Tallahassee in late August is a place without movement. No breeze stirs the air that sits heavy and thick with humidity over the Capitol and white stone state buildings. These are days without bright sunlight because of thick motionless air; a haze clings to the rolling hills of live oak and dogwood. Secretaries and clerk typists and bureaucrats move with slow care between air conditioned buildings trying to avoid sweating, but the effort is useless. The Legislature finished its annual session well before the summer started and the dorms and classrooms at Florida State and Florida A&M are near empty. The city takes a deep, thick-aired breath, and exhales in a slow sigh with only dreams of the the first chill, the first hint of color on the maples.
Tallahassee in late August of an election year is without movement, but is poised. While bureaucrats sit safe in career-service jobs, free from the whims of shifting officeholders who may or may not return after the election, legicrats, employees of the Legislature, wait to learn if they will keep their desks or look for others. They wait while their employers are out of the Capitol, home shaking hands, making speeches, eating at chuch barbeques, sipping drinks at condo clubhouses. They wait for the choice of the voters and then the voter's-choice choosing staffs. For some, they will know their futures the day after Labor Day, primary election day, but for others the wait is until the November general election.
Thom had been a legiscrat up through the end of the last session, a couple of months earlier, but now he’d really banked his future on the fortunes of another. He quit his job as staff director of the House Select Committee on Parks and Wild Lands to work on the gubernatorial campaign of Frank Matters, a member of the House of Representatives and chaiman of that same committee.
The Chambers Deli, a favorite lunch spot for legicrats, many waiting their fates, sits just a block from the Capitol. In the back of the deli is a bar and that is where Thom and Jon were escaping the heat by having an extended lunch. The bar was empty except for the two of them, the other lunchers having returned to their offices.
“Key West means Florida to me even though I've never been there,” Thom said.
"You and me both. We've been talking about the great AlA trek, all the way from the Georgia line to Key West for two years now. Why haven't we done it?" Jon asked.
"Who knows? Who knows? But I'll consider this a reconnoiter trip. I’ll scout it out. I’ll see if all the things we've thought the place was, is," Thom said.