(no subject)

Mungo and I went to Florida to help my mom sell her house there. She talked a bit about how her brother Jerry had bought the lot for $5 a month, when he was a young man, before any of them had ever been to Florida; her brother Jim had also started buying a lot, but he didn't keep up the payments. I could see she was having some feelings about outliving Jim and Jerry, and her baby brother Tom, and being too frail to winter in Florida anymore, but I'm not good with feelings. I encouraged her to let go of stuff, and Mungo and I did mighty work packing up the things she couldn't let go of, and I made sure she understood everything she was signing.

Yesterday we went to Gasparilla Island State Park to wade in the ocean. It's full of fish! I saw many ospreys catching fish, and people with fishing rods under the ospreys, and white ibises and brown pelicans. I got a little sunburn on my arms and sanded a lot of callus off my feet. Mungo swum in the ocean for the first time. We went along Banyan Street, which has a lot of banyans, and houseplants, crotons and sansevierias and monsteras and such, growing outside in the dirt like lilacs. I saw an osprey using a nesting platform that the power company had put up.

I remembered a story from when I was a little kid, though I think it must have happened at Lake Michigan, not in Florida. My grandma had blue-green flip-flops with white daisies on the toe straps. She went wading and lost one of them, and was very upset. All us cousins went looking for it, but fairly soon our parents gave up, saying that the tide had taken it and it was gone. But I kept looking. And kept looking. I was a very stubborn child. So I kept looking, until it got dark and I found it -- no! I found a rock. A flat oblong rock, just the size of the lost flip-flop, and weirdly shaped very much like a flip-flop.

Grandma was tickled. I painted the rock blue, with white daisies where the toe straps would be, and she took it home and used it as a door stop.

I thought I was magic. I believed that I had called that rock into being, by keeping the image of the flip-flop fixed in my mind, and searching for it so persistently.


• What are you reading?

I had to return Becoming, by Michelle Obama, and get back on the waitlist. Jesse, I think you can read the first two parts, "Becoming Me" and "Becoming Us", unless you are avoiding not just current political events but all political subjects. I haven't got to "Becoming More" yet.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

The True Queen, by Zen Cho.

• What are you watching?

A Private War.