINY FLOORS

When I was an eighth grader, then a high school freshman, I struggled mightily with mathematics. I was lucky to get into any high school, I was that bad. There was a wall there. I could not climb it. Perhaps I never tried hard enough.

But my poor father wanted to help this situation. He received advice, most probably from the Catholic nuns that were trying to teach me, that tutorial services were available from the retired teachers in the Women’s Home near the corners of Gallivan Boulevard and Washington Street in Boston’s Dorchester section. I forget if it was free or just available for a small fee to help the women support themselves. My mother somehow was led to believe that the women’s home was called “the home for incurables,” and she freely referred to it as that, though that struck even my adolescent mind as woefully bleak and uncharitable, regardless of the women’s conditions or circumstances. True, the women were all elderly and did have serious infirmities — mostly, it seemed, severe and disabling rheumatoid arthritis. I don’t believe any of them were ambulatory. They wheeled or were wheeled down those dark, polished, barren institutional corridors.

The Women’s Home is still there, though I don’t know who are currently its patients or residents or who operates it. (In older, less euphamistic times, I guess it was, in fact, called The Home for Incurables)It remains a brick, Victorian-looking structure at the end of a long drive across a spacious lawn. ( When I Google “Women’s Home,” nothing comes up. When I do a Google Earth search, I don’t see it where I know it to be. Many times on the job as a Boston TV reporter, I recall my photographer and I driving by the long, elevated wall and chain link fence and vegitation bordering Gallivan Boulevard, and bordering the home. But, for some reason, I can’t find it. I can only assure you that I am not imagining there was such a place.

I would arrive, getting a ride from some family member, and take an elevator (as I recall) to the second floor. My sense of the place is, again, of a place clean, but stark and unadorned. ( I can fix the time of my visitations in the summer of 1962, because I somehow recall that I learned of the death of William Faulkner while leaving the property one day (on the radio?) and that date was July 6, 1962. I don’t recall any pictures of paintings on the walls, but my memories might be limited to what an adolescent boy might be likely to take in. And though time may be denying me that memory, I still see in my mind a place where there was nothing of any color, nothing on display — no flowers or paintings. There was an equally bleak-seeming second floor lounge with a piano in the middle of it. A piano was a good thing. (The only person I ever heard playing the piano was yours truly, but that comes later.)

I will continue this memory another time; promise. But, for now, I’ll stop — or stall — here on one of memory’s darker back roads….

GRAY LIGHT AT PORT LUCIAN (in which Mercy Strange’s dark mood lifts and the world’s color and light are restored)

There are narrow winding lanes of tiny shops in the Port’s center. The chocolatier has a fan above his door that sends the aroma of freshly baked fudge out into the open air. He sells ice cream, too; homemade. From the other ceramic, dress and novelty shops, especially the quiet, sequestered ones along the winding lanes, away from the busy little main street (called Myrtle Avenue), there comes the scent of patchouli, citrus and lavender, often the piped strains of guitar or harp music. You might find a busker working away at his guitar or flute on one of the little alley turns over near the water’s edge. People stop to listen. It’s busy in summer. (I noted the license plates of distant visitors.)

And then immediately south of the short row of scollop and shrimp boat docks, there is the fresh sea scent blowing in off Lucian Inlet and the view of the open ocean beyond. There is a small park, a mere patch of greenery at the water’s edge with two sugar maples for shade and benches for the foot-weary tourists and those town residents who make a point of gathering here daily, like the women’s knitting circle and some men who bring a folding table for daily games of chess. There is a small garden and a monument statue of angels at the heart of the park and at the heart of a lovely fountain. For those sitting on the few nearby benches, looking out toward the sea, there is always the gentle sound of water plashing over stone and falling into the tiny pond below. People have tossed coins into the pool. A brass placque by the pond’s edge tell you the fountain was dedicated to a long departed benefactor in 1958. A wooden sign rising up from a stake thurst into the brown garden mulchtells you in Olde English lettering that the flowers are watered and the whole garden maintained by the Port Lucian Garden Club.

