Imagination

When we moved to Sarasota we bought a condo in a relatively old building housing forty five units or so in a most unlikely spot, smack dab in the middle between a major (now less so as another even more giant one has been built over to the east) mall and a brand new middle school.  The school building is about the same height as out condo building where we live on the third and top floor and thus can see over the surrounding impediments to the open sky and watch the ever fascinating cloud formations of Florida pass by.  The roof of the school building forms a line, irregular and thus constantly intriguing which provides the bottom to an imaginary view.  This morning as I was getting my coffee ready I looked out the kitchen window and saw the merest tint of pink/orange in the cloud formation framed against the roof of the school building which in the darkness and shadow resembled  the morning sun peeping over Mt. Hymettus which I had watched so very often from the kitchen window of our house in Athens.  This impression was comforting as it was beautiful, and was matched by the evening sun which turned the clouds rosy, and from the small balcony facing the west there I felt myself to be on the terrace of our place in Rome, conjuring up yet other happy memories of years of promise and achievement not the least tinctured by the regret of inadequacy which was certainly there at the time.  No, I in this moment of dawn or dusk of winter in Sarasota Florida near a shopping mall and a middle school was in some way standing in the hints of sunrise and sunset, a-tingle with the sensual life that was mine in those years, as well as the satisfaction and provocation of being a protective father of four children. It was a fantasy fed for some time by the slowly emerging sun in the morning and its shifting sunset rays in the evening.  Satisfied that god was in his heaven and all was right with the world, I could limp away well into my dotage, but also into a not unpleasing reality of a small apartment just right for two.  Just as Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris I will always have Via Bartolomeo Eustachio and Odos Souidias right outside this little place on the  top floor.