At a reception at
Murray
State
University (
Kentucky’s
Ivy
University) I connected with a a member of a rare breed: native vintage Floridian. His high school played my high school in football. We lamented our lost landscape. We old native Floridians are from a place that doesn’t exist any more (every one is, really), but ours is a particularly beautiful, amazing, wild, superbly strange and wonderful missing place.
I am from a place where you could see men launched in rockets out into space. Where hibiscus grows out of cracks in the cement. We took all this for granted, like television and the sun and Sno Cones. Alligators and armadillos.
Oranges and bougainvillea and snakes draped from the trees. And Disney was on one end of the town, the coasts, ocean and gulf, smell-able, touchable, thrilling attractions. I read Bible stories and tales of elves and books with talking spiders and Mogli and I walked outside and sensed
permeable membrane.
The poem to read: Jesse Lee Kercheval’s in the recent issue of THE SOUTHERN REVIEW
Related posts:
- What I Signed
- I Can’t Write In This Town
- MYSTERY CONFUSION REDUX
- Haruki Murakami’s New Book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
- Crazy Burning Dramatic High Point, and other things like points