For forty years, Mercy Strange has had her little art gallery halfway down Periwinkle Lane in the Port shopping district. For years, she had worked in oils, acrylics and watercolors and still displays and sells those old legacy works in her cramped but cozy space. But, sometime early in this century, she switched to working in charcoal. She said it was the light in Port Lucian that made her make that shift — a peculiar change, no question, just to work exclusively in black and gray, drawing what in real life are colorful landscapes and seascapes and, now and then, she will generously draw portraits on-the-spot of some of the people who approach to watch her work at her easel those days she goes to the park.

It seems odd to be turning everything gray in such a colorful, charming world.

I asked her about the change. She said it was the light that she sees over everything — she insists the light at Port Lucian is gray. Now, everyone else saw sunlight, although there were certainly gray days when clouds rolled over the coastline beyond the bluffs, or when winter came and the occasional snow cover would turn gray –or slushy- icy silver– on the sidewalks and in the otherwise clean gutters, and on those especially frigid days when ice would form on the masts of the fishing fleet.

But to Mercy, the whole Port, where she has lived all here 69 years, had become gray in every season. It was a singular and curious evolution in her artistic vision. It baffled many of us.

Gray light at Port Lucian: That was the name of her last exhibit in February.

Gray had become Mercy’s color of choice.

She also said the village, indeed, the whole world (according to her gray vision) had become more and more gray, crass, mercenary and materialistic as the days and summers and every season, bright or gray — even Christmas, all red and green and draped with holly — came and went and came again in Port Lucian and in the universe.

She was not specifically speaking of famine or disease or pandemic or war are political termoil. She was speaking of –well, of death. Life and death, and all the gray in between.

Some of us thought she might have suffered an ocular, or specifically, a macular degeneration that was effecting her physical vision.. But she assured us that was not the case. In fact, unlike many of her age –she is 69 — she is still gifted with 20/20 eyesight. We know this because, sensing our suspicions regarding her health claims, she showed a few of us the results of her eye examination. Yes, she was 20/20.

I see Mercy on my frequent trips to The Port. Her world has been in deep charcoal gray going on fifteen years now. I’ve been wondering about that. About Mercy, and the Gray Light….What emotional or mental — or, still I wonder if it is not physical — factors have altered her view of the world. Surely, over that period, times have been good or bad. Good and bad can be rendered in color or in black and white — or gray. Gray is more somber, more ambiguous for certain. Many of life’s circumstances seem gray. Of course, when as many movies were in black and white as in color, we did not necessarily feel our mood dampened. Those were often the filmmaker’s economic decision. Often, but not always. There is a quality rendered by black and white which color cannot convey, not to mention what gray conveys.

Mercy reminded me that DaVinci worked extensively in charcoal, including in his famous study of hands. German artist Kathe Kollwitz used charcoal to express the struggles of the working class and the horrors of war.( It was to Kollwitz’s work that her growing body of work was most often compared.) John Singer Sargent certainly let earth tones prevail on his canvasses.


So, Mercy Strange is not unique. But it was still peculiar or (forgive me) strange that she so seemingly abruptly shifted from a colorful vision of the world to a gray one.

So most of us who consider ourselves friends, patrons and supporters of Mercy Strange had accepted her shift, invited the art media to highlight her growing body of gray and black (but mostly gray) work. I personally bought one of her charcoal drawings of crows gathered on a bare and dying oak tree on the bluff at the entrance to the inlet. She called it, in complete accuracy, “A Murder of Crows,” for that is how such a gathering is known in the avian lectionary.

All well and good. Meanwhile the quaint, colorful and charming life of the waterside village known as Port Lucian continued, the coffers of her merchants rising and falling as the national economy rose and fell,buffeted by seas of contemporary political overtures, advances and retreats.

But six months ago, the skies seemed to darken to the edge of her twelve-by-twelve mile borders. Yet there are no clouds overhead, but the sky nonetheless seemed a deep gray. It is as if clouds dissolve the second they drift into The Port’s airspace but the sky remains gray for no known atmospheric reason, or so those who beheld this phenomenon declared.

But was it just Mercy’s mood spreading — or do we all, from time to time, even for long periods, see nothing but gray? But Mercy above all seemedd to be seeing nothing else.

It was about then that people really began to take note of Mercy Strange sitting with her easel, and sometimes sitting without any easel or drawing implements — sitting among the rocks bordering the inlet.

