My wife and I like to walk, and we’ve been walking together for more than twenty years. It’s good exercise, and it gives us a chance to talk without the distractions of house chores, television, other people, the telephone, the iPod, and the multitude of other concerns that help keep some marriages together by allowing the parties involved to not fully realize who it is that they’ve partnered with. But we really do like each other, so we walk and talk whenever we can, which is not all that often here in south Florida. For at least six months of the year, it’s just too bloody awful hot. And when it’s hot, we get the added benefit of clouds of gnats, and flying gangs of mosquitoes, each one the size of an armoire. So we look forward to “walking season”, and walk we do. And we’re not the only ones. Lots of our fellow neighborhood residents walk as well.
We live in a nice, safe, friendly neighborhood on a small island. There are about six hundred homes, a golf course, two parks, and the only access is by way of two small bridges. So unless someone is visiting someone who lives on the island, whoever you see driving by probably resides here. And the people driving by are one of the many things that we like to comment on to each other during our walks. Some of the cars themselves are interesting. We have on the island at least one Ferrari, a couple of Bentleys, and a high-end Aston Martin that purrs like a cat even at the illegally high speed at which it always seems to be traveling. Most of us who live here drive nice, normal, modest late model cars. But some drive what in my grandfather’s day would be referred to as a “Jalopy”, in my father’s day, a “Heap.”
For years we used to see an old, rusted Cadillac. We always saw it at the same time each evening. When it was new it may have been yellow, but a combination of rust, a lack of maintenance, and many, many years of the relentless south Florida sun had rendered it a patchy, sickly shade of parchment, like the skin of a slightly jaundiced old man. Even when it was getting too hot to walk, but before we realized that it was too hot to walk, we’d see this car with its windows rolled down. Where we live there is only one excuse for driving with the windows down in the hot weather. The air conditioner must not have worked. The radio, however, worked just fine, and was always blaring what has come to be known as “Classic (old and passe) Rock” at a volume loud enough peel off what little paint this car still retained.
The driver and only occupant of this car was an elderly gentleman with gray hair combed back. He wore a nondescript shirt. Since we never saw him save but in his car, we never knew whether or not he wore pants. But always, without exception, he loudly sang along with the radio, almost yelling the words as he drove by. But that’s not all he did. While he drove and sang, he accompanied himself on a tambourine, driving with his left hand, vigorously shaking the tambourine with his right (driving with both hands on the wheel is a highly overrated practice, uncommon here in south Florida) in time with the music. We never saw him drive by without hearing the singing and the multiple “ting-ting-ting” sounds of his tambourine keeping the rhythm while announcing his approach and his departure through his perennially open car windows. And we never saw him with another person in the car. This went on for years.
We wanted to see where Tambourine Man lived. Although most folks in our neighborhood keep up their houses fairly well, we were sure that the Tambourine Man’s house would be as derelict in appearance as his car. But we never saw the car parked, and therefore never knew exactly where the Tambourine Man called home. And then, we stopped seeing him. We thought that he must have died, both because of his age, and because we couldn’t imagine anything else stopping him from doing what it was that he did with such regularity and such enthusiasm. But we never really knew, and gradually we stopped talking about it, and eventually, we stopped thinking about it. At least until last week.
I was out working in the front yard waiting for my wife to come home from her job at a local university, when a shiny, immaculate late model Cadillac rolled by. It was a lovely shade of pale yellow. The driver was a man who appeared to be in his early thirties. It was one of those rare days here in south Florida that it is cool enough in the afternoon to drive with the windows open, so most everybody does. And then I heard it…the singing accompanied by that characteristic “ting-ting-ting” sound of the tambourine. I’m not a gambler, but I would bet that this young man is Tambourine Man’s son, although I have no way to know for sure. I hope that I’m right. I can’t imagine any other explanation. I’ve only seen him once, so he may not even live on the island. But that one sighting got me to thinking. At some point in his life, this young man made the decision to sing and shake his tambourine while he drove. He had to learn it somewhere. On one hand, it’s silly, not to mention dangerous. But on the other hand, how many of us have the capacity to fill the mundane moments of our day with such unbridled joy? Maybe he learned it from his father…maybe not. But either way, Tambourine Man is back in town.
A man could do worse in life than inheriting a tambourine from his father.
