I'm "stranded" on Florida's Gulf Coast for a few days, with sunshine, surf, and white sands spread out before me all day long. And I have a laptop. But I'm more observing and recalling than writing. That will come later. Walking the surf, I watch the steady beat and curl of the waves, see the shells and fragments of shells that get pushed to the waterline, then buried or drawn back as the next wave breaks onto the shore. Traditional imagery comes to mind, the impermanence of life, the way that footprints vanish almost instantly, with no sign that anyone ever walked there. The shells that were so miraculous and mysterious to build, which housed living entities with stories no one will ever know, and now are nothing but empty detritus. Seagulls flying and screaming, shorebirds going about there business indifferent to the human swirl around them. I remember once, long, long, ago, Walt Whitman inspired me to be a poet. The idea that free verse sold, what appeared to be simple stream-of-consciousness writing painted pictures and told stories, and sort of sold books (I don't think he got rich off them). I wrote some of those, with mixed results from friends and no response from magazines or journals. So I tried traditional poetry, and most of those vanished into the postal ether (no internet then). I did write one poem, "Empires in the Sand" about a relationship that died, and slipped into obscurity, just like a vast network of castles built up on the ocean short, at low tide. Poof, all was gone. It rhymed well, too. That's the only poem anyone professional was ever kind of enough to respond to. (It's okay to end an English sentence with a preposition, BTW, though it still makes me uncomfortable). He told me it was a nice enough poem, but with traditional structure and an overused theme. So thanks but no thanks. I took from that experience this truth: few themes that move or impress me are unique to me -- either lots and lots of other people experience them and have no interest in being told by someone else, or they are something that appears to interest only me. Bottom line, there are stories galore in the scene I am watching outside the lobby window; my mission is to find one or more that can be crafted into something others will think worth reading.