She would sit there for hours on end. Finally one day, I made my way out there along the waterfront road, parking my car at the base of the rocks where there was a scattering of teenage grafitti defacing the pervasive beauty. (There is always a bit of blight scattered about the world — but, of course, the reality is — there is a whole lot of it.)

I found the path Mercy must have followed through a few scrub pine and then onto the rounded, bare, sometimes slippery rock surface until I saw Mercy sitting there…

She was sitting before her easel, but she was not drawing. Her hands were by her side. She was staring out to the open water. She’d apparently set up her easel out of habit. But her canvas was empty.

I approached….I don’t think she knew I was there. She was briefly startled when I said, “hello, Mercy.”

She looked at me, standing now on the precarious rock surface to her right. I smiled. She said, “sit here for a moment, rest, though, I’m sorry I do not have another chair.”

I sat down on the rock, drew my legs up. Her folding chair was low to the rock surface. “It’s coming soon,” she said.

“What — what’s coming soon?” I said.

“The cloud,” she said. “I don’t know, it’s sort of like …..I saw this film as a child. Perhaps you saw it, too. Husband and wife along on a boat on the open water, obviously unhappy in ways you or I would not yet understand as children. The wife goes below on the small boat, the husband suddenly notices a cloud approaching on the surface of the water.”

“I think I recall this movie,” I said, “from a Saturday matinee. It made me have my first bout of juvenile depression. At least that’s how it felt. As I recall, the cloud makes the man shrink away to nothing – in a black and white movie about a black and white…and gray…world.”

“But not,” Mercy reminded me,” before he falls victim to the family cat he’d once loved so much — and, escaping to the basement where he lives inside a match box but is attacked by a spider — a small spider that, in his new universe, is a giant, hideous monster…”

Thought the breeze on the rocks was gentle, I was getting a chill. “Yeah, you’re bringing it all back,” I said.

“And he shrinks and shrinks — to an atom, alone.”

“And his wife and everybody think he was eaten by the family cat.”

“Yes.”

“Enough,” Mercy. Have mercy…” and I chuckles.

And, from here on out reader — well….the revery, the vision, the revelation, the necessary human act of understanding, of comisseration, of vicarious participation in another’s invisible suffering…. the what-have-you…

for…Mercy suddenly said to me, with great urgency…

“Look,” and I looked out where she was pointing beyond what boats were visible on the water, including a tanker far out toward the horizon. It was a consoling, beautiful scene. But she was pointing to a low-lying cloud.

“Mercy,” I said. “That’s just a cloud.”

“Yes,” she said, but clouds have been coming ashore for months now, gray clouds. In my life, anyway. How about yours?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I started to say.

“And you haven’t seen the clouds gathering out there, getting ready to push ashore?”

“I listen to the weather forecast,” I said. “Clouds come and go…”

“No clouds in your forecast?” she said, looking at me again, then out to sea — toward whatever cloud she was seeing.

“I haven’t seen any,” I said, meaning clouds – or, at least, clouds or a cloud of the kind she seemed to be suggesing; an ominous cloud. The kind of cloud that could turn the world gray, change our climate, within and without. We’ve all known such clouds. “I’ve been here every weekend,” I said with redoubtable optimism,” and sometimes during the week. I love it in the Port, I come here often, as you know. We have had nothing but sunny skies…and the world here is — colorful.”

But then, I noticed the air suddenly growing hazy. I turned and looked toward the sea, but a fog –or was it a cloud — had suddenly, mysteriously, engulfed us. I could barely see Mercy right next to me. I was suddenly terrified. What was going on? I looked back toward the village. It, too had vanished from sight. The rocks were suddenly moist and slippery.

“Mercy,” I said. “Are you there? What is happening,” as if she would know. I put my hand out toward her, and touched — nothing, not her not her easel, nothing.

She was gone…

After a solid two minutes, paralyzed by my utter bafflement, I carefully rose, crawling first, then standing once I was sure I would not slip off the rocks into the bay. My heart was pounding, for I wondered, was this a dream? A very bad dream?

I made my way back down between the patches of green to where there was dry earth and pebbles underfoot. I fumbled out my car keys, but all the while wondering — had I left Mercy up there? Had SHE somehow slipped silently into the inlet’s waters? But, no, she was gone. I looked about for her small old Volvo, but then recalled that it hadn’t been there when I arrived. Mercy was known to walk all the way out to the point.

