lwood

[Edited: I typoed a link and the cut. Fixed, with apologies!]

I've flip-flopped yet again on whether to friends-lock stuff. Not gonna unlock old stuff, but may as well make this'un public, it's just me ruminatin'.

"Mars. I can't believe I'm back on Mars. Three times before this place almost killed me. I swore I'd never give it another chance to finish the job. Humans got no business being here. No business at all." -- Garibaldi's Log, "Babylon 5," "The Exercise of Vital Powers."

I don't quite feel about Florida the way Garibaldi feels about Mars, but it's close -- no 'fense meant to

illuviel, Osprey Bay Kindred, or the like.

It's just never been a place that's been kindly inclined to me.

Something over a decade ago, not long after my father divorced my mother, Mom wanted to spend the summer with her mother. It wasn't unusual when one grandmother lived in suburban Philadelphia and the other in suburban Maryland... but by this time my grandmother and step-grandfather pulled up stakes and moved to Sarasota, Florida.

I don't think I'd been on an airplane more than once or twice before in my life.

Anyway, spending those several weeks there in high summer convinced me of several things:

Florida is Flat (eventually contradicted)

Florida is Hot (yet to be disproven). All the time. And humid.

Therefore, one stays indoors as much as possible, as all indoor spaces are air conditioned.

Florida has lots and lots of interesting critters: anoles that scamper up the walls, and neat bugs, and fire ants, and things-in-shells -- enjoyment of these is only hampered by the point above.

Florida Beaches Are Nifty and Keen! This statement void when one is overcome by my second point.

Florida, in the summer, has daily thunderstorms, which is pretty damn cool.

My stepgrandfather is a churlish boor who is too damn stubborn to face the fact that he's growing deaf (she eventually wore him down and he got operations and a hearing aid).

They are Polish. Their favorite types of music are Big Band (yay!) and polka -- would have been a yay if not for point above, which meant that said polkas had to be played at HEADBANGING VOLUME.

Polkas are not for headbanging.

My grandmother will pinch that penny until it screams and is flayed between her fingers. She's allowed; she got married directly after WWII, therefore lived through the Depression, and had to raise three kids as a single (widowed) mother in the fifties and sixties. However, this means a lot of store-brand food in the house that's past its expiration date. My exasperation with Greyhaven's kitchen almost certainly hearkens to this.

Florida is where I saw my first triple rainbow (on the Fourth of July! Behold, Bifrost Boldly Outblazes Boring Pyrotechnic Blasts!).

And every Sunday, when Pa-Pa turned on his polka music, my brothers and I hid in my bedroom and played the only tape I'd brought with me: Billy Joel's Storm Front. I was very, very tired of Billy Joel's Storm Front, but it beat having my ears reamed out by Polka Played at Headbanging Volume on Crappy Speakers. Heck, we got so tired of Billy Joel that I found a Timex-Sinclair that my grandparents had "won" from attending a timeshare presentation ("Free Home Computer!") and played tapes from that. These do not have a good beat and you cannot dance to them, nevertheless they were better than the alternative.

It wasn't all about cowering in the bedroom, though: we took a side trip to Orlando and visited the expected theme parks as on-the-cheap as you could get: $1.99 breakfast specials and the whole bit, and after that, Kennedy Space Center. Plus, we visited a few Gulfside beaches far closer to Sarasota, and that, as I say, was Nifty and Keen.

But my overall memories of Florida are of being too damn hot, or hiding from the Headbangers' Polka. Strike One.

(It occurs to me that I may be blending two separate trips into one purgatorical sojourn; so be it.)

Some years later, after I'd moved to California, my father gave up his job in Cleveland for a verbal job offer in Florida. Nothing signed, no offer letter -- I told him at the time that doing so was almost suicidally stupid, especially as my brothers and alcoholic stepmother were with him; the excesses of the IT industry taught me well how much faith to put in anything but real offers, real paychecks. But the offer was legitimate, he assured me, and it would be being a chef, which he'd wanted to be for wenty years, but had had to give up for You Kids...

