Florence and I weren't typically close. We were magnets that either repelled or slapped together at such high speed we were never sure how it would turn out.
So, until she crumpled into an illness we didn't understand and couldn't defy, we didn't talk every day like some mothers and daughters.
However, when we did occasionally check in on the phone or the rare times she'd actually come upstairs after calling from the payphone on the corner, the conversation would meander about until it landed where it always did.
"What did you do today?" I'd ask.
"Ate my way up and down Sixth Avenue," she'd answer.
And then she'd regale me with each and every stop made at each and every fast food place she had seen advertised on TV. Those commercials she watched at home alone with the television brought in after we had all left to our own lives were as powerful as the stories Dorothy heard about Oz
Striding up and down streets and avenues seeking the next promise of the wizard, she'd barely ever stop and sit.
I, of course, adored food, went to restaurants, sat down, and then emailed friends about what I just ate.
Yet, interwoven in between my rebellion against eating on the run, I often found myself striding up streets, relishing something in my hand that cost less that a couple of bucks, and just this past night, as I sailed fast across familiar waters, I sat briefly on old benches I had known since I was a kid, dining on something that could have come from Oz.
**
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