Let’s call her Flora.
Flora was hitching a ride on GO, a shuttle from the Fort Lauderdale Airport down to South Miami. Flora was calling everyone in her cell phone memory with her plans. Flora reminded the driver and a weary me in seven-minute intervals of everything going on in Flora’s life. I was ready to bang my head out the glass and roar, gripping the leather of the seats, pretending to scratch Flora’s face.
Maybe it was the vanilla wafers I ate on the plane. Or Jet Blue’s legroom. I imagined I was entitled to peace for the shuttle that was technically just mine.
Then we hit traffic into MIA, her drop off point. I could feel my cells pushing against my bones’ desire to groan.
I asked Flora for change, so I’d have smaller bills to tip the driver for picking her up. “No, only the twenty.” She was going to pay him for the agony. Y yo?
In The Family
I was in Miami for a funeral. In a spaceship. But I’ll get to that later.
First we had to dull ourselves with sushi for some and teriyaki for the less adventurous. A nearly twenty-year friendship sat in front of me, a brother and sister grieving, a spouse. All of us with a large fish tank behind us, floating in and out of our sight line and food cravings.
It was a family dinner missing one.
We talked history of Coconut Grove, the swanky strip of shops we were frequenting, with the Bay only a hint of a Palm tree away. I choked Flora’s memory down with my teriyaki chicken.
We shared television addictions (damn you Lost!) and food curiosities, and listened to the adventures of the couple around South Florida – on break from their own strain to support a friendship, like family. The brother and sister were there, but had a quiet shock and sadness that under girded their eyes and their speech. The layer beneath us all.
On to the Spaceship
Its hurricane-resistant hood made the chapel look like the top of a steely alien invader. Maybe it was Jesus in there. Revelations never mentioned that.
The ceremony was for a mother, long sick but painfully leaving her children behind. I could feel their ache and gaping absence as the solid truth in that room. You could remember the spirit one leaves behind, as a childhood friend of their mother’s shared in a speech that commanded a presence of a life. We inside the spaceship listened intently.
We were entertained by a priest that couldn’t even remember the deceased’s name.
Apparently, we are unforgettable to less people than we think. You would think paying the church would ensure the name is right, but maybe that’s asking for too much of the liturgy.
Closing with a slideshow, one thinks how short it really is.
Who Rocks the Party
I met a gaggle of old family friends. Welcoming, real, quiet in some ways, grown (I’d seen them three years before a wedding of my friend, at the wedding and now two years later). Such short time really.
But the sun and slight façade of shade welcomed us to the patio with the great food of a kind reception. My generation sat aside the patio overlooking a golf course, sun out, the spaceship and urn away. An exhale across the party, taking in the blessings of a reception and seeing each other all over again.
Eventually the sweltering Miami heat got to me. It had been nearly a decade since I’d lived in such heat and my body couldn’t adjust.
I pulled up by a couch inside with a New Yorker and Washingtonian. One was an artist and one was a political consultant, putting my paths before me. We happily chattered on about politics and the beauty of San Francisco, about life as it is, and the time sped by.
“Its gonna storm!” someone cried, running in a little wet from the early drizzle. I raised my head up to see the clouds coming in over the golf course that spread behind us.
Rain skipped upon us all as we ran out to our cars to rest in the remains of the day.
Life is Sweet
I couldn’t sleep at all. The heat, the cable box, the time zone not settling into my bones despite a week in the East. My body was refusing to abide, it fought with all it had. It wanted to go home. So I booked it a flight.
I heard my name called behind me.
“Yea?”
“You leaving?” My friend sat up from her stoop in the lobby, clearly up all night as well. I was sorry we had missed each other’s company.
“Yea,” I said, explaining the flight scenario and my body’s lack of compliance.
“I’ll drive you.”
They were a sweet twenty minutes, alone with a friend with new fears and hopes ahead, like a new horizon had been painted. Only the last one was ripped from you without your permission.
In that simple ride, I was reminded how she housed more love than she knew and was blessed to give any piece I could muster.
She shared how they scattered her mother’s ashes at sea, between incoming rain clouds, no other ending seeming right. Far away from the Floras, the priest, the oppressive Miami heat, sadness ashore and into the sweet depths of another place.
Comments