We crossed into the Florida panhandle under cover of darkness last night, around 7 p.m. My last clear sight of Alabama — my only clear sight really since I fell asleep in the Expedition’s passenger seat in eastern Louisiana and missed Mississippi entirely — was the Battleship Alabama in Mobile, standing like a ghost to the right of the freeway. Then, a few minutes later — I don’t know how long, because time doesn’t have the same value on a long car journey — we saw a green sign with “Florida” on it and some motto or other and we were in the Sunshine State.
“It feels weird,” said Leo. “I’m fifty years old, I feel like I should have been in Florida before this. I mean, an iconic place like Florida, one should have been there.”
The road got smoother and I searched my brain for references. Hemingway and Key West and a childhood friend who chased his true love to Miami Beach, bringing her triumphantly back to California and then having it all explode in disaster a couple of years later — and the idea of New Yorkers coming down from the east for 6 months a year — the original Snow Birds — Cubans fleeing from Castro’s Cuba and taking over entire districts of Miami, and making Spanish wholly acceptable on the streets of that town (This I heard with asperity from my daughter who lives there, and who had to learn Spanish to fit in at work) and then the story of Marly and Me, not the dog’s story, but the writer’s, who experienced Florida as the place of his youth and through the beginning and middle and end of the life of one dog. Florida. The land of dreams.
We flew over the smooth road. The night was black and inky and we rushed on into it. Florida, here we come.
