Best Wishes in 2016
The Quinns
Bruce, Genia, Summer,
Skylar and Trixie
They were crazy about Hemingway. They talked about Hemingway and after a while they sounded like Hemingway. They had attended the
Hemingway museum exhibit, and had taken in every detail. But that came later. That was in November, and in New York. The year started much earlier, as always.
Early in 2015, it was Spring
Break. Genia and the girls went to Daytona
Beach, because people had spoken well of the sun, and the food, and because that
was where Grammy and Grampy lived. Someone would put a shot of rum in your hand and you watched the sunrise come up over the Atlantic waves. The father, Bruce, had joined them late in the week. He took
the oldest daughter, Summer, and they flew from Orlando to New York. Then they stopped, and rested for a few
hours, and took another flight. To
Berlin. Where they stayed a week, and
they saw a lot of things, and it was good.
Some days it snowed. Those were
good days to be on tour inside the 1930s Tempelhof airport buildings, where you
heard talk about the Berlin Airlift, or to be in underground bomb shelters from
WW2.
Summertime came, and the girls finished
seventh and ninth grades. It was time
for time off. The family took time
off. They all went to an airport and got
on a big jet and changed planes somewhere and ended up in Lisbon. Lisbon was good, because you could rent an
apartment there, for not much money, on a busy street full of restaurants in
the old city. You could take bus tours,
or ride in little jalopies the size of golf carts, and see ruins and museums
about tile. You could rent a car in
those days, and drive to the Algarve, four hours to the south, where the
beaches were unspoiled. They took
pictures. They swam. Someone got sunburned, but no one complained. There were narrow streets where you couldn’t
adjust a side mirror, and so steep it crested on top just like a roller coaster. They joked it was the Point of No Return, but
it was just a hilltop village and down at the bottom there was another beach,
and a little harbor, and a nice café with some people who’d moved there to
retire, from England.
They came back to Los Angeles then,
and Skylar studied Hebrew. She studied
it for her Bat Mitzvah. She did it, and
a lot of family came, and other people, too.
There was a big party, the kind with aerialists suspended high above the
swimming pool and all sorts of foods. The dog mostly stayed inside, and would later
say it had been good.
They looked for Hemingway. They looked for Hemingway in Los Angeles, in
Santa Monica, and in Long Beach, but they could not find him. They heard he was in New York, and he was, so
they went to New York. They stayed at
the Waldorf Astoria, the grand hotel, and went to artsy movies in the East
Village. They saw the big Hemingway
exhibit at the JP Morgan museum, but they also went to the Met, and there were a
lot of old things from Egypt that they had seen before, but they saw them
again. They met friends at Italian
restaurants, and when it was time, on Wednesday night, they saw the Macy’s
balloons lined up at 11 pm on the Upper West Side, where there were 50,000
people and you couldn’t get a taxi home.
Christmas came, and there were no
relatives, but a lot of friends. There
will be more time for relatives. Next
year. In 2016.
