Posted tagged ‘Florida’

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Going To No Down Florida, Cold

December 2, 2010

Brrr.....

I wake up in a very chilly bedroom this morning–no heat and a big window always slides open at the top, only closing again through some precarious sill-standing and serious neck-wrenching–with a need to pack for Florida.

Ah.

There are moments when the waterlogged air and smouldering concrete of the Sunshine State really do seem to beckon.  Not to mention the deep blue expanse on hatted head, the warmth on bare arms, the crunch of Bermuda grass under Birks.

Then I read that the temperature at my planned destination (the “Space Coast”) is currently 43 degrees!

That’s not much better than my bedroom!  Where I have down!

Who has down in Florida?  There’s something about even wool in Florida that feels icky.  Sticky.  Thick.  (It’s not exactly sheep country.)

I don’t mean to be hard on Florida but, well, it’s more like fleece country.  (You know, the stuff made out of plastic bottles.)

I’ll stop.  The state is really tremendously beautiful, or would be, if you took away some of the houses and banks. drive-in medical facilities and strip malls, golf courses and SUVs, beach side condos and hotels, and even a couple of bikini shops.   (Maybe not bikini shops.)

It will also be in the upper 60s during the day, maybe even higher.

Ah.

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Parents Being Parents

September 13, 2009

A parent is always a parent.

I am visiting mine at the moment.

I tell my Dad late in the afternoon that I’m going for a walk on the beach.  ( It is approximately two blocks away from my parents’ house.)   His eyes widen in alarm.

“I’m just going for a little bit,” I say.

He looks panicked.

“I need some air,” I protest.  “Some exercise.”

“Wouldn’t you rather stay here?” he pleads.

“It’s perfectly light out.  No one’s going to attack me.”

He shudders at the voicing of his fears.

This is a quiet prosperous beach town.  On a barrier island.  There are only two bridges.  A difficult place for violent crime.

“How about if you take Mama with you?”

She’s in her late eighties, and never leaves his side.   He really is not well enough to be left for very long.

“You think she’d be able to protect me?” I ask.

He scowls.  “But at least there’d be two of you.”

“It’s not like she’s going into the ocean,” my mom adds in support of my expedition.

He scowls more.

I don’t say anything further, since I sometimes do (heaven forbid) go in the ocean.   (Though nearsightedness and a kind of fear that has eventually rubbed off on me keeps me from going out far.)

Finally, with the promise that I will walk on the beach but only as far as a nearby restaurant he likes to get a special dish he likes, I go.

I move with some speed.  Still, by the time I get back to their block, I see my mom out on the front lawn looking for me; my father, with his walker, his face pained, in the doorway.

Agh.

“I made it,” I say softly.

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More On Incredulity In Florida – Civility, Joe Wilson

September 13, 2009

I just wanted to add a few things to my blog of yesterday, “Incredulous in Florida”.

In my experience, Florida is a very polite place by and large.  (By Florida, I mean the central coast, which is the only part I know.)  (I also don’t mean Florida on the roadside, that is, Floridians when driving.)

My sense, having grown up in Maryland, is that this civility is really a Southern trait, not just Floridian.

The politeness, which seems to be paired with a kind of patience (or at least an absence of the headlong rush typical of New York), is a great boon to the older people who live here.  Clerks in stores, for example, wait without noticeable toe-tapping or audible sighs when older people rifle through purses and wallets at counters to count out exact change.  (I don’t mean disrespect to older people here—I do plenty of rifling through my own purse.  I just know that my parents, for example, one of whom has Parkinson’s disease, are much slower in the purse/wallet area than they used to be.)

Problems with this insistence on rules of politeness can arise.  Taking my parents as the example again, increasing deafness has sometimes led them to fail to hear or understand the cues for their side of the exchange.  This occasional (and always completely inadvertant) lapse has led to real misunderstandings, where because the rules weren’t deemed to be followed on both sides, blow-ups suddenly occurred:  hurricane roofers have walked irrevocably off jobs, (incompetent but available) replacement hurricane  contractors have huffed and puffed and found an excuse for not showing up weeks at a time, and hospital nurses have occasionally required long session sof placating.

Which brings up two things.  First, on the personal side, with respect to my conversation with my car service driver yesterday:  despite mentioning in my post (my) yelling, we both managed to keep things on a friendly (if sometimes incredulous) level.   I was conscious that I did not want to make the reputation of New York in Florida worse, and apologized repeatedly for my aggressive style of argument;  the car service guy graciously laughed and said it was the best ride he’d had in a long while.   (I’m sorry to say that I even wondered whether a heated argument between two strangers in the Northeast would have ended in as friendly and polite a fashion.)

On the political side, this backdrop of Southern civility, makes Joe Wilson’s shout of “you lie!” during Obama’s speech even more outrageous.   The guy simply decided that normal rules of civility, (rules that have probably drummed into him since birth, given that he is from South Carolina),  just didn’t apply in the case of Obama.    Pretty awful.

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Incredulous In Florida

September 12, 2009

I am in Florida today which is an amazing change from downtown New York City.  For one thing, the 99% humidity rate is breathed rather than falling all around me.  Windows are shut tight, inside air is refrigerated and people stay in that air, by and large.  (At least, the only other people who stood or sat outside at the airport, where we waited for our car service, were smoking cigarettes.)

And then the guy who picked us up–a very nice, young, friendly, helpful guy, who really did not seem in any way a nut job (at least I didn’t worry that my life was in his hands as he drove us down A1A)–compared Obama’s proposals to those made by Hitler in Nazi Germany.  (Granted this was towards the very end of our ride.)

People in Florida are extremely nice, friendly, helpful.   This guy seemed another one of these nice, friendly, helpful types.

Who turned from the steering wheel to ask me whether I realized how much Obama’s civilian corp was like the S.S.

He was friendly enough to genuinely not mind our heated argument both before and after these comments.  He did not take offense at my use of expletives.

He talked about studying facts.  (I do not believe these included facts about Nazi Germany.)

He, like Joe Wilson, spoke of Obama as a liar.  When I asked him to give me an example of a lie, he couldn’t actually come up with one.  (I should have given him advanced notice he said.)  Finally, he said, well what about statements that the health care proposal would not cause cuts in Medicaid.  I said that Obama did talk about cutting waste in Medicaid.

Then he said, oh yeah, and what about Bill Ayers?

We both complained about the lack of personal responsibility in the culture.  I mentioned that Obama also stressed the importance of personal responsibility.

But he had a hard time hearing that, given Obama’s exchange with the Joe the Plumber.  He was very upset at the way that Joe the Plumber had been treated, by the way, which he seemed to view as treatment meted out by the Obama administration.   I mentioned that Joe the Plumber seemed to have landed a job as a news correspondent.

I do not want to make fun of the guy.  I liked him, even as I yelled at him  (in a motherly way).  And he, in a sheepish way, seemed to like me (though since I was also the paying customer, this is a bit hard to assess.)

But the experience genuinely shook me.   I had not realized how very far from home I’d come.

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