The haze was all about me now. Yet, it was nothing I could breath. It seemed somehow–artificial, as if my sight merely needed to adjust to the condition and it would vanish. I backed up and, careful that no cars were coming around the bend, started slowly through the haze back toward the village along the waterside road.

Then, as if things were not terrifyingly disorienting enough, I suddenly emerged from the fog and the villeage was spread out before me at less than a mile’s distance….but….in nothing but gray tones….gray, black and ghastly white.

And as I drew slowly closer to the town, the distant prospect of collected, charming cluster of roofs and windows of shops did not enlarge. The whole scene stayed as small as it might seem from a mile away….

And beyond anything I’d ever experienced before came the moment I arrived on the road that had shrunk to a black two-in line and I was driving on dirt and along the waterfront was a collect of dollhouse and toy boats where there had been a full village.

And no people, large or small. I was alone. No birds, no signs of life — just a former world diminished to a toy store’s display of a village by water, that was suddenly just a pond and continuing to shrink…I had not noticed that my car had disappeared from around me. It was at below, between my feet. I went to pick it up — and the ring fell off my finger. And I was……shrinking, and was, all at once, on a wide desert where all but the burning sands were vanished. But Mercy Strange was coming toward me, slowly -smiling wistfully.

And she said, in greeting, “You know now what I have been feeling. Do they call it depression? Whatever they call it, I’ve been trying to paint it, draw it — a world gray and shrinking until there is no place for me…..

And then I woke on a bench along the village’s Myrtle Street — all restored, color life, people all around and I sitting in the cool sunlight under a chestnut tree….and I could see Mercy Strange sitting in the break between the low, charming building….sitting in the park by the shrimp boats and the bay leading out to the sea, people and flowers all around her. She was drawing…no, she was painting in bright colors. That much I could see – the colors. I rose and at the first break in the mild summer traffic, I crossed and walked toward her.

Yes, Mercy, you are back, I thought. But I must tell you of my dark vision……that, for so many years had been your lonely, crushing vision….

The cloud has lifted. The Light is shining in

JULY 4: BANG BANG BANG BANG BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BANG

I wrote a nasty piece about all the whistling and thudding explosions going off around me this night on lawns and in backyards and in the sky, unnerving me and causing my little dog to tremble miserably, perplexed -as, to some degree, am I — by all the excessive noise and why mortals find this incendiary mindlessness so entertaining.

I’ll bet the folks hiding underground in Kiev these days don’t find the explosions overhead entertaining -or the sound of their homes being demolished (Mr. Trump would say “obliterated”) by Russian rockets.

A fierce thunder storm and torrents of rain briefly drove the mad neighborhood bombers indoors and filled the air with even louder, more terrifying flashes of lightening and bursts of thunder. I shrugged and decided man (humanity) and nature had conspired to kill my dog with a heart attack. (She survived, semi-sedated with pieces broken off CBD-laced peanut butter-flavored, bone-shaped treats. But I hate drugging a pet. I may have to do it again tonight.)

Each July 4th, my sister used to have to comfort a Lithuanian-born neighbor who, in her youth during World War II, heard the incessant explosions of ordinance as she and her family were caught between dueling warring Nazi and Soviet tyrannies, destined to see millions of her fellow Lithuanians die around her and be forced into exile.

Okay, I know. Lighten up. It’s all just a — celebration.

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

SUMMER AND THE SORROW WITH MANY NAMES : A REFLECTION

A reflection, meditation,perhaps. Just some words, not many, some sorrow mixed in. Sorrow, nostalgia, fear, frustration, a prayer, a longing. I could never, in short order, say everything I’m feeling, besides exhausted.

The old crowd gathered at The Last Mile in my last post. Okay, so there is no such place. But, then, there is, indeed – there always are such places in our mind — Middle Earth, Brigadoon — in our deepest imagining. Our fictions are like that; they become real. We escape into them, even if they are affectionately grubby little watering holes on the urban landscape, but nonetheless places, for some of us, capable of enchantment.

