“The great wonder, in gardening, is that so many plants live.”–Christopher Lloyd

Put out because of the Homecoming parade happening on a Saturday morning down University Avenue between me and Leonardo’s by the Slice, I finally made a run for it. Shriners, high school cheerleaders, and marching bands were unrolling their yearly blockade. On the other side was a coffee bar where  someone would pass me an iced coffee with soy milk and a vegan chocolate chip cookie.  After charging through the Gator fans tailgating on the sidewalk, I would push through the door and leave my bag on my favorite solo desk in the dark row in the back, still lit by Satchel’s lamps then, and head to the front counter. I had a mild hangover that, once I’d applied the coffee and books homeopathic, would shortly dissipate. I had papers to grade and seminars that required further preparation. These responsibilities and their concomitant routines kept me in check. One of the two extremely gregarious owners of the restaurant, someone whose path I crossed basically every day for over a decade, saw my face and laughed, “What’s up, Mindy? Parade in the way of your daily routine? Has it disrupted your perusal of this week’s great scholarly tome? Whatcha got there? Marx? Oh great. That’s rich. Hey, you wanna puff?” Knowing I would refuse, he thought this was hilarious. I did relax for a second, though, checking the hubris of my tiny daily prowl. A hermetic world within a world that was so predictable as to be vital, exciting, repetitive, ridiculous. Coffee, campus, teach, office hours, back to the Slice for a salad, home, work, bar, repeat. Every detail delicate and important. Recently a post on Facebook alerted many Gainesville ex-pats that the Slice has been sold to the University of Florida. As the pretty young girl with a ripped shirt and lavender hair promised me on my last visit, “pretty soon it will all just be a dream. Gone without a trace. Just like it never happened.”

The thing is, it did happen. Everything happened. CC serving coffee with her bright pink hair way before she died, beautiful and mean as hell. Hawk always out front writing. Alison from Discount drinking lemon water. Big John heating slices his whole way through nursing school. DJ Donna with a handful of flyers. Every person you knew or wanted to know, were fucking or wanted to fuck, outside smoking, reading, and chatting, or inside at the coffee counter. Gorgeous in my memory. Soon to be a dreamtime oasis with no real world counterpart. Is there a word for memories that are only signs? Disappeared sites robbed of their signifying capacity and interred into some bottomless mausoleum of the former vernacular?

Woman on the Street with Eyes Closed, NYC 1956. Headstone for “Killer” at Bide a Wee Cemetary, Wantagh, NY 1960. The Backwards Man in his hotel room, NYC 1961. Identical Twins, Roselle NJ 1966. Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room in NYC 1970. The Jewish Giant 1970. The Young Man in Curlers…. All titles of photographs. Probably you know the photograper after the second or third description. The first time I saw a Diane Arbus photograph it was on a flyer for a show. “Isn’t this perfect?” the maker asked me. I thought it was just a picture of a couple kids, then I looked closer. The kids were odd, adult, in oversized clothes, poor. Yes, I said. They are perfect. Where did you find this? And later I snuck over to the Art & Architecture library to see more. Because there had been something odd but not freaky about the first one, I wasn’t prepared for what I found. I didn’t have a way to read them yet. I carried them around in my bag, waiting until I could tell if the photographer wanted to exploit her subjects, and to understand what seemed like pride on the faces of such unlikely protagonists. All I figured out was that the usual rules were being broken and I felt uneasy in a way I’ve learned means I’m about to figure out that I have an appetite for something I previously would not have known how to order. All these years later, walking around a new show of her work after doing a site visit for a flower job downstairs, none of the images read as shocking, but I’m not convinced that was ever the intention.

Here in this city, all of us sparkly like Klimt’s girls. Dark lips and so much hair. Necks tilted at just the right angle. Anticipating. Connotation the name of the game. Then I’ll see something and it bounces me from today right into that other day. I’m walking through the East Village and I see Joe Strummer’s mural and I’m sitting back in Durty Nelly’s playing bloody knuckles with James from Against Me. Strummer had just died of heart failure. The news spread through the bar that our friend Tang had died in her sleep, sat next to her best friend, on a plane to Thailand. She was on her way to a vacation she’d worked mornings at the Wine and Cheese and nights at 706 to save up for; she reached her goal but never got there. Wasn’t it Christmas Eve? Was that the year I slept through Christmas Day on my niece’s bed? Or was it the year I showed up with my little blue vintage suitcase, hoping to nest for a few days, only to be driven back to Gainesville that afternoon, too proud to admit my intentions. These moments hold me up in this other place where daily life often feels like a refraction of another time. Memories like Narnia closets hiding everywhere. Each door a different memory from a different life. These disorientations illustrating why nostalgia was once taken seriously as a bodily illness rather than the mind games we dismiss it as now. But the nostalgic, through all her compulsive daily infidelities, is perhaps the truest at heart. Every step a stitch in return. The pursuit of feelings, all of these emotional mosaics crafted into the grand collage. And that goes in there. And that goes in there. And then it’s over? Those of us who worship at the altar of the past–isn’t it sensation that drives us?  The way you felt at a particular place, time, age. You felt it while you were in this body, so there must be a way back to it through the body.  The feeling a photograph or a record or a film or a jacket or an era can evoke of blackout longing. I wear a record like a poultice, take notes in the movie theater, and never forget to leave dead flowers where X marks the spot.