Talk about surreal—and serendipity. First, the latter: we
never imagined taking a beach-resort Caribbean vacation until we learned that
friends of ours, about our age, take one every year in Aruba. After being
denied our Jazz Cruise because Ann broke her shoulder three days before
departure—and loving the water (though not so much the sun)—we did some
investigating and decided to go away for six days to a resort on Seven Mile
Beach, Grand Cayman Island. Our choice was based on previous visits on cruise
ships and the rave reviews of that beach, plus the Caymans are close by air,
only an hour plus from Miami. Also,
serendipity again: a distant relative lives there. On our last visit, we met
Melanie—but not her preteen son, Jackson, or her husband, JR, as we did this
time around. I described the connection in this entry: Family Time: A Precious Gift.
We carefully planned to spend most of the days in those
clear Caribbean waters, outfitting ourselves with neck-to-foot sun-blocking
attire. Ann dutifully wore hers. I wore most of mine—but not all. I paid the
price with sunburns in the few places I missed with sunscreen.
Here’s where the surreal part begins. We were also there
to celebrate Ann’s 84th birthday. Together, we still feel like a couple of kids
at times, but at a beach resort mostly catering to families and young couples,
it felt like going to a costume party dressed as the couple in Grant Wood's “American
Gothic,” only to find everyone else didn’t get the costume party message, all
about forty years younger.
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| A frequent beach visitor |
Yet people were respectful of our encroaching
decrepitude, often handing out “Oh, I don’t believe it!” when Ann challenged
them to guess her age. That forced careful underestimations: 59? 65?, even one
daring a 73. The lesson here: if you really want to feel ancient in your 80s,
go to a Caribbean beach resort where nearly everyone could be your child—or
even your grandchild.
One such couple—beautiful and young—took an interest in
us “oldsters” during one of our extended intervals of splashing and floating in
those clean, clear waters. They were genuinely incredulous that we were in our
eighties and stunned when we told them we’d been married 55 years. They’d only
met three months earlier in Jacksonville. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were
also taking a pre-honeymoon trip, as we did in Puerto Rico in 1970 before we
were married. They were captivated by the stories we shared: of that trip, of
what keeps us together—love and mutual respect. Naturally, Ann told them we
were celebrating her 84th birthday.
They were sitting not far from us under the shade of a
chaise lounge (as were we). Ann had left the beach; I told her I’d follow soon.
Imagine my surprise when, a little while later, a hotel waitress approached
carrying two frozen piña coladas, looking for a birthday “girl”—not thinking
she meant the other half of me. Our benefactors were gone. Ann was gone. So I
asked the waitress to find someone else deserving on the beach, while I took
one and drank a toast to them—and to my wife. We saw the young couple the next
morning before they left, and we thanked them. Ah, to be young again, taking
one last swim only a couple of hours before their flight home.
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| Jax, Me, Melanie, Ann |
Speaking of age—if we were indeed much younger and
looking for a life of sun, sand, and water—the Caymans would be a very
attractive place to find employment and live. That’s what my second cousin once
removed, Melanie, and husband did, now becoming citizens of the Caymans. She, and her son, “Jax,” gave us tour of most
of the island. For Jax, the highlight was the baseball field, where he’s
developed into an all-star for his age. Baseball takes a back seat to soccer
and cricket in this British Overseas Territory, but Jax has made international
traveling teams. In fact, he’ll be in Tampa soon for a tournament, and in
October we’ll see him in the World Comes to the Palm Beaches, to be held at the spring
training facilities of the Nationals and the Astros.
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| Jax wins a HR bat |
While we were there, he won the Cayman Islands Home Run
Derby for his age group. Remarkably, this happened shortly after our island
tour (not a single traffic light—only roundabouts!). We asked if he wanted to
rest up for the challenging evening, but he said, not necessary, he was
confident he’d win. The power of positive thinking: win he did—with 15 dingers!
As mentioned, the UK holds responsibility for the
islands’ defense and foreign relations. I suppose it has no strategic value to
our rapacious president—beyond yet another prosaic Trump faux-fancy hotel. So
rest easy, Caymanians: unless uranium or gold are discovered on your island,
you’re probably safe from delusional manifest destiny.
My guide for descending further into surrealism during our
beach vacation was the book I brought with me: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, a writer I highly admire. This
trilogy of novellas—“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”—is unlike his
more traditional novels I read before, The
Brooklyn Follies and Baumgartner.