So…in real time, in real hot spaces…

I went through a great deal of stress today, June 16, 2025, as President of the St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church, Clearwater, Florida conference of the St. Vincent dePaul Society. I, like almost anyone, am happy to help people in distress. That’s why I volunteered for the SVdPS here and up north. But often, you are trying to help people, God bless them, who jump from one of life’s lily pads to the next. (In some ways, I feel like that, and like that’s what I’ve been doing up to now– up and down from Florida, east and west in Massachusetts, down to Rhode Island to boot during a reporter’s career, and now in etirement, running -that other tired metaphor — pillar to post — no direction home.)

I was trying to help a grandmother with a daughter and three infant children. they’d gotten my personal number from a y oung woman and her 11-year-old daughter whom we’d helped get into a motel — the same motel this other family was thrown out of for want of money. I knew we –the Society — didn’t have the money to meaningfully help this woman and her family, but she called me repeatedly. I knew we didn’t have anywhere to put them — a woman, her daughteer and three children ages about eight down to four months! Shelter don’t take children. So began the expensive, time-consuming search for meaningless help — meaningless because temporary: three days. And expensive.

My rock and savior and help in all such SVdP-related adventures such as this is the Filipino-American woman named Imelda who is the institutonal memory of the St. Catherine’s Society, having been Treasurer for a very long time (a job I’m incompetent to do), and, before me, after the departure of the former President, Acting President. She has long, deep experience in dealing with these situations and is also very realistic. ( I became President by default: nobody else wanted the job.) She is generous and compassionate, hard-working but, again, realistic and recognizes the financial and human limits of compassion for needy people, many of whom will likely never alter their situation brought on by faulty life-habits and familiy dysfunction. You do what you can, even more than seems possible — but also know, again there must be a limit. Imelda is also a 74-year-old wife, mother and grandmother — and has been battling melanoma for twenty years, going in and out of remission — and currently on a new phase of medical treatment involving weekly infusions followed by a day of rest. Her energy and dedication has not abated, but she is having often painful side effects in her back. She did what she could to arrange a motel for this family until we ran into enormous bureacracy that would take more than a few hours to work out. She generally had warned me about getting into these “motel” messes.

And, after a period of exhausting effort on her part, I was mostly necessarily on my one on this ill-advised venture helping people with no car, no money and no place to go. I only knew that they claimed that in two days they would have a trailer available for them north of here. They only needed to bridge those two days. I set about trying to make this happen for them.

I won’t go into all the details — what I’ll offer is enough and I knew it was taking up an entire day I had needed for preparing to go on a trip to the northeast in two days.

I drove the grandmother, age estimate late fifties, early sixties, from the money advance chain Amscot, to which she apparently has frequent recourse and which, this time, she reached by getting loaned ( by someone) barely enough money for her to hire a thirteen dollar Uber ride. (She has no car and was getting around by bus!) She apparently also owed Amscot money and there are fees and so the $360 I gave her (the amount it was going to cost her for two nights in the Holiday Inn Express) was immediatelyi reduced to apx. $353 money to these people while depositing and instantly having drawn off a little of my Society’s donated $360. I thought she had some money in her bank account so she could check into the motel. But her credit card was rejected. It was back to another Amscot to WITHDRAW the money she’d just deposited so she could deposit in her checking account. Back at the motel, her card was rejected again. Thhe funds were still insufficient or not yet available. I finally wound up picking up the $360 on my personal credit card, which is already stretched too far. I just had to end this whole agony. It was the only alternative to simply saying to grandma, I can’t help you — you and your family will have to spend the night on the street and then go looking for someone else to help you.

The woman gave me a hug. I saw her daughter camping out with the three kids, the youngest four months, no husband or father in sight, the grandmother’s husband long dead from a liver damaged from booze — this family from Texas, the other homeless women and her daughter I’d placed in another motel at the end of last week was from Tennessee…These are wanderers.

Yes, the grandmother gave me a hug. I pray for her and all of them — and hope they don’t cause trouble at the motel or that my money doesn’t become involved….or that something doesn’t go wrong for them while they’re there.

No car, no money, maybe a temporary job at WaWa.

Much of the country lives this way, in utter dysfunction. We could give them money or a home…but they just don’t have much, and sometimes much good judgement or drive or talent or ambition to escape their circumstances. Often they grew up this way.

