[Author’s Note. Still listening to Moby Dick. I want to share some version of the truth and Cedar Key is special to us. Our room is top right in the photo below. Figure readership not great enough to spoil the town. Parking already tight. End of note.]
A dolphin so close you can clearly hear him snort. Barker Ajax was waterside on the deck of the best room on Dock Street, best room on the island. A cold can of Foster’s, a smoking doobie, Time magazine’s The Hundred Most Influential People issue. He was – once again – excluded from the list.
A better collection of folks could certainly be put together. But introduced to some new worthies. Thank you. Less smarmily written might help. Mitt Romney about the specialness that is Paul Ryan. Enough to give you diabetes. But good beach reading en toto. Barker got to thinking about his own list. Where would he begin? Probably with Mom and Dad. The young redhead.
Life like a big screen three-dimensional extravaganza. Half-naked girls on the fishing pier. First noisy teenager with an outboard mouth. Sound carries here.
Cassie Topaz Malone, the young redhead napping inside. She doesn’t even have to be awake to enjoy the water. Mermaid in a past life.
Only been in town long enough for three meals, had oysters twice. Went to wrong restaurant once.
Not gonna mention that eatery’s name. Nobody’s getting rich over there. Nice people. But Barker’s sausage omelette looked like itsy bitsy flimsy yellow polka dot bikini. With two large dark areolas insisting on notice. The young redhead agreed he was not being sexually obsessed. Not this time. You hate to start the day by being startled by your own breakfast. Most important meal of the day, right? Lunch last year had been much better.
Hottest day of the year. Ninety degrees, Gulf a mirrored glass. Watching legions of dolphin perform back and forth like Radio City Rockettes in shiny wetsuits. One little white kid in a silver motorboat pulling another little white kid hunched like a playful puppy atop a yellow tube.
There’s a modest white sailboat with a trio of liveaboards. Nobody seems to know who they are, we’ve asked around. This will give you some idea about a couple of soulmates and Cedar Key’s entertainment options.
The sailors unfurled their white sails, sailed four hundred yards west. Then four hundred yards east. Back and forth like that for an hour or so as Barker and Cassie pondered. What are they doing? What were they doing now? Why did they do that? What are they gonna do next? Who do you think they are? Should we get a sailboat and live on it?
Those two white kids just went by again. Not a lifejacket in sight. And me without my gun.
The smell of fried oysters – the seafood equivalent of walking into a donut shoppe – dampens the ubiquitous brine odor. Kayakers. Paddleboarders. Christ, next it’ll be tri-athletes.
Dolphins!!! Oooos and ahhhs can be heard from two different bars. We’re not the only ones.
That reminds me. Last night on a private deck atop the water – open the window, fish from the king-sized bed – she said something about voices carrying. He suggested somebody might be listening because he thought he heard a noise from downstairs around the corner. She pointed out if somebody was listening, somebody could be recording. And if somebody got them on tape….
If somebody got them on tape they damn sure didn’t want to sound stupid. The next hour foreshadowed and forsworn an erudite repartee unlikely to be replicated in the verily nonce.
Sounded like that episode of Downtown Abbey when Stephen Hawking went jogging with the Dowager. Barker continued to lapse into the vocabulary of a black drug dealer Baltimore Westside. Next night we thought we would discuss Donald Trump’s proposal to solve transportation problems by forcing illegal immigrants to work for crap wages as litter bearers vis a vis light rail.
Orange seagull! No shit. Maybe two, probably two, one looked a darker brown elsewise. There’s that orange seagull again! Not something you see every day. First thought it’s those crazy goddamn scientists in Gainesville. University of Florida. Orange is the Gators’ color. Researchers bought a motel here last year, they got a dock over that way. What more proof do you need?
Cassie jumped up to watch the orange seagull fly beyond. He does stand out. The color of sunset.
There’s an elliptical machine in the sky. Huh? That cloud right there between the chicken’s beak and her tail. Oh, I do see it; first I thought, crack addict.
Pterodactyl!! Damn pelican came too damn close. Incommodiously close. [Author’s note: That phrase purloined from Herman Melville. End of note.] Barker was firm about proper pelican distance. Pelicans, not so much.
This is so much better than a cruise, she said.
Back home safely. The little sailboat moored again off Dock St. Dolphins, I am told, were hiding from us personally. Just us two. On porpoise.