Beauty

This is why people once moved to the Sunny South.  This is much the way my own Home State looked when I was a kid.  You can still see some of it not far from where I live along the Banana River.  You needed water and shade--creeks and rivers and big Live Oak trees--if you wanted to be comfortable.  Now waterfront property looks nothing like this.  Developers had a better idea.  You can't replace a Live Oak quickly.  In many neighborhoods they planted the relatively fast growing Laurel Oak, but they don't get as thick and strong and are more easily damaged in their 40 year lifespan.  A Live Oak, on the other hand, may live 300-500 years in a rural setting.  Even in a stressful urban environment, though, they can live to be 200.  

Progress.  

I had an appointment with my beautician yesterday.  I secured my mother for three hours and headed off across town.  She lives in a netherworld of connected highways lined with shops, churches, and health clinics on a large piece of county property surrounded by land filled with big sheds and a hodge lodge of construction equipment.  

All of it was once, even in my adult life, cattle land.  Florida produces more beef than any state other than Texas.  It is also a great source of dairy.  Unknown to most residents now, the streets of the city are named after old dairy and cattle ranchers, families that once owned much of the state.  Once they built the airport and a brand new highway leading to it, the real estate harvest began.  Now the roads are littered with auto parts stores, stand alone restaurants with names like La Familia and El Rancho Deluxe, single story stucco apartment buildings built in the seventies and eighties, megachurches like Iglesia del Dios, large medical buildings, and off-brand grocery stores serving the local population housed in bunny hutch neighborhoods  of low-pitched roofs and carports.  

There was never any county or city planning.  

But I drove my mother's car, the little Corolla.  It is nine years old and has 50,000 miles.  But it has Bluetooth and a cranking a.c. and I have become addicted.  Traffic bothers me not.  Not even the souped up Toyota and Kia low riders with added spoilers, fancy running lights, and stereos that rattle the trunk.   That is what comes to dominate the road as I get closer to my destination.

It had been awhile since I had a beauty session.  My hair was long.  I wasn't sure what to do.  I liked it, but how would I feel in two months?  What did it matter, really?  I go nowhere.  Besides, in the coming days or months I may cut it short again and look like a regular Joe.  

Hugs and kisses and all the catching up.  

"It looks good," she said.  "It needs trimming, but. . . ."

"My hair is thinning," I said.  Indeed, since my mother has been in and out of the hospital, since the reconstruction at my house, since the stress began to kick my ass, my hair has been falling out.  "Do you think it is too thin to go short?"

"It has thinned, but not much," she said.  "You have incredible hair, especially for your age.  Cutting it short would make it look fuller.  But not today.  It would be too much.  You have too much going on to deal with a new look, a new identity.  Wait.  It looks nice.  I'll not cut it much today."

And so she mixed the chemicals and got the foils and the long process began.  She needed to talk, and talk she did.  Everybody's life has drama.  Hers includes her larger family.  She is a Russian Jew married to a Dominican.  Married?  When did that happen?  It must have been a secret ceremony for they weren't last time I saw her.  

I didn't ask.  She'd tell me if she wanted.  

My story is short and simple.  It involves two people.  It is mostly silence.  So I listened.  

A few hours later, I was finished.  My hair was be-el-oh-en-dee.  And as always when she finishes, combed and straight.  It is not the way it normally looks, but it takes a few days to become the messy head I wear.  

We kissed goodbye and I pulled outside her security gate.  I sat on the side of the road.  It was almost seven o'clock.  I didn't want to cook.  I called a hippie pizza joint near my mother's house and ordered a medium house pizza.  It would be ready by the time I had crossed back into town.  

Traffic was light.  Storm clouds filled the horizon.  Half an hour later, I pulled up to the Magic Mushroom.  Ten minutes later, I was back to my mother's.  

"Do you want some pizza?"

My mother made her way to the table as I plated a large piece for her.  Knife and fork.  It was good, but she ate little.  I had mine with a glass of citrusy New Zealand Sav Blanc.  I had two.  And when I was done, I poured a glass of whiskey and turned on the television.  Saturday night.  

My beautician and I talk about shows we watch on t.v. 

"Have you seen 'The Hunting Wives?" I asked.  I'd read that morning it was the most watched show on t.v. right now.  Netflix.  

"Oh my god. . . yes.  How do they have so much sex?"

"I guess I'll make my mother watch a lot of lesbian sex tonight," I said.  

Around nine, I turned it on.  Halfway through, I fell asleep.  When I woke up, my mother was sleeping in the recliner.  I'm tired all the time now.  There was nothing to do but go to bed.  

Now it is another Sunday here in the Year of Our Lord.  I will try to get a little exercise and visit my house.  After dreaming dreams of my film Leica, I have brought it with me in hopes of. . . but I've yet to take a photo.  Maybe today, somewhere, somehow.  I have two film Leica M7s and two film medium format Rollieflex cameras.  They sit.  I have many other film cameras, too.  Good ones, both 35mm and medium format.  Mamiya 6x6.  Hasselblad CM.  Canons and Nikons.  Modified Polaroids that shoot 4x5 film.  

They all sit.  

As do I.  

Maybe I'll try for a mimosa this afternoon at the Cafe Strange.  But I don't know.  I may not be as enamored as I was.  Still, a mimosa sounds good.  I am fat and need to keep up my calorie intake.  Mimosa juice she called it.  

Cold water springs, creeks to lakes, rivers that run to the ocean.  Giant rattlers and cotton mouths, fifteen foot gators and snapping turtles that can sever a finger.  Wild hogs that can sever an artery.  Peat fires and quicksand.  At sunset, the sky turned dark with giant birds going to roost for the night.  You could hear the fish jumping.  We'd drive to the beach on two lane roads past vegetable, fruit, and boiled peanut stands on half a tank of twenty-five cent a gallon gas.  We'd surf.  Afterwards, coming home, we'd stop at the little Frozen Gold shack for some soft serve  ice cream.

That's all gone now here in my hometown but for tiny pockets.  There is a bit of it left in my part of town surrounding the old Boulevard. . . but not for long, I fear.  The Greedheads are digging deep.  Everything will look like Trump's paved over Kennedy Rose Garden soon enough.  

But hey--there is still some music.  There seems to be a lot of it, and now, thanks to algorithms and social platforms, you can hear more than ever.  I heard this yesterday driving to my hair appointment.  Zowie!  A nice remake of an old Carol King/Neil Sedaka tune.  It felt like Magic City.  It washed over me like a bit of romance.  

I could use a bit of romance.