Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I had started a blog a month ago. It could not get any traction. I do wonder if my blogging days are spiraling down. It is hard to pin point the reason for this waning phase. I have accumulated numerous other hobbies; gardening, bee keeping, wood working, bike riding. I feel like a high school sophomore facing college applications with high Tetris score as the only legitimate accomplishment in my brief 16 years on this earth. Holy crap! I had better get busy. Whatever the reason, I am having a hard time taking "that would be a good blog topic" all the way to a "take care" sign off.
I do like this time that I spend with you. I like writing. I like going through my everyday and running things through the "that would be a good blog topic" sieve and seeing what catches: taking that one idea, adding to it, trying to make it work. I do imagine you looking at your Facebook feed, seeing that a new post is out there and silently saying "aw what the heck? I really didn't have time to find the cure for cancer today. I might as well read what Roger is writing." So I keep writing; not as often, but an effort is made.
As I mentioned, I had started a blog about a month ago. It was all about the disappointment encountered while on a 5 day vacation in Orlando; how two pale hoosiers succumbed to the hype of warm January weather and were drawn to the promise of warmth, sunshine and sandy beaches. It was to be a parody of all of the January beach pictures of our northern friends and relatives that are sent out simply to coax me into a hellish eternity; paying for winters of envy and covetousness while looking at your posts on Facebook while the winter ravished the countryside outside my cold drafty house.
That blog reported the plane stopping while approaching the jetway because a snow drift had to be cleared from the tarmac. There were jokes about forgetting my sunglasses and being snow blinded on the beach and a reference or two about the wind chill. I tried. I had four really tight paragraphs about being lied to and about how happy I was to figure out that all of my tormentors had really been lying. It was good to find out that mom had been right. People will say anything to make themselves feel better at your expense.
I tried to stick with the theme of cold, miserable weather. But I couldn't do it. It was too perfect. The lie was too big. It was 85 degrees. The wind chill was 79. I had my sunglasses so there was no retinal damage. The only drifts that could have occurred might have been from a little bit of sand piling up around the edge of the pool.
So the lovely Miss Beverly and I have found out that it really was true. Florida is very nice in January. While I did not make it to Disney, even though, much to the chagrin of some relatives, I was a mile from the gates to the magic kingdom, I did spend two days on a bicycle dodging cataracted geezers in their Buicks on the busy streets of Orlando. I enjoyed every second of it.
As you may have noticed, the lovely Miss Beverly and I are not exactly early adopters when it comes to sun worshiping. I suppose that someone has to be late to the party. It does appear that we are so late to the party that others of our tribe of pasty white folk have moved on. If my Facebook feed is any indicator, several of our friends have decided that the beach was getting too crowded and moved on to Australia. "My beach is getting too full. I am going to fly 24 hours to get to a less crowded beach" is certainly a first world solution to a first world kind of problem.
I do feel for the Orlandans (not very catchy but better than Floridiots). Every place that I went people were asking "where are you from?" Once my proud hoosier heritage had been proclaimed, they would immediately tell me where they lived before moving to Orlando to be the vassals of long suffering northerners. Granted being an introvert, I did not have the opportunity to engage in small talk with a large number of people. Okay of the five million people in the Orlando environs that week in January, I spoke to maybe 30 and reached the "where are you from" level of intimacy with ten of them.
I know what your'e thinking. "You spoke with ten people in a week Roger?" What can I say? I had made a tactical error. I had taken Indiana centric t-shirts with me for the expressed purpose of warning off the rifraf. In my mind, seeing a shirt with all of the Indiana counties listed on it screams "YOU HAVE ALL OF THE INFORMATION YOU NEED. LEAVE ME ALONE." It appears that for others in this world it means "Oh your from Indiana. Where do you live in Indiana?" I would dejectedly point to Madison County on my belly map and cringe as I would have to nod and act like I cared that they were from Boston, New York, Fort Wayne but had lived here for more than a decade.
But act I would because they still had time to spit in my appetizer, or misdeliver me in their Uber, or slip a tarantula in my nice orange backpack that I was buying. This forced civility did provide important insight, as forced civility will often do. I learned that, based on my limited sample size, no one living in Florida is from Florida. You are a state of transplants. You are all happy about the beautiful weather. You do not miss the tornadoes, the ice storms, or the occasional polar vortex. But you do miss home. "I go back every couple of years and I miss those Boston streets and se food." Really you miss the seafood? You are surrounded on three sides by ocean and you can't find seafood? Your'e not trying hard enough. "We had a great neighborhood in New York. We lived in the Bronx and it just isn't the same here. But a house up there was worth three times the house down here plus retirement money. We couldn't say no." The stories repeated. The weather is great but I am reminiscing about a home that I left 12, 15, 20 years ago.
It is trite but true. Dorothy had it right. "There's no place like home." We love it. We hate it. We work hard to rid ourselves of it. Finally when we get to paradise, we spend years reminiscing about how great it was or should that be is. Makes you wonder what the future will bring and how neurotic we will be from the surface of Mars.
Take care.
Roger
