Florida Adventures

It has been a long time since I have written because I didn’t know if I wanted people to know what happened to us in the past few months. But, the best stories have their rough points and it would be silly not to include ours. Things got so bad at one point that we began planning a move to England and giving up this whole thing.

Here is what happened- there will be other stories to follow im sure.

We arrived in Florida and spent the weekend with my Aunt Suzy, her husband Mark and their three girls Rachel, Emily and Katie. This was difficult for us because we had been used to living outside on our own and we suddenly found ourselves in a house full of people who wanted to hang out all the time. Alex could barely stand the last day, he went into our room an wrote on the computer at the end of the night because he couldn’t take the children anymore. I liked spending time with my cousins but it irked me that my Aunt did everything for them, down to getting them glasses of milk. This launched Alex and I into a series of conversations about how to raise children, which having had none, I don’t know if we’re actually qualified to give advise about. But I would try to make kids as independent as possible as early as possible because kids are a lot smarter and a lot more mature than adults think.

We left there with an invitation to come for Halloween and went to Beaver’s house. Having talked to him on the phone, I expected a taller, fatter, longhaired guy to meet us at the door. Instead a shorter fit man with a shaved head and a quick smile squinted at us from behind his motorcycle. I think about this man now with mixed reserve and gratitude. His son Rory, 24, met us inside. Over time we learned that Beaver has helped a lot of people get on their feet. To me it was strange that he opened his house up so readily to us. My family has never taken in anyone except one foreign exchange student, and that was after I had left for college. I felt that I would cross a boundary by asking Suzy if I could stay with her while we were trying to find a place. Fun enough, if we had stayed with her we would have had a place much faster.

During the two weeks we lived with Beaver: we met the English, we took mushrooms, I found a job and we found a place to live- in that order. One of the first things Beaver did was introduce Alex and I to the English in Indian Rocks Beach. They all hang out at a bar and seafood restaurant across the street from the beach called Crabby Bills. They’re awesome guys, always there for the games and a very tight group. When I first met them I was very quiet and didn’t know what to say to them. My first few months in Florida were filled with me not knowing what to say- to people in bars, to coworkers, to Beaver and Rory. Alex and I had been talking about theories of life for so long that I didn’t know what normal people talked about anymore. Over time, just by showing up and saying a couple words every day there began to be more to say. I’d say most of relationships is just showing up and talking. You don’t have to say anything profound, just listen and talk about whatever comes up.

Two days before my job interview, Rory came home with a bag of mushrooms. It was my first time taking them and Alex told me not to tell Beaver and Rory. At this time Alex and I were not in a good place because he thought that I was flirting with Rory. I wasn’t its just that he was easy to talk to and I’d been talking to Alex for such a long time that it was nice to hear what another person had to say about things. The way he looked at things shook up my world. He always finds himself in fights all the time. He has more crazy stories about his teenage years than should fit in one lifetime. Like one time he got caught smoking cigarettes by the janitor at his school, so the janitor made a deal with him and his friends that if they helped him clean everything after school he’d buy them cigarettes and beer and they could all hang out in his office. Rory said now he’d be fired for it but that he loved that old guy.

I digress, so we all took the mushrooms on the back porch which overlooks a reservoir. After a little while it looked like the trees were breathing. Then I could see the energy flowing through the power lines. Then the reflection of the lights on the water started to remind me of being on a boat racing home in the dark on Catalina island. The little lights on the island looked like little pirate towns. Then it switched again and everything started to turn to neon colors, with everything moving. But I didn’t talk at all during the whole thing because I didn’t want them to know it was my first time. This put me into a deep funk. Especially since I couldn’t get into Beaver and Rory’s conversation, because it was all about shit that had happened to them in the past. Alex left and went into the front room where we slept because he was feeling shitty, so I went to join him. It was horrible in there the dark got to me and I became really depressed. In my drugged stupor I started going over my current state in my head. I was broke, dirty because I hadn’t showered in a long time, had no home to call my own, had no job, no prospects, generally my life was shit. I started to wonder what the purpose of living was and wished that I were dead so that I wouldn’t have to think about all that. It had been a long long time since I had had any of those thoughts. I tried to talk to Alex about all this but he didn’t want to talk to me. This made me cry and I cried for a while. I lay next to him for a while feeling worse and worse and then I needed to go to the bathroom. So, I went and looked at myself in the mirror. The bathroom looked fuzzy because of the bright light and I looked like shit in the mirror. I went back to the bed, and I felt like my nose was bleeding. I kept trying to make it stop but it wouldn’t I saw blood all over my arms and started to freak out so I ran to the bathroom, where I saw that I hadn’t been bleeding I just needed to blow my nose- a lot. Tons and tons of snot came out and I felt better. I took a deep breath and decided to start my life back up again and to start by going outside and trying to talk to them.

By that time a girl named Danielle had arrived and she was really nice. “So you‘re back from the dead.” I said yeah and we got on to talking about shit and laughing. After a while Alex came outside but he was still feeling really rough. I told them that it was my first time and Beaver flipped for a bit- and rightly so. I should have said something before. I am embarrassed to this day that I did that. It’ll pop into my mind while I’m driving and I start shaking my head at myself in the rearview mirror.

Two days later I went in for an interview at TutorWorks. I decided to just be myself for this interview instead of trying to be impressive. I have a lot of experience in teaching and managing so when she asked me questions I had a lot of applicable answers. Apparently she liked me because two days later she gave me the job. The work is easy and frustrating at the same time. Easy because there is no lesson planning, no homework to assign and grade and no tests to make, give and grade. Frustrating because all the students are working on different things and there is no time to give them a good introduction to the subject matter that they are studying- this ends up frustrating a lot of the kids. As I get to know the kids more and really get to help them I really started to love seeing them every day.

