Point of View: Getting Away

We were sitting on a narrow, pleasantly crowded fine-sand beach in Naples, Fla., the other day, reading our books under an umbrella as walkers paraded by, one of whom caught my eye, wearing as he was black shorts and his long black hair tied back.

What made him come up to us I forget, though it seemed apt. I told him I was reading a book on Zen Buddhism, and he said that that was good, and that — according to Mary’s recall — he liked to propound too much to be a Buddhist.

“My wife tells me,” I said, with a laugh, “that I should stop reading books about Buddhism and just do it. . . . Maybe I should put this book down and just let it go. . . .”

He smiled. “Let everything go,” he said as he kept on going.

Not long after, I thought I saw him in the water about 100 yards distant, and, after looking down at the book for a moment or two, looked up to find he’d vanished.

“What made him stop here? You think he’s a Zen master, Mary?”

Florida may well be “Centereach with palm trees,” as Kathy has succinctly phrased it, but everyone’s quite friendly there, or at least they were on the street in Naples that we frequented, whose name I dare not say. Here, we pass each other with heads bowed or eyes drifting off to the left or right. There, by the time I’d walked up from the beach to the public tennis courts, I had learned a good deal about the cheery person striding along beside me.

Maybe it’s the weather that does that to you, people just happy for a time — even for a week, as was the case with us — to be sprung from winter’s grip. A beach, public Har-Tru tennis courts with no end of people — usually from Ohio or Michigan — to play with, and a bar with passable margaritas (though not, of course, as good as mine) all on one street!

A week was enough.

“It’s just good,” as Lori Wesnofske said the other day, “to get away.”

And to keep on going.