Author: Evelyn Wilde Mayerson

I grew up loving Cheetah more than Tarzan, more than Jane, certainly more than Boy. He was a funny-looking, hairy toddler who helped me get over the terror inspired by the Flying Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

Sometimes at an outdoor cocktail party when the pinks of early evening have turned to purple, the time that some Florida folks call “dark-thirty,” I suddenly feel it before I see it – a cloud of bats flying from a neighbor’s attic or the bat condominiums that our community maintains at its perimeters, swooping down above my head in a directionless flutter, their tiny faces like impish homunculi in a Bosch painting. The bats are small, not nearly as large as a fruit bat with its three-foot wing span. In fact, they’re more like three inches, similar to the bat described by James Joyce in Ulysses as “a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands.”

Writing is usually a solitary pursuit. Most writers chain themselves to a desk, a club chair, a kitchen table or the corner of a tearoom like J. K. Rowling, who finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on an old manual typewriter. They perform this act of self-immolation for a variety of reasons. Seeing their name in print is the least of these. No writer I have ever known writes to see his name in print, principally because they already know their name and second, writing is difficult and frustrating work. If you want your name in print, shoplifting is an easier way to do it.

I grew up in South Florida at a time before hurricanes were named and no one evacuated anyone anywhere. It was when grownups talked in somber voices of the hurricane of Labor Day 1935, the strongest hurricane ever recorded, with winds at 200 m.p.h. That was the time when World War I veterans, working in three CCC camps, were swept off the Florida Keys along with a rescue train that was blown off the tracks.

Here in Florida, we inhabit a geographic cul-de-sac, a continental appendage that my second-grade teacher taught us to draw as an upside-down turkey, with Lake Okeechobee providing a Cyclopian eye. Perhaps the least changed in our ecological novelty of a state are our swamps, the vines and mosses eternally being born, dank with black water and rotted leaves and ripe with the scent of living creatures, including the legions of microscopic things chomping away at something.

It was early morning, the time when the night, as described by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, “lingers on in the eyes of the blind.” The light from the sun was creeping west across the Atlantic, ribboning the sky in mauve and deep violet. Cloud shapes became visible and the hammock, still damp from its nighttime condensation, smelled dank and full of promise like any forest floor.