Stormy days

They shut off the island from the mainland, evacuated the last tourists and locked down the employee-housing building where I live. I am the only one outside, floating on my back in the lit pool of Olympic size with the dead fronds spiraling down from the palm trees with each new gust of wind. The birds are silent and the pelicans no longer skimming the surface of the ocean. They don’t need CNN to know that yet another hurricane of feminine gender is bearing down on us two meridians east with its predictable premenstrual mood swings. Suddenly I hear a distant Cuban radio station playing a bolero beyond the mangroves while watching a gecko run down the length of a gutter thinking again of Ulysses Grant apt definition of history: “Just one goddamn thing after another”.

Key West, October 2005