She finished her beer and sat for a few more minutes. The stereo delivered another song.
“What’s that album you playing?” she called to the bartender, the only other person present.
“A1A, Jimmy Buffet,” the bartender answered, proudly Amy thought.
“May I see the cover?” Amy asked, getting up and walking inside to the bar, pausing to drop a dollar in the jar marked “Thanks for Tips.”
“Sure,” the bartender answered, handing the album cover to Amy. He was tall, blonde, a towhead, certainly a surfer. She did not recognize him, although she thought he might have been a student at the same time she was, but unlikely their paths crossed.
“Says here the album was recorded in ’74. Good summer,” Amy said to the bartender not caring if he was listing. She just wanted to make the statement. “That was the summer I moved here. Funny that you play this album on the day I return for the first time to the city,” she said, looking up only to see the bartender had walked away from the bar to get some towels.
Amy looked back down at the album cover and thought that maybe it all did mean something, that perhaps there had been a reason she’d been called here, pulled by a longing. Sitting in the bar, thinking back on her St. Augustine days, and the music she just happens to hear was recorded during the summer she first arrived, three years earlier. Maybe it meant something.
“It better mean something,” she said to herself, drifting back for a moment from her mystic reminisces. She had left a lot of work on her desk and had given no real reason for leaving the office at lunch. Just said it was personal business, urgent, and she would be gone for a couple of days of vacation time.
She worked for an agency that prepared relief bills for consideration by the Legislature. She had been editing a bill filled for Mrs. Raymond Culpepper who had broken her hip when she stumbled on a broken step and fell down the stairs at the Stephen Foster State Park. She was seeking compensation from the state for the $128,000 in medical bills not covered by insurance and lost wages.
Amy didn’t care. She had become immune to the pain and suffering and death the bills described, sometimes graphically. All she did was ensure the spelling and punctuation was correct and if there were any citations they were consistent throughout the bill. She wasn’t insensitive, just immune, senses dulled by the sheer monotony of her work.
She knew that’s why when her memory triggered old sensations, she was overwhelmed and moved to act. At that moment she not only had no concern for Mrs. Culpepper’s plight, but she also lost any interest in the editorial quality of her plea. All Amy felt was a longing for a time when her senses were sharp and finely tuned and receptive.
As she moved quickly through her apartment, packing enough for a weekend, and then later as she stopped for gas, she kept thinking of how dull her life as a bureaucrat was compared to how she remembered life as a student-artist. She had not been back to St. Augustine in three years. She and her friends had been an enclave in a tiny college in a town filled with strangers everyday. Everyone she knew was gone now. Only the town remained.
She didn’t dismiss the compulsiveness of her act. She started looking for signs that what she had done was in response to a message sent to her. Her inner self, deep down in herself, had said “Go!” She had no choice but to act, but needed an affirming sign. She took the album cover, the song, its recording date all to mean she was supposed to be there, in the Milltop, on that afternoon. Her trip was a good thing.
“Thanks,’ Amy called to the bartender as she laid the cover back on the bar along with money for the beer.
As she walked out the lyrics of another song followed her off the porch and down the stairs:
“...I want to go back down and lie beside the sea there.
With a tin cup for a chalice
Fill it up with good red wine,
And I'm-a chewin' on a honeysuckle vine.”
Amy walked out onto St. George Street and strolled slowly and without destination. She was indistinguishable from the few diminishing tourists who moved in the same manner. Moms and dad and grandparents and cousins and daughter’s best friends and future brother-in-law and sorority sister and newlyweds and long time married and lifelong friends strolled in the stretching shadows of the reconstructed 18th century village street. She had no real plans. She didn’t need any.