It’s hard to pin down the genre of The Trilogy, perhaps a cross between the detective novel and
literature of the absurd. It reminded me
a little of Motherless Brooklyn by
Jonathan Lethem, but far more abstract, with the voice of an unreliable
narrator reminiscent of James Salter’s A
Sport and a Pastime.
Ironically, I had found a good used UK paperback edition
published by Faber and Faber, which adopted British spelling conventions: appropriate,
given that I was reading it in a UK Territory. Still, it's a distinctly
American work—memoir-like, and dreamlike. Its themes slip through the fingers
of your mind, like the fine sand of Seven Mile Beach. It served my goal
perfectly: reading something immersive enough to escape our unreal day-to-day political
nightmare by entering an alternative imaginary world devoid of anything
political.
I was partly drawn to it for its New York City setting
and Auster’s sensibility, which often aligns with mine. There’s a comfort in
such familiarity. Indeed, I was immediately smitten by the opening pages, as
the unnamed narrator describes Quinn, a mystery writer using the pseudonym
William Wilson, and his love of aimless city walks. I described one of my own (albeit,
purposeful) NYC five-mile walks in this 2022 entry.
Quinn, however, walks randomly—letting the city guide
him. If ever there was an example of internal narrative, this is it. I quote
Auster, as this captures the essence of all three stories and the spirit of the
city: “New York was an inexhaustible
space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked no matter
how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with
the feeling of being lost. Lost not only in the city, but within himself as
well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself
behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing
himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and
this more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary
emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the
speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on one
thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one front
foot in front of the other, and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own
body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer
mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was
nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New
York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had
no intention of ever leaving it again.”
Reading that, I thought of Thomas Wolfe’s short story
“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” Auster gives clear attribution to many great
American writers—particularly Poe, whose story “William Wilson” also features a
narrator haunted by an alter ego. Auster
lived for a while on the Upper West Side (his novel Baumgartner was set on 85th Street – the same street I lived on
long ago -- between Columbus and Amsterdam).
West 84th Street, between Riverside Drive and Broadway, was renamed
"Edgar Allan Poe Street” to commemorate Poe's connection to the area. As Poe
had lived at 206 West 84th Street I speculate that Auster felt a close
connection to Poe, in spirit as well as geographically.
He expands on the concept of the unreliable narrator
across all three novellas, with characters shifting identities, even including
one named Paul Auster. The Trilogy is
a prime example of metafiction. He brings in the process of writing itself,
referencing greats like Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau—his story “Ghosts”
identifying them as such.
Auster blurs the lines between fiction and reality—much
like the times we now live in, where news can read like parody. Characters
search for truth, only to find themselves swallowed by existential questions.
This culminates in “The Locked Room,” where the unnamed narrator’s missing
childhood friend, presumed dead, Fanshawe—the “real” novelist in The Trilogy—reappears. Fanshawe’s wife is
now married to the narrator, who’s been hired to be Fanshawe’s Boswell. How’s
that for circular thinking?
The narrator has writer’s block writing the biography: “I
had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been – but my
mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one improvised image: the
door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room,
condemned to a mythical solitude – living perhaps breathing perhaps, dreaming
God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located in my skull.“
Earlier in the same story, Auster casts a dispiriting
light on memoir writing—something I’m personally grappling with: “Every life is
inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no
matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say
that so-and-so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that,
that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died,
that he left behind these books or this battle with that bridge – none of that
tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in
the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the
words, and to do this, we substitute ourselves for the person in the story,
pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is
a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a
glimmer of who we are, but in the end, we can never be sure, and as our lives
go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our
own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple
reason that no one can gain access to himself.”
I can argue that it was through his fiction that Auster
gained “access to himself.” The line
between memoir and fiction is faint, one gaining access to the essence of one’s
life in characters of one’s creation in fiction. The memoir I am writing includes some of my
short stories for precisely that reason.
My beat-up paperback, heavily marked, looks at me now as
a challenge to keep writing—to keep reflecting on The Trilogy. To what end? Only that it’s good (for me) to leave a
record of my reactions to this important work. I’ll say no more about it now, other than
that reading it during this trip left an indelible impression—just like the
Caymans. The rest of my scribbled observations will remain between those pages,
maybe for me to revisit, maybe for my progeny to muse about.
The turquoise waters of the Caribbean proved to be more
than just a beautiful backdrop; they were a balm for the soul. This eclectic
trip culminated in a celebration dinner to mark Ann’s birthday, fresh fish
caught near the island and a little piece of birthday cake.
