Living in Winter Park

For one week, as of tonight, I’ve been enjoying my own space to read, think, write, stretch, do yoga, and venture forth into territory where I lived for 14 years.  Harriet and Bonnie, who live summer and fall in Wisconsin, have graciously given me their winter/spring condo. 

Elegant Winter Park is Orlando’s Berkeley, Corrales, Oak Park.  Wealthy New Yorkers have mansions circling Lake Virginia in the shadow of Rollins College.  Giant oaks drape their branches forming canopies over brick streets where the perfectly groomed putter along in sports cars I can’t identify from golf to tennis to lunch or shopping on Park Avenue at J Jill, Coldwater Creek,  Chico’s, Williams and Sonoma.  A past Rollins president who collected Tiffany glass left his legacy to the Morse Museum, now the finest Tiffany collection on display in the world.

When I lived here in a humbler bungalow bordering WP and Orlando, I enjoyed afternoons grading papers or reading at East India Ice Cream on Park Avenue where the flavors changed hourly, and coffee was strong enough to keep me alert through a pile of freshman comp essays.  I’d bike over (4-5 blocks from my office) and prop my bike against the patio brick wall.  Students and colleagues often stopped to chat.

The previous 12 days at Casa DeVore I jumped to the racing rhythms of three businesses run out of their home.  A few times I took Cheyenne to swim practice, the family to dinner, and Lisa to lunch just the two of us.  Mostly I read and answered email in my room.  Lisa and Cheyenne alternately flopped down on my bed to tell me their tale du jour—Lisa’s bright ideas from a seminar on photographing babies (her favorite human subjects—no bad hair days or pretensions) and Cheyenne’s swim progress and freshman orientation. I enjoyed tuning in to their daily dramas.

My first few days here I’ve revived by reading, resting, unpacking.  Cheyenne snared the last two books in the Hunger Games series at the library, and I devoured them in two days.  If you need to bury yourself in a plot-driven futurist thriller, forget your problems and the whole outside world, go for these books.  The central character, 14 to 17, grapples with grown-up moral dilemmas more complicated than I imagined facing the 13 and up set.  Who knows what fevers the teen imagination today?  Reading Terry Castle’s memoir essays in The Professor provided a reminder to treat even those that I believe injured me with compassion and grace.

Now I’m spreading out my files so that I can get on writing about my life when I first moved here in August 1979.  I’ve excavated a journal June-Dec 1979 detailing my last two months in Missouri, my fears about the future, and my joy at Rollins College.  The journal gives minimal focus to professional mountains I thought I had to climb.  Quite contrarily it harbors tales of floods of attractive women I’m enjoying and the women’s communities I’m joining, especially Pagoda on Vilano Beach.  Alas I’m the Fool stepping off the edge of the cliff—impulsive but visionary, driven by passions and obsessions, miraculously landing on her feet.  Angels buoy up the little fool. 

Now in Week 3 of cardio-pulmonary rehab, I think I’m growing stronger.  Nurses hook me up to an EKG as I warm up, stroll the treadmill, pedal the stationary bike, swirl the upper body hand crank, cool down.  They monitor blood pressure and record oxygen saturation throughout.  I feel like a race horse chomping for more but know I can’t go farther faster sooner until they say.

Old friends have emerged, and my social calendar expands.  Today I missed my colleague Kate at Brio’s in WP (Mercury in Retrograde?)  I arrived 15 minutes early, accepted a table, gave the greeter Kate’s name and description.  Kate arrived 5 minutes later, did the same, but waited for me out front.  When Kate was 40 minutes late, I called her home phone (her cell was off), alarmed her partner, and ordered lunch.  Kate also came in, looked around, didn’t see me, and had her own lunch.  How could the greeter not have connected us?  How could we not have seen each other?

More next time on FL pulmonologists I’m consulting or maybe my musing on Home.  What does Home mean to you?  What have you been thinking, reading, seeing, enjoying?