First I would like to thank those of you who offered suggestions for my sabbatical month. I liked the suggestions so much I have decided to do them all.

As I was loading the car, I pictured driving around America. I could stop at the fishing villages along the Florida coast, later maybe also fly to New York. I was slamming the trunk when my phone rang. It was a local girl offering an empty guest room across town. I sped right over. She was in the middle of trying to eradicate an infestation of white flies. An entire gumbo limbo tree was turned snowy from fly issue.
“You can stay a couple of nights,” she said.
I stayed a week.

I used up the week watching my hostess try a variety of home-spun white fly killing techniques, the best of which was the purchase of five thousand ladybugs. Too soon the week ended, and at the last moment I bought a ticket for New York. En route to the airport I drove the ocean road. I had a few minutes to spare so I parked at the beach. I made my way to the edge of the gentlest of surfs, water too placid to make headway up the sand. I reveled in the bright seascape and the warm air and tried to absorb the loveliness. Hoped to freeze the scene in my imagination.

“That you?” The words broke up my trance. I already knew the voice, I turned to see a friend from town. We have never

learned each others names. He is my favorite dance partner at the Salsa club.
“Hello!”
We embraced.
“Wassa matter your face?” He said. “Why you look so sad?”

Magician-like he fired up a marijuana cigarette and stuffed it twixt my lips. I did inhale. Then I inhaled some more. We giggled, and slumped on the confectioner’s sugar sand. We listened to the collision of bird calls. We watched the diving gulls and pelicans, precision bombing the water, flapping back up toward the open sky with tiny, black, squirmy fish clamped in their beaks. Swallowing on the fly.

“Flying!” I jumped up, and patted my friend on his head. “Gotta go.”

Turned out I was tremendously stoned, and it was a Herculean task to park at the airport in what seemed a very tiny narrow spot. And then to haul my bag, which suddenly felt like a thousand pounds, to the terminal. In my mind I heard the eerie synthesized soundtrack to Midnight Express. I trembled, sweat started rolling hotly down my spine, tickling the small of my back. Once aboard, I passed out before take-off.

It has been a week since I got to New York. Right away, it was good to be back. I have dashed hither, and kissed cheeks yon. I have been busy as a butterfly. And I cannot help wondering if those five thousand ladybugs are the start of upsetting the ecosystem.