Here, there, and everywhere.
In Florida again for the holidays. I’m over my need for face-breaking cold weather in order to enhance the Christmas spirit. A tannenbaum looks just as festive in the sunlight, Santa looks even jollier with nut-brown skin and sunburn-red cheeks.
It’s added balm for my sin-sick soul to ride around in a car with my brother blasting music, like we used to do when he was 19 and I was 12. We’re less bored now, with weightier subjects to talk about; it’s a convertible Pony instead of various ’70s and ’80s-era Chevys; more crunk and less P.E. or N.W.A.; and a Scamp in the backseat approving of the beat and clutching his curls to stop the breeze from tendril-whipping his face.
“OK. Where are we, again?”
“We’re going north, and we’re about to turn west on State Road 50, which becomes Colonial Drive in the east –”
“Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Something about Orlando just ruins any sense of direction I have.”
“Well as long as it doesn’t fail you in New York, I’m glad.”
But New York looks like somewhere, I think, as we pull into a mall like every other mall I’ve been to in Florida, with the same architecture, anchor stores — hey, this Dillard’s even smells like the Dillard’s in Little Rock, with the same peculiarly fusty but practical clothing –
“–but it’s in Orlando,” laughs my big brother.
“Yeah.”
Back in the car and on our way to the tattoo studio to check in with the artist who’s going to ink my brother’s arm, I only begin to regain any sense of place near downtown, close to the crumbling ghetto of Bahamians and Jamaicans living in plantation-ish shotgun shacks that remind my brother of New Orleans and me of the Caribbean. There are also bungalows that, given some care, would be lovely places to live.
“But the money’s coming and these will all be –”
“–swept up and the area gentrified soon?”
“Right.”
Living in New York, I am convinced that the paradigm shift that made people of means realize that inner cities and their bungalows and rowhouses and commercial/residential density and centralized transportation were more desirable and interesting than 1-hour car commutes to disconnected suburbs is complete. But then I visit the rest of America and remember how narrow my view has become. I wonder, now that the Little Rock I remember looks more like Orlando looks more like Dallas looks more like nowhere and everywhere, will there be a movement to restore character to the sprawling landscapes littered with the same big box stores and gas stations and parking lots and strip malls? Someone’s trying.