I was sitting on our front porch, listening to my little transistor radio which I held on my shoulder so it was aimed at my ear. It was night, and it was at a time in the year when the temperature in South Florida was actually comfortable -- to me, anyway, which meant it was in the low 60s or perhaps even the high 50s. My parents had some friends over and they were sitting on the front steps smoking and talking. Occasionally someone would get up and go inside, to the kitchen, or through the house to the back yard where my father was cooking something on our grill. I don't remember what my sister was doing, she might have been in the bedroom or in the living room watching tv, or she might have been outside running around in the dusk. All I know is she wasn't bothering me.
I was happy. It was my favorite time of the year ("cold," not muggy like pea soup, weather that will always mean holidays and presents and not having to go to school and not being sweaty and tired because my father took the air-conditioning out of the house -- it "made us sick," he said). I was wearing my current favorite dress, which at the time was called a "maxi dress." It was long like these but otherwise resembled nothing so much as something an Amish child might wear, but as far as I was concerned it was the height of fashion. All the girls at school had one. In fact, the school had to restrict maxi-dress-wearing because some girl tripped and fell (or so we heard), and we could only wear our maxi dresses on special "Maxi Dress Friday." I have no idea how we accomplished this coup among the school administration; usually they were not at all amenable to soothing the clothing fads of grade schoolers. Perhaps it was because after years of trying to get skirt hems to keep from rising up to the stratosphere the idea of completely blocking girls from actually wearing dresses that hearkened back to a more innocent, or at least less revealing, time struck the grownups as being too ironic. At my age, of course, I didn't concern myself with such things. Anyway, my grandmother had made my dress, of some dark flowered print, and it had long sleeves and a demure round neck and a border of white rick-rack. I loved it.
So I sat in my parents' big butterfly chair that was made of orange canvas and you had to be careful getting up out of or you'd fall over with it collapsing on top of you, and listened to my little transistor radio. I can still remember my favorite station: WFUN-AM. There was very little FM at the time and the only radio we owned that got FM radio was in my parents' bedroom and had an electric cord whose plug would get very hot after a while. Anyway, WFUN was a local pop radio station which played things like "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson (a favorite of mine), "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks (ugh), and "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" by the Bee Gees (meh). But tonight was different.
The deejay came on with an announcement. "The Vietnam War has been declared over." I don't remember the exact words. Then some other stuff about the president (that would be Richard Nixon) making an announcement, and so on. This made me proud that my parents had voted for Nixon. Then after the announcement, they started playing bells.
They were church bells. This is all that played on the radio, for the rest of the night. My parents went in and out, or sat in the dark talking quietly to their friends and drinking beer, the ends of their cigarettes like tiny orange suns in the night. I sat in the cold holiday air and listened to the bells.
Crabs
It was hot, and there was no comfortable place to sit. The Florida sun beat down on the stretch of mangroves and gravel that was made up of sharp bits of white coral, limestone, and shells. At the water's edge the sand was soft, but it was wet, and I didn't want to sit in the water all day, despite the fact that it was as warm as a bath.
I wanted to go home.
I had no interest in crabbing or fishing or drinking beer (naturally -- I was eleven), but my parents did and they refused to leave me home by myself. They did offer to leave me and my younger sister at home together, ostensibly so we could "watch out" for each other. I quickly agreed to come along. We piled into the old Chevy station wagon -- a vehicle as old as I was, with no air-conditioning (it never had any) or seat belts (they were an option at the time the car was built) and the AM-only radio had never worked in my memory. During the long drive down to the Keys my sister and I bickered. I only wanted to look out the window at the passing fields and mangrove swamps, but my sister as always wanted attention.
When we arrived I think my parents' friends were already there. The styrofoam cooler squeaked open, disclosing the half-melted ice and the cans of beer, and soda for my sister and I. I think it was Seven-Up, or perhaps Dr. Pepper. I went through soda fads. We were at a tiny lagoon surrounded by mangroves except where the road went by, a stretch of salt-worn asphalt that crumbled at the edges into the stretch of uncomfortable gravel, which pierced through my thin flip flops so that I had to walk very slowly.
Crabbing has to be the most boring activity in the universe. Here is how you catch crabs: you get a hunk of salt pork, you tie it to a string, you put the salt pork into the shallow water with the string leading out to where you can grab the end, and then you wait for a crab to come along and decide it's hungry. When you see the crab, if it's holding onto the salt pork you can pull the string out of the water and try to get the crab into the bucket before it lets go. Or else you can get your net (you'll have a net, attached to a long pole) under the crab and then try to get the crab to let go of the net so you can get it into the bucket. This is not as exciting as it sounds. Crabs are very slow, to move or even to make the decision to move, which makes it easy to catch them but first there is the waiting for them to come near enough for you to get them.
