For every high-rise there is a trailer park.

For every theater there are six crack houses.

For every festival there are a dozen bank robberies.

For every millionaire there are a hundred desperate souls who would kill for twenty dollars.

For every new upscale mall there’s a Circle K waiting to be robbed. The night clerk working is often a single mother with a child or two, her eyes questioning each customer who enters after dark.

And for me, two men had died in the past two days and a woman had died twenty-two years before them.

Nothing really held their deaths particularly together but me. The first death hadn’t even made it to television. Each of the other two turned out to be big stories for almost a week until a teenage girl and her boyfriend murdered the girl’s mother. That was news because the dead woman and the girl were white and the boyfriend black.

Our murders are frequent, black, white, and red, colorful, the stuff our natural, morbid curiosity draws us to, and then we move away to work, eat, watch television, or go out to the movies.

I want nothing but to be left alone. I don’t want corpses, problems, weeping women, doomed children. I don’t want them but they make their way to me. I had come to Florida, to Sarasota, to escape from memories of the dead.

I had fled from such visions, from the helpless who asked for help, from the dead who needed no help, and from those who were haunted by ghosts who were as real to them as my ghosts are to me.

The world intrudes on my seclusion because I need to eat, to have some place to live, and to keep my clothes reasonably clean. I work as little as I can and live in isolation as much as I can.

The Cincinnati Reds have spring training here and we have a minor league team, the SaraSox. I’ve never gone to a game, the opera, the ballet, or one of the five live theaters.