Visiting My Father in Florida

45 CITINO DAVID CITINO VISITING MY FATHER IN FLORIDA Forty years, every working day he drove through the roiling haze of Cleveland streets to the Harshaw Chemical Co., past Union Carbide, Rockwell International, Bethlehem Steel, all the barbed-wired, bricked-windowed plants, sulfur rising from their stacks to rain on playgrounds and reservoirs, the states downwind. He knew the neighborhoods of Italians and Poles, Greeks and Slovenes, Slovaks and Croats before they moved their kitchen tables, photo albums and ceramic jockeys to the suburbs. He couldn't understand the girls in platform heels and slit skirts who'd whisper "Hey Mister" from bleak doorways. "Go home to your mother," he told one once. "Your white ass," she answered. He persisted so long even he changed. Now we drive through his new "planned community," banks and K Marts garish as modern churches, acres of offices of oncologists, protologists, urologists, ancient women pedaling tricycles, Lincoln and Cadillac dealers, the old in bunches raising blouses and shirts to show their latest scars. Later we fish his new canal. Caloosahatchee mullet leap stiffly toward the sky. He lifts his rod and a whiskered, flat-headed catfish the color of sludge lands between us, writhing. I've never seen a thing so old, so ugly. It leaves a trail of slime on the new dock, lost in so much sudden light, blind. Its mouth gulps the precious, useless air. ...