My whole day in the 90-degree heat trying to get them settled — for two days only. Then what? (The motel required paperwork we were willing to offer as a 501C tax-exempt charity. But they insisted we had to email it to them along with pictures….insisted it was not really that complicated, though it certainly was and time was of the essence and in our little office we lacked the uploading ability and had no idea how we’d load a picture — and they wouldn’t take cash.

Enough! Enough!

Life is difficult. Charity can be a challenge. Pray.

Epilogue: While I was in New Hampshire on my travels, the grandmother called repeatedly on my private phone to say that the daughter and she had had a falling out and that the daughter had thrown her out and she was on the street again. She called repeatedly, crying. I was able to get put in touch with a female police homeless liaison officer in the Florida area who, over the phone, assured me she had spoken to the woman, offered her alternative situations, but that nothing suited her — and counseled me that this woman was just one of those perennially distressed people who will only come around when they’ve had mental health counseling and/or after they’ve necessarily spent time on the street. I was not happy to hear this, but it was realistic counsel, and very much, ultimately, what I knew I’d need to hear — as I was also counseled by a woman close to me that you can help people, but you can’t always rescue them.

End of story.

SUMMER ARRIVES AT THE LAST MILE LOUNGE

There was a loose plan to have a spring gathering upon the arrival of the Vernal Equinox. But that never happened. Everybody got busy.

So, a plan sprang up, almost like a case of spontaneous generation, to welcome summer. The rattling sound of the air conditioner might have got Deano thinking about it. So it happened.

First, owner Joe Barren showed up from Florida. Jackie the Crow and Stickie Sammartino were there by 10 a.m. Kenny Foy had a Chinese girlfriend and and they were both there and joined Stickie and Jackie at the bar where Deano had been in place and at work since well before 10 a.m.. Jimmy Jammin, no longer tipling but hungry for company showed up about 11 a.m.. Deano offered him an ODoul’s but he said, no cranberry and soda was his drink now — and an occasional ginger ale. Since there would be outdoor activity and organizing, Tash DeSilva, Monday-Tuesday bartender came to help. Bill Kirner, who ran the book club at his apartment around the corner, came in about the same time as Bo Cherry Burkhrdt and her steady beaux Charlie Simonnetti.

Knox, the upstairs resident artist, was still working on his mural but set down the brush long enough to take his place over his Blushing Monk at the far corner of the bar. It was, however — because it was before noon — a non-alchoholic Monk Deano had concocted for him. (I’d like to try that! What on earth are the fruity or fizzy substitutes out of which you make a booze festival-in-a-class such as that?)

Willy Hartrey had been cleaning the place overnight, as was his job. He was there. Jerry Garagiola, who runs the body shop in Lynn and who is a neighbor but only rarely a customer — he was out behind the building with his wife helping set up the tables in that small dirt lot, scene of other gatherings.

Pippa Goldflower came unattached — up to the noon hour.

And, greatest surprise of all — Carl McClure, whom no one at the Mile ever expected to see again, came quietly down the side street and into the rear lot where, as noted, festivities were still in their formative stage. The time was about one p.m.

The summer gathering, Joe Barren’s first, was underway.

“Joe, tell me something, I said when I showed up. “Why didn’t you wait until the summer solstice? You know, the official, astronomical start of summer?”

“Too late in June,” Joe said. “I’m up from Florida, too hot down there. It’s summertime. So, we celebrate.”

And so, as the world burned, from Gaza to Tel Aviv, tanks rolled in a grand military display in Washington, protesters mobbed to the intersections convinced there is a self-involved, jingoistic egoist mounting an American throne, counter-protesters appeared on the other side of the intersections, politicians were assassinated in Minnesota and rioters tried to take the streets in L.A. , the steady patrons of The Last Mile Lounge on the Revere, Lynn line tried to dispel the darkness and make spirits bright.

But Deano had to tell Joe, “looks like rain, boss.”

“If it comes, we’ll just squeeze indoors,” he said.

That’s the spirit.

And so summer began for Joe Barron and guests a good week before the earth’s north pole was pointed toward the sun.

