Religious experiences

No sounds of saws, hammers or nail guns as I sat awhile at the house this morning. Just the seaplane buzzing in from the Tortugas, a high breeze rustling fronds, the bell at St. Peter's and the hellos from the well-dressed church ladies strolling home after services.

So I ambled to the car, and decided to see if North Roosevelt had washed away or anything during the night. No -- and the car somehow wanted to turn into Kim's Kubans, so who was I to resist.

A Cuban sandwich (or Cuban mix, or just "a Cuban" -- the names vary as much as the proportions do) is a workaday paean to the pig. It's an amalgam of ham, roast pork, a smidge of thin-sliced spicy sausage, shredded lettuce, sliced onion, tomato, mayo, pickles (extra, please!), generic yellow cheese and mustard in a sliced length of crusty, flat Cuban bread, all pressed between heated plates just long enough to smoosh but not so long as to wilt the lettuce.

Buy one, feed two. ¡Milagrosa!

Today's was great, as Kim's always are, but it would be unfair to compare it to the first one of theirs I had.

That was another Sunday, in March. Robert was here, and we'd just become "official" residents. We'd gotten sandwiches for the beach but, being spring break and all, the tables and parking spaces at Smathers were full up, so we parked in the sand on the bridle path, opened the sunroof and windows and feasted in the car.

Clear sunshine, big palms swaying in the wind, gulls swooping, galleon clouds out over the reef, sunburned kids playing Frisbee and volleyball in the sand, fine Latin jazz on the CD and that sandwich.

¡Pura vida!