Chillin' in Florida

I'm sitting in the busy lobby of the Winter Park Public Library trying to warm up and chill out at the same time. It's a little cooler than usual for central Florida, but the sky is so blue and the sun so delicious that we've been trying to spend a lot of time outside. We're going to the beach on Thursday regardless of the weather just because it's soothing to stare at waves rolling in.

Today we had breakfast with some of my old high school friends and then went window-shopping on Park Avenue, where marching bands from West Virginia University and North Carolina State University paraded by and performed in preparation for the Citrus Bowl game. I recall marching down Park Avenue during my brief and inauspicious career in the junior high marching band, probably just before I quit band and joined the newspaper staff (instantly improving the quality of both institutions).

Park Avenue is also where I purchased the first hard-back book I ever bought with my own money: A Thurber Carnival. I paid something like $4 for it and I rode my bike home clutching it as if it were gold-plated. The Little Professor bookstore where I bought that book isn't even there any more, and neither are many of the other cute little stores I haunted in my youth, replaced by Starbuck's and Talbot's and Williams-Sonoma.

But the neighborhood where my parents live looks just the same as always, with the same old Spanish moss hanging from the same old live oaks. On a walk last night I noticed that the house up the street still has the name of my seventh-grade English teacher out front. I wonder if she would remember me? I can't recall the names of students I taught last year, so I wouldn't want to put the question to the test.

What are we doing for the rest of today and tomorrow and the rest of the week? Nothing much. Next week we'll have to hit the ground running, so today we'll just chill out and watch the parade pass by.