Florence!

My pictures say it all! 

Basilica di Santa Croce
(Basilica of the Holy Cross)

 

Michelangelo's Tomb
(inside the Basilica)

The River Arno at night

a typical street

The River Arno again

the view from our front door

a wider street

Dante!

On the Beach

I’m on a beach. In Delaware. A mini-vacation before the longer one I’ll begin next week. I’m sitting under an umbrella, most of the time with my eyes closed, listening to the voices of strangers while a breeze skips across my skin, moving from one shoulder to the other.

There are people all around me - an older woman with short gray hair sitting alone with a book; an Asian family of three - mother, father and a teenage son who never leaves their side;  a young black man with long thin locks that frame his face majestically; and a man behind me talking incessantly on a cell phone, his voice rising and falling with the cadence of the waves, a voice I’m surprised I miss after he packs up and leaves.

Children screaming. Women laughing. All of it muffled by the mantra of the waves that lull me into bliss, until finally, I pick myself up to head home, to finish packing for a trip across this ocean to Germany and beyond.

At the Beach

It's summertime and the living is easy. Or, at least, it is as long as you are inside with air conditioning or at the shore. Which is where I spent two days last week (and took this pic).

On the beach, I looked down to see the sand between my toes and up to see a perfectly blue cloudless sky. It was easy to fall into a light sleep there, listening to the crescendo of waves until the sound of a child’s voice calling “Mommy, mommy,” woke me. Later I slept again, then awoke to find that I had been resting somewhere between contentment and bliss. 

When I opened my eyes, I saw a woman on crutches standing at the water’s edge.  How did she get there? I wondered. A toddler went running away from his mother as another, slightly older child, in a neon pink bathing suit ran in the opposite direction, away from the same mother. 

Later, in the evening, I dined on seafood and walked the boards, eating fried Oreos and watching the tide come in. Back at the hotel, fattened and content, I laid my head on a pillow and dreamt of another tomorrow.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

The Place Poem

When I was given an assignment to write a “place poem” in November, I thought it would be an easy poem to write.  It turned out to be the most difficult.  I thought about all the places I’ve visited: Rome, Berlin, Paris (sort of – which is yet another story). 

I thought too, of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the Green Mountains in Vermont and of one of my very favorite places on earth – the Blue Ridge Mountains from where I looked down through the clouds at the breathtakingly beautiful Shenandoah Valley.  But no place seemed quite right for this assignment until I thought of the place I return to year after year.  Close to home, it is somewhere along the

Jersey Shore 

 

I’ve come here every summer

since I was a child

to take  in a breath of salty air
at the base of the Ninth Street bridge.

I’ve come here every summer

to salute the Ferris wheels
that stand like sentinels
against the rising tide of my life. 

I’ve come to remember the hootenannies
I sang to in ‘63, the boy I met
and might have married,
the Frisbees I tossed but never caught.

I come to soak up the sun,
to walk the boards,
eat lunch at Chatterbox
and for yet another ornament to decorate my tree.

I come here as often as possible
to gaze upon the sea
until, at last, it diminishes me 
and all the things I’ve come here to forget.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Flip-flops

   

     Flip-flops!    The name says it all.

     Did you know that flip-flops have been around since 4000 BC?  (Weren’t they the footwear of choice those decadent Romans wore with their togas?) Did you know that soldiers returning from Japan brought modern flip-flops to this country? That was in the 1940’s, but flip-flops didn’t become popular here until the 1960’s. (That’s because nobody in their right mind would have worn them in the Forties and Fifties. Flip-flops are casual wear and nobody understood casual before 1964 when the Beatles grew their hair long just for the hell of it.) 

     Did you know any of this?  Of course, you didn’t and neither did I. In addition, I just didn’t give a damn. Until recently, I was too blissfully content in my ignorance. Having grown up in the Fifties, I had never even worn a pair of flip-flops. 

     Then along came that June day when both my daughter and I finished working at our respective school districts. It was a beautiful summer day - one of those glorious days when it was hot, but not humid. There we were with our first full day of freedom. 

Naturally, we decided to spend the day doing absolutely nothing - with a little bit of shopping thrown in for fun. We had just left one store in the mall when my daughter, upon seeing a pair of flip-flops in another store window, exclaimed, “Let’s get pedicures!”

     “Why?’ I asked. 

     “Because it’s summer and you need a pedicure to go with your flip-flops.”

      “I don’t wear flip-flops.”

      “But you need them to wear while you get your pedicure?”

     “What?” but she was already sailing through the front door of the shoe store, expecting me to follow. 

     “Mom, look at these,” she said pointing to a pair of hot pink flip-flops with soles thicker than the ones on my sneakers.  “Try these on.”

      “I can’t,” I said.  “I only wore flip-flops once and that little do-dad thing in the middle drove me nuts.”

     “But you need them,” she insisted.  “Besides this pair won’t hurt.  They’re good ones.”

    
      “How much are these?” I asked a salesman thinking maybe I could squeeze out a ten dollar bill for them. 

    
        “Sixty,” he said blithely. 

     “Dollars?” I shouted wondering how something that almost did not even exist could cost so much.  Everyone in the store had turned to look at me as half a dozen emotions including shock, incredulity, and amazement appeared on my face.  Embarrassed, I turned to join my daughter who had already broken into gales of uncontrollable laughter that propelled both of us out of the store, into our car and up the highway to a discount department store. 

     But after purchasing an inexpensive and bland pair of flip-flops and getting a pedicure, my mind kept returning to the sixty dollar pair that would have looked perfect with my hot pink, perfectly painted toenails.

    
     “Hmmm….” I said looking down and wiggling my toes, “maybe those Romans weren’t so decadent after all!”

      

                                       

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE