Close-Ups

The Don

The Don S tanding alone at the end of St. Petersburg Beach, a strip of white sand that curves into the Gulf of Mexico, a mammoth Spanish structure, the Don Ce Sar Hotel, splashes unabashedly pink against the blue sky. It is a building that so captures the imagination that thirty years ago it inspired one woman from Georgia, seeing it for the first time, to return home, pack up her kids in the family Ford, and, without leaving a note for her husband, drive south to fulfill the first dream she had ever had, or at least the first one she could remember: to live within sight of the Don. Stupid woman: to leave everything she knew in exchange for a dream of pink rising from white sand into blue sky.Stupid woman: as it happened, she turned over her life savings to an aging Florida gentleman in exchange for a house in full view of the Don, merging her dream and her reality, a house on Gulf-front property that, thirty years later, is worth $200,000. I don't know the woman. Shortly after I moved to Florida from New York I met the woman's daughter, whose daughter was in kindergarten class with my own. She told the story briefly, in perhaps three sentences, as we waited in the Clearwater train station with the kindergarten class, all twenty-five of them swinging their ioo Close-Ups legs from the benches, waiting for the train. She didn't tell the story to me. I overheard her. Which is to say that this is all I know of the woman from Georgia who has stayed with me so well. It's her dream of the Don that we have in common, and her literal-minded way of incorporating a dream into the everyday. The woman from Georgia must have been about twenty-five when she first saw the Don. I was six. Because my dream began earlier than hers, while I was a child, it may have taken an even stronger hold, but since it was based on a childhood view, it may have been even less easy to realize. Thirty years ago, about the time the woman from Georgia saw the Don for the second time, this time for good, arriving in St. Petersburg in the family Ford packed with the kid's clothes, the mixing bowls, a tricycle tied to the roof, and her life savings tucked into an envelope pinned to her brassiere, I sawthe Don for the first time. Imagine the sight of the Don to the eyes of a six-yearold from the landlocked Midwest! From the family's rented green-and-orange striped cabana at the north end of St. Petersburg Beach, I languished in the presence of the Don. There was no Holiday Inn then, no Hilton—bastard newcomers—only small, flat motels that in the glare of the noon sun or the haze of sunset melted, diffused, into the scrub far back from the Gulf. There was nothing to break the clean, white line of the sand strip that ran two miles from where I sat, then dipped and curved out into the Gulf, and at the end, with nothing to rival it, high above white sand and blue Gulf, rising into the sky,the massive Don. At that time, and for many years thereafter, the Don The Don ioi was no longer a great hotel, but, in a triumph of mismatching form and function, it housed the Veteran's Administration. I mention this only for historical accuracy . It did not intrude on the dream; it was what the Don inspired, not what it was used for, that mattered. It is historically accurate, also, that though I was a dreamy child who had good reason to prefer fantasy to reality I was still a child. Far from the shadow of the Don, I built drip castles in the sand, and on days so cold and windy that the cabanas were left to lie folded on the empty beach, my body was thrown off a rubber raft again and again, into the choppy surf and onto the shelly coast. In other words, I did the usual things. As winters passed I grew tired of sandcastles, tired of raking my body against the shells at surf's edge, but the dream of the Don persisted. I wish I could say...