Author’s Note: This is a rear oblique screen capture of last summer’s weird season when the absence and presence of cravings descended upon me during the rising tsunami of Delta.
Of course, your mileage may have varied.

-Marlow

PS What the hell — Still Alive and Well!

A portion of our last southernmost mango harvest in 2016 (l) and a resulting coconut rum daiquiri (r)

This plague has been a series of strange weather seasons.

Last summer was either nonexistent or else, more sadly, shabby and ill-tempered.

It had some real mean heat, heat like downtown Miami asphalt hot. Like heat in a third world country, an unintelligible foreign language Western Pacific kind of heat.

We sat in our backyard, under the shade of our patio-furniture’s orange umbrella, both of us unable to read even the simplest of things, despite being older and wiser survivors of the sixties, seventies, and even the eighties; and, now it was the 21st’s twenties as we sat here, in the Empire — the Hostess City to be exact — facing this huge darkly painted pandemic death wave’s latest peaks pumped up to look like a horror show morning, noon and night, but now in daylight of year number two looked weird, to say nothing of the strange reports of wildly differing pandemic worlds across our country coming from our four-corners-road-tripping kids during the past 12 months. I mean, weird was the only word for this cocktail.

I was craving a homemade daiquiri like those we had made with the fruit from our mango trees down on our former coral isle, which would have gone quite well with our crap weather and plague season, although I thought about a late summer outdoor backyard 3-meat barbecue affair across the street we’d recently been invited to. We were going, but the trouble with barbecues is that they always say “Don’t eat, don’t eat, there’s going to be tons of food” — so you don’t eat and then you arrive and by the time you get anything to eat, it’s overcooked, or undercooked, dried out or too greasy, too fattening, and too much, too late. I didn’t want to hate myself for saying yes to this barbecue, but as expected I got there early at five, and staying late that by nine, I was all sticky, bloated, and dreary. More weird.

The kind of thing we loved to go to on weekends, during plague wave troughs, was called a jazz brunch, and everything was already ready by the time you got there, music, buffets of delicious salads, pimento cheese egg cups, cute little rolls from the local artisan bakeries with crusts so light and flaky that heaven must be nearby with the live jazz quartet tunes flowing like a golden stream over us and then the rooftop bistro’s glass railings into the river beyond but even for these things this past summer, the pandemic, cresting once again, threw too much shade on our desire to endure the heat.

Too weird for brunch indeed. So, southernmost mangos were all anyone with a modicum of common sense would have welcomed gladly.

Perhaps the weather’s being so weird is why this past summer was the first year in all my born days that I hadn’t felt regularly horny. Fortunately, it was just a brief interlude. A big plus was that I didn’t have any brilliant friends who might opine on this phenomenon as “it would be in poor taste to be craving sex all the time when this plague is such a tragedy, really.” This sailor thought it was because we were finally worn out by the media’s endless hair pulling.

Anyways, despite these cool jazz gatherings’ bristling low sparkle charisma, the lack of zinging ions permeating city’s plague atmosphere was what really kept us away.

It was trop tragique.

This musical and dining aerie was no traditionally padded-booth place with nice rugs on the floor, yet they actually had desserts — nothing as fashionable as sea salt crème caramel custard; mostly it was chocolate this or chocolate that. Still, this rooftop was incredibly seductive in a long-term kind of way, and I thought, if this season stayed weirdly hot, we’d be coming right back regardless of which plague DEFCON we were in.

I’d get myself one of their specials – a mango dessert on a stick placed in a rum cocktail. With a sidecar of tonic. Despite me not ever getting enough mangos in my life, eating a rum-juiced one on stick during this plague now seemed to be one of the more perfect divine interventions.

What gives ? I thought.

Maybe it was the wet weather.

Maybe it was the heat

Drifting off into some vague plague happy, no future and no past was as far it came to going out on the town. As weird as this particular plague season was, I felt safe. We were safe. As dusk settled, I found myself beginning to sing Still Alive and Well.

Now all we needed, now were mangos for at-home garden daiquiris.
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