In the beginning I only had 10 hours a week at $9 an hour. So I was making no money and still had a ton of time on my hands. Luckily we had found a place to life on Halloween when we went to Aunt Suzy’s house. Her neighbor Victor owns a landscaping business had a studio apartment in his yard that we could rent for $300. We moved in a few days after Halloween and got to work fixing it up.

During our first weeks there was a lot to do. It needed a paint job and we decided on yellow and blue. There were wasps nests and cobwebs on the inside and outside that needed to be scraped off. Our small accumulation of stuff needed to be organized and put away. Plus there was the town of Safety Harbor to explore with its 500 year old oak tree. In the mornings I took walks downtown and go to know the town. Main Street is lined with shops and surrounded by small houses that remind me of the neighborhoods in Berkeley. There is an Herbal Apothecary, a few diners, an Italian restaurant, a day spa and three bars among stores full of tchotchkes.

Over time, I took walks more and more seldom; inactivity breeds inactivity and instead of looking for another job I found myself spending my mornings on the couch reading and eating. I read Marcus Aurelias’s Meditations because I was concerned with what a good person was and wanted to figure out whether I was one or not. I didn’t feel like a good person, but then why would I- I was lying on the couch all day, not talking to people and not being productive. This was the first time in my life that I hadn’t been doing or planning something that took up most of my time. My whole life was behind me and I had nothing planned for my future. When I was in college and working all I wanted was to be able to have a break from those things, but having had an extended break, I now know that I want to be studying or working but that I need breaks at intervals. I think that’ll make the best life.

During this time there were two major holidays to celebrate: Thanksgiving and Christmas. This was my first year away from my parents and my father’s side of the family for these holidays. My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving because it doesn’t have all the religious frills- its just your simple food, family and fun holiday. Plus it’s about being thankful for the things/experiences/relationships that you have. This Thanksgiving was particularly poignant because the week before we has almost run out of money and had to walk 30 minutes to the store to buy food because we needed to save the gas so that I could get to work. We bought all the food that we could on our $10 budget and with what we had in the house there was enough to eat for that week and make two Thanksgiving apple pies (one for us and one for the family). When we sat down to eat my little cousins wanted to go around the table and say what we were thankful for. I loved them for this because I think that is a great Thanksgiving tradition. I was thankful to have enough gas in the car to come to Thanksgiving and to have enough money to bake them an apple pie.

When we left Thanksgiving Alex and I had a lot to talk about again. First was that Emily didn’t eat any of the Thanksgiving dinner that Suzy spent all day making. Second was Alex’s opinion of my grandparents. Third was how different this Thanksgiving was to the ones in my past. In previous years my Nanny and Poppa (my dad‘s parents) always did Thanksgiving. The best years were when we went to Yosemite in the mountains of California. We rented a big house and the whole family stayed there for the weekend. I played gin-rummy with Nanny and Poppa, my sister and I pretended to be princesses in the loft bed, Dolly Parton played in the kitchen for days, and one year it snowed. We always had an amazing dinner with sweet potatoes, mashed potatos, turkey, green beans, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and 5 kinds of pies. This year we had turkey breasts, microwave potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans with mushrooms, and my grandma’s stuffing which is to die for. Suzy made my grandma’s pecan pie too, which was awesome! We played monopoly for hours and Wii after dinner, and I got to hang out with my cousins a lot. I love spending time with them, they’re like hanging out with Margaux when we were little.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Alex and I became disenchanted with Florida and the south. Our neighbor had hired Alex to help him with his granite business and had cheated him out of $200 and then wouldn’t talk to us. An all out war ensued between the men. We got Alex’s court date for the paraphernalia charge and that started a whole tirade against Mississippi. We seemed to meet more and more southern rednecks who hate anyone who isn’t white, have been members of the KKK or Aryan Brotherhood and who aren’t very open-minded or forward thinking. People here hate Obama and think he’s running the country into the ground. This made us reflect on what most people are like in the United States, and we came to the opinion that we don’t like most people in this country. That they’re unthinking, unreasonable, unkind, unfiar and prejudiced. Now I realize there is some truth in that, but it’s a little over the top. Anyway, because of this we decided to plan to move to England.

Christmas came and went much the same as Thanksgiving. I missed my family more. They sent my stocking to my Aunt’s house and filled it with little presents. They got me a Kindle so that I could read as much as I wanted without having to buy physical books to carry around. They got Alex a telescope that we can use went we get back to the forest. We hung out with my cousins a few times for basketball games and Alex showed Katie how to built fires in the backyard. I started working for an Englishman named Richard and we decided that we should continue the journey and finish writing this blog and eventually the book.

Having come back to work from inactivity, I have a few new ideas about work. First, its awesome because it gives you something to do all day. Two, there’s no reason not to like what you’re doing. Three, there’s no good reason to have problems with people you work with. Currently I wake up at 6:30, leave the house by 7:15, work at Vision Travel until 1:45, get to TutorWorks by 2:30, leave TutorWorks between 5:30 and 7 and then get home 30 minutes after that. If I didn’t have the above mantras I’d probably hate my life right now.

Working for Vision Travel has been great because I’ve gotten to think about relationships more. I work with an older lady who thought that I was replacing her and who hated me for the first few weeks I worked there. But by having a positive attitude, and talking to her every day about her grandkids and travels we build a good relationship. Vickie, who owns half the company has a difficult relationship with her husband Richard who owns the other half. They’re at odds about how to run the company so I’m learning how to accomplish everything they need done without stepping on anyone’s toes.

I think that should bring you up to date. . . More to be written soon.