A FRESH, HOT SLICE OF LIFE

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…)

CROWS, GULLS, AND AN EVENTFUL MAY UPON US…

The crows, maybe one needy crow, comes and stands on The lights stanchion by the carport. Caws that rhyrmic vocal tattoo, his message: I’m here, time to feed me.

And so the ceremic plate hoisted its three-foot stand gets filled with cat food kibble and grapes, an apparent crow delectation. (The cats, too, come around for the kibble that, I supposed, is rightly theirs. And the rats.

They crows come, they take. This one crow — my friend Diane believes it is always the same crow, her friend — comes, dips, takes a grape or some kibble, flies off.

It is said crows will bring you a gift. So far, there has only been a chicken bone. a treasure from one of these black-winged carnivor.

The poet Ted Huges meditated on the crow’s blackness:

Black the brain with its tombed visions

A black rainbow bends its empitness over emptiness.

Dark. Very dark.

Brighter and so white are the gulls that sat, days ago, high up on the tiled roof of the Sistine Chapel nearby the tin stove pipe that would eventually emit the white smoke and announced the choice of a new Catholic pontiff.

White fellows from the sea that can be found wherever offal or discarded protein can be found. They now and then tilted their heads sharply back, as they will do, and screeched their keow or cow-cow-cow.

Long live the Pope!

But how long will those gulls, so amusingly unaware they were being seen by billions of mortals, gathering, as birds will gather, on the ancient chapel roof for unknown reasons (probably hoping someone in the multitude in the wide square below would drop a pizza crust.) — how long will they live? How long pursue their career foraging in Roman garbage?

Who, coming upon one of those seabirds down an alley or devouring their cast-off cafe table scraps along the Via Venito , will realize that there is a worldwide celebrity under their table, a guardian of the pipe that was soon to spew its portentious white cloud announcing a new chapter in Christendom’s history?

Where and when will their airborne journey end — for those crows in Largo? Those gulls in Rome?

Remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Literary hero of the distant Seventies?  Steeped in personal reflection far exceeding the likely capacity of the average bird’s brain. That’s fantasy for you.

But those are real birds in Rome, real crows in Largo. But now just beeks in the avian crowd.

But somebody should paint them, from memory, of course. They’ll never pose.

I don’t know how Audubon did it.

APRIL FADES

And is fading wherever you are. Six days left in the fourth month.

The mocking birds, grackle, jays, sparrows of assorted varieties, cardinals and a solitary woodpecker come to the backyard dangling flat feeder I’ve fill with mealworms which draws a busy winged frenzy like shoppers to a bazaar. The squirrels, those antic rodents with their spasmodic twirling, bounding motions and fluttering tails, pillage the other feeder, exhausting them, and me.

Out front in the carport, a feral gray cat now comes regularly to be fed. A seashell has been set among the plants on the steps to the slider. I found the seashell on a Gulf beach in the Panhandle. The cat kibble is set out in the shell, is now a feeder. It reminds me, and only me, of the shell in which the mythical maiden stands in Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus.”

The cat, looking a bit ragged these days, as if she might have tangled with a rival, showed no great appetite for her food this morning. Perhaps I should call her Venus. She departed.

The crows have their own feeder — of peanuts and, oddly enough, cat kibble, which they like. They have not shown up yet. I will hear them when they do.

So the cat did not partake of her feeder.

But a rat did — a small rat (one might even call it cute) briefly dined on the kibble.

And so the 7 a.m. traffic of birds, cats and rodents took it’s wild turn as the light rose on the fading April morning.

APRIL NIGHT

There was a black cat on the walk this mild April evening, fortelling the black, night. He was sitting in a driveway, staring at me mildly, eyes very bright, as a mild April evening became the April night, sealing off forever this mild April day.

And that’s all I’ll say, except how much the breeze flutters the little leaves above the ramshackled house on another block, where an old lady lives, all in darkness now, her hammock no longer slung across her little porch, and the tiny model sailboat set upon the sill of the window facing into the carport–that’s missing, too.

And the purple Club House flag, flapping in the breeze, is flying at half-staff, indicating a death in the community. Was it that old woman? I haven’t seen her lately. I hope she’s still with us.

But, if not, living or deceased, I choose to see her happily setting sail, as if that tiny model sailboat were the real thing, large as life –sailing her off forever across the April moon, borne by the mild April breeze into the April night.