The Cell

I’m in Florida.

Paul is here for business and several weeks ago it occurred to me that Florida is generally a better bet for sunshine than Michigan is. As I thought wistfully of the sun I remembered that my sister lives with me and and that she is the sort of person who, if I jumped on a plane, would probably feel obligated to care for my children until I returned. Knowing that Paul would be busy all day I decided it could be a good opportunity to write and to do so sitting in the sun would be a bonus.

I don’t like Orlando, let me be upfront about that. Why, when you are surrounded by oceans, do people flock to the center of the state to sit on “rides” that show them the wonders of hydroponics? This I have done at an alleged amusement park. For me, coming to Orlando is creating distance between me and my children so that I can write about them. I have flown across several states to sit in a quiet hotel room or by a pool, not to visit Orlando.

Today as she handed us our keys, the receptionist, mentioned, “Your room has an atrium view,” and my heart constricted. I wondered if this meant an atrium view in place of a view of the real world, the sky, a lovely parking lot, anything open really…and began to feel claustrophobic just thinking about it.

Well, it was. This was disheartening as I came here to sit in this room and hopefully, to see the sun. But there was worse. For the holidays there is a nonstop show going on in the center of the atrium. Loud songs, terrible vignettes, synthesized carols all bouncing around and around and around the glass and steel desperately trying to find a place to land, settling for the soft tissues of my ears, causing them to bleed.

Regular readers of this blog and anyone who has known me for, say, two minutes knows that I am a tad sensitive. This is true, but I am NOT exaggerating. Buying Tylenol at the gift shop tonight the clerk told me the price and then about two years later I managed to pull the necessary bills out of my wallet and hand them to her. She was standing patiently waiting and I apologized, “That took a long time.”

“Yes! Yes!” She shouted in not quite the clearest English, “It is all day-ee, every day-ee frome November tawunty secone-d to Jan-new-ary secone-d!”

We immediately knew what she was talking about.

And, instinctively, we also knew that no words would adequately comfort. We settled for extremely sympathetic looks as we backed out the door and she wiped the spittle from her chin.

Tomorrow Paul is going to request a view of the parking lot and I am going to write my story.