The Lyft driver pulled up to the curb at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport early in the afternoon on a late September day. I’d only been standing there for a couple of minutes, and my shirt already clung to me in the Florida heat. I threw my bags in ahead of me, and piled into the backseat, where I was hit by an arctic blast of air conditioning.

“What brings you here?” Will, my driver, asked. He was a wiry, well-tanned man, probably somewhere in his 70s. And like every ride-share driver, he was chatty. Really chatty. But after nine hours of travel that had started at 4 a.m. that morning, several hours of masked confinement on a pair of flights, and one seemingly interminable layover, I didn’t really mind.

I was down there to visit my mother, who’s lived alone in Sarasota for the past decade since my father died. It was my first visit since before the start of the pandemic. You always figure there’s going to be plenty of time, until there isn’t. It was a trip that was equal parts vacation, long overdue catch-up, and a tag-up with the roots I never knew I’d planted in southwestern Florida.

The reunion was all that you might have expected it to be. Hugs. Laughter. Some tears. And because I’m Italian on my mother’s side — don’t let the Slavic surname fool you, I consider myself more Italian than anything else — plenty of food, and no small amount of wine. Now well into her 80s, my mom’s as sharp as ever. And she can still talk the legs off of a donkey. I’m not sure which one of us finally called time. But I’m almost certain it was me.

Conversations with people into their ninth decade are, necessarily, more retrospective than they are prospective. Yes, she asked about work. Yes, she asked about my wife and daughter. But we talked more about our shared topography: parenthood, her childhood and young adulthood, my childhood and young adulthood. Much of it was gauzy and nostalgic. But behind it all, there was the sense that there was a clock ticking, inexorably.

In the afternoons, with the Florida skies threatening, and often delivering, on rain before breaking into a lemonade yellow sun that inflicted a sunburn that slowly mellowed to a tan, I took long drives around Sarasota.

There were a new pair of traffic circles along Main Street, a surviving piece of Old Florida, dotted with restaurants, boutiques and book stores. More than a few were new since my last trip. Some storefronts were dark and empty, victims of the pandemic-mandated shutdowns last year. But even at 2 p.m. on a weekday, the street hummed with life. I pulled into a parking space and paid at a kiosk — also new — and left a couple hours with some books under my arm.

The day before I left, I drove out of downtown, across the John Ringling Causeway, which stretches over a sparkling expanse of Sarasota Bay, and into St. Armands Key, a plush neighborhood of wildly expensive shops, restaurants of varying degrees of affordability, and implausibly large homes.

St. Armands was the first neighborhood I visited with my Dad when he and my mom moved down from Connecticut. It was my first Christmas with palm trees. We swam in the Gulf, and had lunch and beers at a now-shuttered local bar. An hour later, I was planted at the bar at one restaurant where we’d always had Cuban sandwiches. The memories came fast and furious. The years were blur. The sandwiches were every bit as good as I remembered.

Before I left, I walked up to the beach one more time. I left my sneakers on the sand and ventured out into the bathtub warm waters of the Gulf, the waves churned up by the recent heavy weather, slapped at the bottom of my shorts. This tag up with family, and the reminder of my ties to this very strange state, reminded me that, if there has been one good to come from the pandemic, it’s that it’s reinforced the importance of not wasting a moment, of maximizing every second with the people you love, because you don’t know how long you’re going to have them.

I walked deeper into the surf. The ocean water soaking me now. I didn’t care.

“What brings you here?” Will, the Lyft driver, had asked me six days earlier. It’s the pressing question we’re all called to answer.

Standing in the Gulf, the sun warm on my back, wrapped in memories and family. I had all the answer I needed.

Don’t let the moments go.

An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.