Easy Rider

Quick ride down the eastern coast. Hickory to Melbourne - 610 easy miles in 9 easy hours. No maintenance, no traffic, no weather - no problem. Really good to get back on the road again.

The pounding bounce, the twisty turns, the horizon's constant rise and fall, the slow-passing cities, the quck-passing towns, with people and cars racing all around, The long great roads with ancient monsters from the distant past, lumbering, snorting, thrasing, rumblingly, mindlessly-charging and ominiously-eyeing us, those hissing and groaning and squealing Trucks. Hah – Olé!

We sleep with the door open to the beach tonight, and the song of the ocean is our lullabye. Pillow-talk with an old friend, long time missing. Bringing back feeling-sounds from Florida and California, from Green Turtle Cay, from Pattaya Beach in Thailand, from Bermuda and the Azores and Iceland, and especially Vietnam, and the islands of Greece, and Crete and from Caba de Gato in Spain. The warming pulse of our very close friend, the good planet Earth. Ah, tonight we sleep together again. And it is wonderfully good. Yea.

© John Womack, 2009. All rights reserved.

Brigid

I Ran into Brigid today, quite by accident. It was in a warm swath of sunlight beneath a palm tree patch in front of aggressively blooming gardenias. She was dressed in orange tutu with long purple stockings and a fancy gold pair of Tevas. Her yellow blouse was carelessly open, down to a point, and her hair was electric red.

“Hi” she said, “Why are you staring?”

“Are you Brigid?” I impulsively asked.

“Well,” She sighed and looked off at the northern horizon, “ . . . yes.”

“I didn’t expect to run into you down here!” I exclaimed, “Not in east central Florida!”

“It’s a point of contention” she sadly replied, “But I am supposed to be everywhere today, you know.”

“But why down here? This place has never SEEN Winter, and it is certainly not here today.”

“Yeah, well, you see – well, I am not really THE Brigid, but a Brigid-in-training-to-be.”

I was stunned. “There’s more than ONE Brigid -- how on earth can that be?”

“Come on, man, even Santa Clause has helpers!”

“Oh, I see!” You are like one of those old Santas in Macy’s and Dillard’s, huh?”

Brigid took my hand in hers as we crossed the street to walk on the shining beach. “They send some of us down here for a fancy fling, next year we move north a state.”

“So you’ll be in North Carolina in - 2012?”

She crossed her arms and shivered. “I don’t want to even think about that - not right now.”

“I think they have this thing backward - you ought to come south a state each Winter.”

“Oh that too,” She said, “Someday I’ll be back - actually, I’ve been here before.”

“But won’t you be old by then?” I asked.

Now she smiled as we walked down toward the beach. “’Old’ is one of the great illusions of Winter.” and added “that’s part of my message.”

“Why your silly get-up?” I asked, pointing to her tutu.

“Well, “ she said as she gathered herself up, “Spring IS silly.”

“No!” Spring is NOT silly! We NEED Spring!”

“But that’s not really true,” Brigid sweetly smiled. “Spring always comes way too early.”

“No” I said. ”No, it always comes in way too late!”

Brigid walked out into the surf and spun around “The daffodils always come out too early, popping up out of the frost,” Bridget lifted her hands above her head, “ the forsythia blooms before it is ready to make it all the way through, the baby birds hatch out way too early and the baby possums are born too soon,too.”

“That’s only because Spring is late!”

Brigid smiled sweetly now, “Winter is the wisest of all the seasons, you know” and she brushed her bright red hair back from her twinkling green eyes. “and Winter has lessons to teach and the world has lessons to learn.”

I interrupted her “Oh Winter, bah - bah humbug, in fact! How can Winter teach us anything?”

Brigid continued, “The great message of the ages is that Spring is the child conceived in the glory of the harvest the year before, and Winter is the time for germination and to branch out and grow below the surface.” She continued now, “And the world has changed since last year's growth, and there are things the world needs to learn."

"But how can anybody learn anything when they are cold and frozen?"

"Winter is the time to send out roots, to try new passageways, to fix what went wrong last time. Winter is the time for pondering, for examining, for questioning and for resolutions." Brigid smiled again and lifted her arms up as if to hug all of heaven. "You should never wish for Spring to come but only to open your heart to Winter."

And as the sea twinkled behind her she too twinkled and vanished. Brigid was gone, and Spring was here.

The Fountain of . . .

It is a strange world down here in a place with people who walk around like men on stilts, although they crouch as they walk and their hands quiveringly grope for support. In some ways they resemble a child learning to walk, or to ride a bike, or tie their shoes - in other ways some resemble a fish on the sand grasping for water, or a bird on the ground still trying to fly. Many of their stumbling feet are shod in perfect shoes. Brand new shoes, never really used. Right out of the box.

Their hair is their ensign, a common sign of their species, usually combed into a neatly frozen arrangement when viewed from the front, but on the back it is always flat like a bug that has been squished. Another commonly seen is a flock-like chicken-style look on their faces, nervously turning and blinking and swallowing and blinking and turning another direction.

