Sea Grape For Michael

This is not Miami, the real site of the sea grape. This is a wannabe-- a biker town, a speedway town. Not the fabled city of Dream Whip clouds expressed into a flawless sky. Not the cool Technicolor dawn when an aging chick like me could still do her morning run on Collins, come back home to the high rise on the Intercoastal, where in the mirrored lobby, retirees lined up in their wheelchairs along a wall to socialize, see who comes and goes. Here, in this faux paradise on a Friday, morning mass is celebrated in anything but Ordinary Time by a Bahamian priest in a chasuble the color of winter rye. There are no flowers anywhere, only trailing tropicals; a graceful spider plant with its dangling tentacles. An acolyte brings sacramental vessels on a tray, as if to dinner in his own home to an altar covered with a simple tablecloth. Simplicity...in the elaborate setting of the Saint John Basilica, Daytona Beach. The real home of the sea grape with its leaves like tennis table paddles is where a husband hospitalized in Mia with a failing heart valve lay in the pre-surgery ICU fighting for breath as an insensitive nurse brought food on a tray no way he could eat. The sea grape is a hardy tree that reaches for the heights. My son in Halifax Hospital is like that: a survivor of surgery for a metal hip to replace the one that failed. Bones--- nemesis of our family, meant to last but do not. Unlike the sea grape whose limbs grown longer, stronger. Fail not.