Yo Ho

The 32401 weather reads 69F and 93%. Maybe that’s forty-five minutes up the road at the new airport, but the mercury on my back porch sits at 72F. Walking down front for Linda’s PCNH I met a predawn that’s comfortably cooler than the overnight setting for our family room. Lay the PCNH in Linda’s chair, a platform rocker that mama reupholstered years ago, back out to the downstairs front screen porch to enjoy a cool early morning. Something’s missing: no salty smell is coming across the Bay from the Gulf. But I can fantasize it.

We’re to the time of year when there won’t be many more cool early mornings, moving toward the season when even this early will be too smotheringly hot and humid to be outside. Life does that, time and seasons. For a symbol, from now on, the newspaper will always be down front, it will never be out back again.

HuffPost Travel page this morning has a list of the ten most disappointing vacation destinations in the world. Included is Nassau, Bahamas, which having been there on three cruises I more than agree. There’s a touristy but good shopping area the block off the pier. Emeralds. Rum, good Jamaican rum with memories of chewing sugar cane as a boy. Rum cake. Beyond that, no. If you take one of the cabs offering to show you the sights, you get whizzed through a squalid Hell that equals my memories of Port-au-Prince, then stop at an empty casino. You can go to Atlantis, the tall double resort with the bridge between them that houses rooms for, we were told, $25,000 per night. I no thank you. The resort has a fine walking grounds and an underground aquarium that goes on and on and on and holds for me my first memory of very sharp angina, before it dawned on me what it was, nearly four years before the flight to Cleveland. Should we ever take another cruise, we will make sure the itinerary does not include Nassau.

However, it was disappointing to see Walt Disney World on the HuffPost list. Okay, it’s all fantasy, nobody thinks they’re really where the rides go, but starting as soon as the gates open, I’ve circled through “Pirates of the Caribbean” half a dozen or ten times straight and loved every cannon shot and yo ho yo ho. Tickets are shocking, but HuffPost has Disney on the wrong list. You expect a day of fantasy, and you get to submerge in a good one.

Where’s this going? Nowhere real. You don't need Disney, life has its own fantasies, different for each life. Sometimes we actually get to live in them, even if only for a time. No, always only for a time. When they’re done they're not done, they're still as close as what my aunt EG called a treasure chest of memories. Peering in the garage window. What do you see? Whatever you want. Or thought you wanted at the time. What was. What might have been but you’re probably glad wasn’t. What you lusted after and thought you could not live without, for me, for sure, a car or two -- one of which I owned for a while, the other I never got to drive. Drink up, me hearties, yo ho.

Still dark, but chirpy chirpy chirpy chirpy the early birds are out to live their own fantasies.

A pirate’s life for me.