Their faces are trusting and they all seem to be expecting that Something will happen soon. They want to see it coming. They want to see it before it gets here. There is often a startled look as if “it” just entered the room, but they are not sure. They look to others for confirmation or perhaps help. Then they close their eyes as if to relax for just a few minutes more.

This land which was once was called the Land of the Fountain of Eternal Youth has sadly become the Land of Eternal Age.

DoubleTree

We stayed at the Doubletree on Melbourne Beach, 1665 North A1A. Indialantic, FL 32903 (321) 723-4222 Room 707. It was OK. Room was nice. All rooms are suites with a private balcony facing the beach through a door out of the bedroom. Next to the bedroom is bath compartment with toilet and shower in a closet and basin outside. That leads into a large living area with TV, table, excellent internet connections. The living area opens to a walkway balcony which is the method of egress. It leads to elevator/stairwell. Below is a nice lobby, numerous entertaining rooms, a bar and a swiming pool which is about two minutes from the beach. Weather was cold, colder and frigid. The last morning we abandoned walking on the beach due to 26° temperatures with 15 mph winds along the beach which was totally deserted except for a few birds of several species which were huddled together away from the water.

We had a problem with drainage from the sink in the room. I reported it to the main desk by telling a story about a great sea monster which had attacked me in the room and how I had fought it all night, finally forcing it down the sink hole where it got stuck. Took them three days to get if completely fixed. They were getting tired of the monster story by the end.

The DreamTime

Go inland an hour, then turn north. Go past the Orlandomegalopius and stay west of the cape. Go on through Payne’s Prairie and past all the gators. Somewhere up there, where the Suawanee River slowly flows through an ancient land of Spanish Moss there is a DreamTime place.

The world is more silent up here, and it turns more slowly. The days are more pleasant and the evenings always fade slowly under pastel gloamings. There is no time here, only flowers and trees and the sand and the sky.

The Temple of the Universe is right next door and there is a cat called Charlie and a dog named Solo and an unusual house with a screened-in room and a wood burning stove. And a very, very fancy guest house.

Outside are some grapefruit trees and orange trees too, and camellias and kumquats, and zen-like garden places, and here live royalty. Yes, this is the home of the gracious Queen Annabananna and her regal escort, the Olé Goaté .

Spanish moss is out of control, falling from the tops of tall trees clear to the lariopie down on the ground and the grass is strange and sandy, and the back roads seem not to matter. Swamps, or once-swamps, still lace the land although their bottoms are now firm and sandy.

Mockingbirds are singing and the crows call out Murder! Murder!, and there is the scent of flowers floating on the air along with the woodsmoke. But the songs and the sweet smoke don't go anywhere, no they never leave here. This is the land of the DreamTime, and nothing "real" ever happens here. How wonderful.

Paynes Prairie

Lots of birds and gators. We came to photograph the Whooping Cranes that had been reported here. We did not see any of them but several hundred Sandhill Cranes were evident. Also lots of Bitterns, Egrets and Herons.

Gators were here also but not eating on this chilly day with temperatures in the low 50s. These pictures were made with my Canon PowerShotS3, and at 20 to 30 power magnification, handheld.

Lazy Sunday

Lazy Sunday in the DreamTime Place. A casual comment about the coming birthday of the Great Scientist, Charles Darwin, led us into wonderfully long philosophical enquiries about questions that have no answers.

Like mountain climbers scaling vertical walls, we went far beyond reality digging our pitons of talk into solid conjectural rock far above the clouds of verifiable fact. We talked about leptons and bosons and neutrinos and muons and gluons and quarks and went as far as the Higgs theory would allow and came back down debating our competing theories about brain and mind - whether the mind is simply a compartment in the brain or whether, my view, that the brain functions as a radio-set that turns on and off and changes frequencies and volumes as it brings in signals from the great mind without.

We talked about Sufism and Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, and their various sub-disciplines. All this as Johnsy Gonzales softly played the pan flute and recorder to the “Whisper” and Phil Coulter led his group through “Scottish Tranquility”, and there was talk of Stephan Hawking and Exoplanets and cloud computing, eventually coming down to whether or not we could even refer to “classical” music or whether we should call that works “concert” music.

The gals worked a puzzle while the Olé Goaté and I took care of most of these significantly important matters, only occasionally we would refer questions to them for clarification concerning anatomy, or mental health.

As the evening warmed up to the low 60s we walked through the sandy roads around the Temple of the Universe with Solo to lead us safely, then to the Devil’s Millhopper and on to Nero’s, an American Millhopper of a fake Italian restaurant - actually not that bad except that they never gave us a chance to relax, salad served before the appitizer was worked through, meal brought before we could finish our salad, then the check - oh how VERY un-European!

Finally, we returned to the lane named after an April Gift for a last evening in the DreamTime Place. Tomorrow we blast off for the piedmont to return home and bring our doggies out of their kennel orbit back down to their soft beds again.