Vacation observations and poems

by Pat Laster

While vacationing in the Florida panhandle, I did two things for the first time in my seventy-something years: I ate classic Eggs Benedict and drank a pint of raspberry-tinged ale. Not on the same day, you understand.
Friday, the first full day, 7:50 am on the deck with coffee. A Mom and small boy—she with a cooler and a racket, he with a zippered racket following docilely. Here they come back. Was the tennis court “temporarily” closed, like the pool?
A hot-rodding, old-model convertible passes, noisy even from this distance. A local insulation installer leaves in a logoed panel truck. And there goes another business man carrying only a satchel.
Here they go again—the mom carrying only a racket, the son lugging both the water jug & his racket. The boy walks back toward this building, his Athletics hat nearly covering his eyes. The mother seems to be looking for a way into the tennis area. Now, the boy follows behind a maintenance man who will be “fixing” the problem. Sounds like one needs a code to open the tennis courts gate, too. Whatever he did must have worked—they are on the court and the employee is ambling back to his post/ area.
NOW, the brassy blonde mother, also brassy voiced, is teaching Son how to play tennis. That’ll drive me inside: I don’t need a human voice to adulterate the doves’ sounds. I will read Kathy Craig’s poetry book, Kindling. Her mother, Pat Craig of Bismarck, gave her poet friends copies of her daughter’s first collection. Kathy lives in the Raleigh-Durham area.
From inside, I see that the tennis lesson is over. A poem comes to mind, thence to the journal: Tennis/ lesson over. / I can resume my seat/ in the warming sea-air breeze of/ the Gulf.
Back out on the deck, I continue reading Kingling. One of Kathy’s poems, “Loss” hits a chord with me. I reprint it here:
“I had two ceramic terriers once, / Both fit in one palm. / They stood guard/ on my cherry dresser, / the one my mother had as a girl.//
“I never played with them––/ they were just for show. / Yet I kept them/ all through the years. / Now I don’t know how/ or when they disappeared, / like the last pages of childhood.”
That poignant poem engendered my own reminiscences about something I lost. “Whatever Happened to...?”
“As a young wife,/babe in arms,/I visited my first flea market./A green frosted-glass/ perfume set/captivated me./Mine now, I determined/to decorate our room/with purples, greens and blues/even going so far/ as to create a baby quilt/in those colors.//
“That’s as far as my project/went. Except it began a life-long/love of frosted-satin glass.
Whatever happened/to the green perfume bottles? Whatever happened/ to the life I once had?”
As many times as we moved from 1960 till 1980, it is no wonder the velvety glass bottles disappeared. But I still have the baby quilt. Somewhere.
I’m off again, but only to Los Indios Escapes in Cherokee Village. See you soon with more stories.

c 2011 Pat Laster, author of A Journey of Choice, dba lovepat press