When Dad got to Florida, they found out that Dad hadn't just been in a union (hadn't you heard? That's one step above being a damn mutant Commie Satanic terrorist!), but had actually at one point been a shop steward (union representative within a workplace, and so actually a Satanic Commie mutant traitor terrorist, by God!).

Understand, please, that in the Rust Belt, everyone is in a bloody union; many places of all sizes and trades are closed shops. Shop steward was just something you kicked around to a different person each year. And, indeed, I remember that year, because there'd nearly been a strike and Dad was trying to calm ruffled feathers while awaiting word on what to do from higher-ups. Position of power it ain't. But, of course, he might Secretly Be a UFCW Spy, trying to convert their union-free operation.

The job offer suddenly had all the life expectancy of a snowball in Sarasota, leaving my father and brothers homeless, my father jobless, and my brothers with high school to finish.

Strike two for Florida, pun somewhat intended.

Dad and the boys got religion (it runs in his side of the family; I come by mine honestly) and a neighborhood church bailed them out. He got a job at one of Starke, Florida's two (two!) maximum-security prisons as a guard.

Well, he applied to be a cook, but they'd just changed the rules so he had to be a guard for awhile before switching to cook. They taught him how to fire rifle and pistol, set him in a tall guard tower, and told him, "Anything that gets to that point, you shoot to kill."

"Do I shout anything first? Do I get a warning shot?"

"Nope. See, if they got here, they've passed these six other things and are clearly Trying to Escape. So you shoot."

This gave Dad a few sleepless nights, eventually resolving themselves as the eminently quotable line, "They're not here for skipping Sunday School, you know?"

He lost the alcoholic wife, my brothers graduated high school. One joined the Marines (I visited his boot camp graduation in South Carolina) and the other went to community college.

The next time I went to Florida was to attend my youngest brother's high school graduation in Starke, Florida. I flew into Jacksonville. The Pennsylvanian grandmother flew in some hours later and we rented a car -- her name was on it, but I did most of the driving. The Floridian grandmother drove up the coast.

My first impressions of driving into Starke were of a barbershop (Men's Cuts $6, Women's $8, JESUS LOVES YOU) and the watertower.

I'd convinced myself that the thing atop the water tower was... really... just a funny-shaped lightning rod. Honest.

Until they lit the twenty-foot cross up.

Do I really need to mention that the graduation ceremony opened with a prayer that didn't even try for non-sectarian? I guess they figured that as long as they didn't actively slur the Catholics that that somehow counted. Because, y'know, it's not like Catholics are actually Christians...

And if I can have a sidebar (why the hell can't I? My Damn LiveJournal), that particular conceit among certain Protestant denominations, Baptists in particular, has always rankled ex-Catholic me. To spell it out, it's that "Christian" specifically doesn't include "Catholic" and I would assume that if they bothered to think about it, the Episcopal and Orthodox variants would be in the same box. I get pissy in an extremely related way when someone declares me unheathen for their favorite reason-of-the-month (usually something Diana-related), and my response to both is generally a hearty "FUCK OFF!"

Y'all're Christian, get over it.

I'm heathen too, suck it up.

Anyway, that weekend was spent under extremely heavy cover. Quiet as a churchmouse, me.

Strike Three for Florida, which should be Out but apparently having nifty faua and resident relatives gives you more strikes. Or we suddenly switched to bowling and no-one told me...

My next game attempt to invade Florida was by train. Constant readers will remember my Trainabout Travelogue, and less-constant readers can click directly to the first and second Florida entries. No grandmother this time, but Dad has a new girlfriend with whom he did not sleep; he had an efficiency apartment upstairs to make sure that appearances were upheld, and had completely sworn off sex outside of marriage.

Those of you who have heard certain less-flattering anecdotes about my father may now snort and scoff. But, consider... if he'd been so thorough in the other conversation, it wouldn't earn him anything to lie now, so I'll take that as truth. He still had religion, too... and that can pinch-hit for other drives if needed.

That trip was mostly-okay, and short enough that nothing too terribly untoward could come up. I hopped on another train a day later, heading north up the coast, but this doesn't really improve Florida in my estaimation; obviously I wasn't there long enough for it to try for me...

And now... now, I'm in Florida again. Why next post, and dammit I mean there'll be a next post that will address this...

-- Lorrie