Way off to the west in the wire grass were the twinkling lights of a trailer park. Mostly old people. The whole damn state full of them. Like God picked up the country and shook it and all those who weren’t nailed down with jobs and commitments slipped right out of their houses, their card games and visits with grandkids, their nine holes of golf and double dates with other old people who’d lived long enough to make it to dinner one more Saturday night – every year more and more of them just slipped out of their lives and fell to Florida.--- From The Garden of Last Days, by Andre Dubus III --
Have a great Tuesday!
I must confess that I like the fact that Austria does not have a place like Florida.
ReplyDeleteTo me, Florida spells Everglades. I have been twice and I love the place.
ReplyDeleteWhat would "a place like Florida" BE though?
ReplyDeleteFlorida is not only Everglades and old people, it is historic fortresses, and home to bird sanctuaries, the shelling capital of the world (Sanibel Island), Peace River, orange groves, persimmons growing on your backyard tree, grapefruit that needs no sugar, Corkscrew Swamp, romantic lighthouses, miles of miniature golf, and pink flamingos on the lawn.
It's all that!
Still, that Dubus passage - put here, I presume so we could appreciate the delightful prose - is the freshly communicated perspective of a talented writer.
Thank you for your comments, all.
ReplyDeleteIt's true, as anonymous points out, I only posted the quote because I like the way Dubus wrote this little passage... I have nothing against Florida per se, or its median human age of 103.
Even though I love that one joke that Seinfeld does, where he says that the state-flag of Florida should be a steering wheel with two knuckles at the top of it, arthritically placed at ten and two!
But yes.... sometimes I just love the WAY a thing is written.
To my chagrin, I lost a ton of quotes I had been saving, quotes just like this... passages from books, stuff that is not so much saying something profound, as profoundly saying something.
I lost it all in the Big Crash of my last Hard-Drive.
Now... I back up stuff more frequently.
And speaking of backing up.... beware, if you are driving through Florida..... literally hundreds and thousands of half-blind old people are backing out of driveways everywhere and NOT LOOKING!