I knew that this was really mostly a chance for my parents to sit around with their friends and to smoke, drink beer, and gossip. There was nothing for us kids to do except watch for crabs, which was like saying there was nothing for us to do but undergo slow torture. The afternoon soon was punctuated with my sister's whines (ignored by my parents) and by me trying to find a comfortable place to sit down that wasn't the car, which was a furnace inside by that time. And at the end of it all I ate none of the crabs. I hate crabmeat.
I wanted to go home.
I had no interest in crabbing or fishing or drinking beer (naturally -- I was eleven), but my parents did and they refused to leave me home by myself. They did offer to leave me and my younger sister at home together, ostensibly so we could "watch out" for each other. I quickly agreed to come along. We piled into the old Chevy station wagon -- a vehicle as old as I was, with no air-conditioning (it never had any) or seat belts (they were an option at the time the car was built) and the AM-only radio had never worked in my memory. During the long drive down to the Keys my sister and I bickered. I only wanted to look out the window at the passing fields and mangrove swamps, but my sister as always wanted attention.
When we arrived I think my parents' friends were already there. The styrofoam cooler squeaked open, disclosing the half-melted ice and the cans of beer, and soda for my sister and I. I think it was Seven-Up, or perhaps Dr. Pepper. I went through soda fads. We were at a tiny lagoon surrounded by mangroves except where the road went by, a stretch of salt-worn asphalt that crumbled at the edges into the stretch of uncomfortable gravel, which pierced through my thin flip flops so that I had to walk very slowly.
Crabbing has to be the most boring activity in the universe. Here is how you catch crabs: you get a hunk of salt pork, you tie it to a string, you put the salt pork into the shallow water with the string leading out to where you can grab the end, and then you wait for a crab to come along and decide it's hungry. When you see the crab, if it's holding onto the salt pork you can pull the string out of the water and try to get the crab into the bucket before it lets go. Or else you can get your net (you'll have a net, attached to a long pole) under the crab and then try to get the crab to let go of the net so you can get it into the bucket. This is not as exciting as it sounds. Crabs are very slow, to move or even to make the decision to move, which makes it easy to catch them but first there is the waiting for them to come near enough for you to get them.
I knew that this was really mostly a chance for my parents to sit around with their friends and to smoke, drink beer, and gossip. There was nothing for us kids to do except watch for crabs, which was like saying there was nothing for us to do but undergo slow torture. The afternoon soon was punctuated with my sister's whines (ignored by my parents) and by me trying to find a comfortable place to sit down that wasn't the car, which was a furnace inside by that time. And at the end of it all I ate none of the crabs. I hate crabmeat.
Whitey stole my ganja
I knew this girl from Port St. Lucie, Florida who pointed out an artwork in a local college magazine, a pencil sketch of an upset-looking guy with Rasta dreadlocks, and she told me that's what students were calling the picture. She also told this preppie-looking kid who came up to her and was trying to make time with her that her name was Nation (it wasn't) and when he looked confused explained "my parents were hippies." We walked on, leaving him behind looking non-plussed.
Later my friend and I drove up the coast because my friend and the girl had had a spat on the phone over a cap the girl had borrowed and not returned. The cap had a pattern of skulls on it and was one of my friend's prized possessions. When we got to the girl's address we found no house, just a pile of bricks and a scorched-looking place in the grass. This was before the internet was easily accessible so it took some time of looking it up before we found out the house had burned down and the people living in it had moved away. It had been a big house on the St. Lucie River, but filthy, because the girl's parents really were hippies. We decided the father had burned the house down for the insurance money. Or maybe her mother had had an accident with her bong. Anyway, we never saw the girl again.
Later my friend and I drove up the coast because my friend and the girl had had a spat on the phone over a cap the girl had borrowed and not returned. The cap had a pattern of skulls on it and was one of my friend's prized possessions. When we got to the girl's address we found no house, just a pile of bricks and a scorched-looking place in the grass. This was before the internet was easily accessible so it took some time of looking it up before we found out the house had burned down and the people living in it had moved away. It had been a big house on the St. Lucie River, but filthy, because the girl's parents really were hippies. We decided the father had burned the house down for the insurance money. Or maybe her mother had had an accident with her bong. Anyway, we never saw the girl again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
