IN MEMORY OF MEMORIAL DAY: AN INTERMISSION

I woke up at 7:00 am, healthy and kicking, and hurriedly checked on my coordinates. Phone, no calls. Cellphone, no texts. Email, no messages. Blog, no comments. I guess people learned to give me a break and decided to leave me alone. How rood.

And so I called my brother, who's probably either asleep or banging the wife - or maybe both, he's talented, you know - and asked if he would like to hit some shots while breathing in this gorgeous holiday of a Monday morning. My brother said yes! yesss!! yesssss!!! (to me, not to the wife, as it turned out she's off to work) and asked if we could possibly check out the blue courts somewhere in Homestead right across the racetrack where they do the final leg of the Nascar circuit, Nextel Series, or whatever it's called. (No, I'm not into car racing. In fact I drive so slow that everytime I look at the side mirror and see a car swish past me and weave into traffic and out of my sight in no time - I laugh. Reckless drivers are hilarious. They're like confused cockroaches trying to find the way out of the squalid room and into the pages of Kafka, if not the gates of hell, and they are so funny, seriously funny, I tell you.)

After a couple of hours my brother and I were at the J. Redd Municipal Park in Homestead, Florida, and wondering aloud why not a single soul was playing in any of the six US-Open-blue hard courts in this gorgeous holiday morning.

After a couple more hours I was still wondering, wondering, wondering why my brother had my number (which is probably zero) if not my ass (which, they say, is one zero) as I delivered a sympathetic headshake while reflecting on the 6-1, 6-0, 6-2 score.

The game finished close to noontime and we were famished. I asked my brother if he wanted to go to the Keys and check out my favorite Keys restaurant, and 20 miles later we were in this quaint seafood place along US 1 in Key Largo called Fish House having beer and iced tea and oysters on a half shell and seafood fajitas and chargrilled grouper and fries and coleslaw and crackers and breadsticks and laughter over the last point of our game that went like this: he lobbed the ball when I tried to approach the net and I was quick enough to be in front of the ball when it bounced off the concrete, and as I posed to hit it in my best human highlight pose, the wind blew, the ball hit the frame, the ball flew far far away, so far away we didn't know where it landed. My brother couldn't have captured the moment better. Supot.

On the way home we took the faster (but longer) route known as Card Sound but midway through there was heavy traffic and we learned later why, there was a man lying on the pavement who must have been in an accident. We called 911 and the dispatcher said somebody already called in.

When we parted ways I went straight to Borders Bookstore and picked John Cheever's Oh What A Paradise It Seems, and 100 pages later I have fallen in love once more to my greatest American writer, and I thought it was simply great to read an American writer in this American holiday and it fit well to read a book that could have been about playing the blue courts, eating seafood, reading a favorite writer, and oh what a paradise this day seems, and it is.

It especially is, as right now I am watching this great reality show called On The Lot.

Till next time, see you all. Please leave me a message, moo, wah!