Found an old, old note. Something scribbled in college. Said note said, “I have always wanted to see Florida, so I have been saving these words about Florida by the esteemed poet James Dickey since I found them in the October, 1974 issue of PLAYBOY.” Which I was just reading for the articles. A dollar-twenty-five well spent. A real eye opener! Oh, to be in my twenties again. I think, not.
Not soon likely to have a better place to use Mr. Dickey’s fine prose.
A bridge, and a caged rattle. An attendant at a tourist reptile farm is bouncing a red balloon off the spring-tensioned, back-coiling head of a rattlesnake. The snake strikes the balloon and the customers leap back from the cage wire and giggle.
In a lagoon are lying hundreds of alligators, sprawled on the land of Jericho over and under each other, lolling in the water, half-emerging from the locked scum as in the true, the evolutionary Eden. They bring the Everglades: The vast river; and the ponderous heads gaze up – only the eyes out of the water – with an aesthetic appreciation known only to the Lower Forms of life, for strangely birds. Someone says, I can tell you, Jack, that the alligator is one beast of which it can be truly said that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
“I have always wanted to see Florida…” Don’t know to laugh or cry.
Because I have seen this almost tropical orange zone. Up close.
Twenty years a foreigner in my own country.
Like being a Puerto Rican.
THE SENIOR TOUR MEETS WILD KINGDOM.
Miami Vice on one coast, Matlock and Golden Girls on the other.
Harry Potter getting Goofy with Minnie Mouse in between.
My life turned around in Florida. And around. And around.
Think I am pointed in the right direction now.
Finally stopped spinning.
The last place I would’ve thought to call home.
And I won’t.
I can’t.