Last Thoughts

My last thoughts will be of a weekend Katie and I drove a car that wasn’t a convertible to the shore,  but the sunroof and the windows were open, and it was the first warm day of the year, so I will remember it as a convertible. We drove through Alabama, Mississippi, and dropped into the sliver of Florida that lets you in on Earth’s greatest secret: the ocean is empty. We had no plan. We just jumped in her car with a stack of cassette tapes, grape sodas, a toothbrush between us. Our skin was pale. The water was cold. We jumped in anyway.

I will remember a bowl of lentil soup in Chichen Itza, Mexico. I climbed ancient Mayan ruins there, but it is the soup I remember eating by a window that viewed a pool where a man was meticulously pulling leaves off the top of the water calloused with algae.