Overhead Door

Finding the Key to Life Beside the Road in Florida

I found the key during a trip to Fort Lauderdale.  It was the early seventies. I was in college and my aunt had offered me her time share for the latter part of Christmas break.  All I had to do was provide my own transportation.

            At the time I was fascinated by hobos and rode the rails whenever I could.  On December 26 I spent all afternoon in the brush by the curve where the track turns south out of Richmond's largest freight yard.  A train came by at sunset and I hopped into a boxcar when the engine and the caboose were both out of sight around bends.  Big pink sky over the James River as the train crossed the trestle; headlights of rush hour traffic behind crossing gates, then pine woods slipping by in the dark.

            I had a sleeping bag I’d gotten with S & H Green Stamps.  It didn't work against the cold.  I walked the car all night.  South of the Border's big neon sombrero, then Spanish moss on moonlit trees.  The train stopped in Jacksonville.  The sun came up over the downtown--finally I was warm.  I hitchhiked the rest of the way.

            In Fort Lauderdale I had a vision of myself as the Last Pedestrian.  I was sitting on the rocks of an artificial waterfall in the middle of Jackie Gleason Boulevard, the only person on foot for miles.

            Another snapshot memory: a stairwell standing by itself in a field.  There were acres of abandoned condos near where I stayed, victims of one of Florida's periodic real estate boom/busts.  They were in all stages of construction, from family-ready units complete with miraculously unstolen major appliances to cinderblock foundations with stairways to nowhere.

            Odd artifacts of the consumer culture, a surreal backdrop for a college kid's  eternal debate:  "What am I going to do with my life?" Brooding on The Question, walking back from a convenience store where I'd discovered Artificial Vienna Sausages, my internal dialogue went something like this: I really like academics, maybe I could go to graduate school.  But I'm not drawn to any of the conventional subjects.  What else am I interested in?  Hobos...

            I could be an anthropologist and study hobos!

            The moment I had the thought I saw a key in the dirt beside the road.  I picked it up. It said "Overhead Door."  The key to heaven, a symbolic "Yes!" from the big Office of Career Planning and Placement in the sky.  Laughing at life's good humored synchronicity, I put the key in my pocket.

            Hobo anthropology didn't last the semester after I returned home. Baffled looks from professors and a sobering encounter with a stack of graduate school catalogues.  But I kept the key.  Over time it came to represent synthesis, the blending of widely diverse elements into a new and coherent whole.  Now I use it as a touchstone when I'm confused, a reminder that often the key is right in front of me if I just try to fit the puzzle pieces together in a new and unexpected way.