Thomas G. Fiffer

“DON’T USE THAT KNIFE TO OPEN A PULL-TAB!” I shouted at my teenage son. It was a steak knife—one of eight—from Far Horizons, the long gone Sarasota, Florida, resort where my family took spring vacations. We flew to Orlando, then drove a rented car (one year a Plymouth Fury) to our private cottage on the white sand beach.

Mornings, Mom took me shelling. We found conchs, whelks, olives (never as shiny as those in the stores), and my favorite—tiny coquinas we often boiled to get open. Breakfast was banana or blueberry pancakes by the pool, surrounded by red concrete and shuffleboard courts. Afternoons, we might visit a friend’s gallery in St. Armand’s Circle, or the nearby Ringling circus museum. Dinner was in the resort’s elegant restaurant, the source of the steak knives and the domain of Jesus, the effusive maître d’. Or, we’d head to the Buccaneer, with its pirate greeter and treasure chest full of toys. It was heaven.

The year my father died, my mother and I went alone. Jesus was so crushed when we told him that he openly wept. A boy I met told me his father had taught him his signature and asked me if mine had taught me. “Not yet,” I lied. I wasn’t ready at nine to share that my father had died. I didn’t fully believe it yet myself.

The green plastic knife case with the Far Horizons logo is gone. But the memories—which cut both ways—remain.