My week-long travels through South Florida reminded me of several trips:Miami area: My family made a couple of trips to the Miami while we lived in Gainesville. During one trip we camped in the Everglades (something I replicated twice with others), and on another trip we traded houses with the family from whom we had bought the Palm View Estates house – who had moved to Hollywood, FL, where I stayed for the conference last week. I don’t remember their house so well, but remember going to the Orange Bowl parade in Miami. I didn’t think so much this past week about Everglades trips.
Once as a family we visited the Fort Myers area, but I only remember going to Sanibel Island. During the mid and late 1990s and while I lived in Sarasota, I visited the Miami area several time: Once a flew there and stayed for 4 ½ days, doing research for my book – leaving Columbus, Ohio, just minutes after turning in grades. I thought about this trip when I was planning this trip, for it’s the only time I had contact with the Fort Lauderdale airport (I flew into there) and stayed on Miami Beach. A few years before I stopped in Jupiter and driven to Tampa before and after five days on Miami Beach for my first American Sociological Association meeting. And before that I had flown into Miami to meet Abby, whose parents were staying on Miami Beach. That ASA experience was memorable for a variety of reasons: One was – I flew into Miami, even though many tourists were having trouble renting cars and then getting carjacked. And, sure enough, one of my New School classmates got carjacked in a rental car. Last week was the first time I’ve flown into Miami since then (although I tried to route our Guatemala flights through Miami – unsuccessfully – note that in the book trip that followed my ASA trip I flew into Fort Lauderdale, not Miami). On the ASA and book trip I got to spend a decent amount of time on South Beach, on the second trip interviewing people around the beach. I also visited various friends and their families, including two I visited this time (Andrea and Daniel) and one I didn’t (Greg and his family subsequently moved to Texas). At some point in there I went to Miami Beach for “family weekend” at the Barbara Brennan school, which was then meeting at a hotel in Miami Beach. Then weeks before I headed to Tallahassee, then to Minnesota, away from Sarasota (and two months before 9/11), I visited Daniel and Andrea again.
A year before this, in late August 2000, on Stephanie and Vincent’s first amazing trip to visit me in Sarasota, on Sunday we drove down to Fort Myers, where her great aunt and family lived (with their Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs and the dog that helped inspire the Frisco acquisition – with all those famous pictures from that trip) – lived in Fort Myers Shores (where she and her extended family lived for some 25 years before Lana and Dick moved up to Tennessee (pictures to be posted eventually) – there are still cousins there – some of them drove up to Ohio for Aunt Catherine’s funeral – but I didn’t look them up – on a Thanksgiving visit by Papa Larry to Tallahassee and Bradenton – he rented a car one day and drove down to Fort Myers Shores to visit with them.) We stopped by the Ford-Edison mansions (before a renovation). Then we happened upon the Shell Factory store/attraction, on Tamiami Trail in North Fort Myers on our way home, which she had visited with her grandmother and father in past trips she made to Fort Myers, when her grandmother was alive. In and around Bradenton and Sarasota – and even around Tampa and St. Pete – I thought of various other visits they had made to see me in Sarasota and in turn me to see them in Bradenton (including that worldwind Memorial Day weekend Saturday in Tampa and St. Pete (eight years ago this coming weekend) and then – critically – the next Sunday – when we drove to Myakka Springs state park with the dog, through Arcadia (where Aunt Lana had once lived), and then Stephanie urged us to keep going to visit Zora Neale Hurston sites – putative, at least – around Lake Okechobee and in Fort Pierce (not all so putative, as it turned out). (Of course, don’t forget our trip to Orlando several years ago, when Mom (and sometimes) me were at the Florida AAUW meeting, Vincent was at an anime convention, and Stephanie and I visited the botanical gardens in Orlando and then Eatonville, where Zora Neale Hurston grew up.
(Of course, just 1 ½ years ago – I think – was my last visit to Bradenton and Sarasota, when I drove down from Tampa – hours before a conference I was attending was to start there – and did my favorite widest arc through both of our old neighborhoods and out on the beaches – Anna Maria Island, Bradenton Beach, Longboat Key, St. Armands Key, and Lido Key – Several times my family came from Gainesville to visit Sarasota, including the Ringling Museum and Asolo Theater, St. Armands Key and Lido Key, and even the antique car museum and New College. On this trip I overlapped with where I went 1 ½ years ago – but I purposely did something things – skipping some things I did last time (before I got my digital camera and before blogging – the beaches, the Presbyterian church, and downtown Sarasota)).
And then there’s another gripping Memorial Day memory. Four years ago today (Tuesday) or tomorrow, Grandma Martha arrived in Bradenton to help us finish packing – and several of the people I visited with in the past 24 hours (Marilyn, Emma, and Caroline) also helped us pack – while Vincent said good-bye to his Manatee School for the Arts friends – including in a party after school Friday) – and then we pulled out Saturday morning. The way I tell the story isn’t literally true – but of course I thought of it as I was driving across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge at lunchtime today. At lunchtime on Memorial Day Saturday 2005, I was driving the big rental truck over the bridge – on the way to Louisville) – overlapping the beautiful Tampa Bay and Fort Desoto Beach on a sunny morning – and turned to Stephanie and said: Now, tell me – Why is it again that we’re moving away from here?
(Six months later – the last time Stephanie, Vincent, and Frisco have been to Sarasota/Bradenton – the four of us visited a few days before Christmas – we didn’t really visit my New College friends then – but visited Marilyn. Stephanie was in Orlando a couple of years ago with Angie, for a conference, and Marilyn, Brantley, and Emma drove over to visit – but Marilyn told me she felt pretty sick during that visit. (Marilyn’s mother loves the Kentucky Derby, and they’ve all talked about getting up there, but getting Marilyn and her family up there would be quite an undertaking.) One month before, Stephanie and Grandma Martha met at the Orlando airport, and then they drove to the AAUW in West Palm Beach – which I thought of as I drove past West Palm Beach on the freeway (back in Gainesville days my family and I only went there once and I skipped it for my book trip. After 4 ½ days in Miami, I stopped in downtown Fort Lauderdale to interview Mom’s AAUW friend, the Broward County historian, before heading across Alligator Alley to interview Andrew and Jan’s old diving instructor. Instead of trying to get to Ford-Edison (since I knew it closed early), I detoured and drove through Immokalee (site of agricultural worker organizing) before making it to the Tampa area.)
There’s one very important trip I left off. During spring break 1984 (25 years ago – if I’m counting right), Melanie and I headed to Tallahassee while Cindy and one of her brothers headed to West Palm Beach. Melanie, Cindy, and I were all housemates in the “Red House” in Swarthmore, and Melanie and I were starting to go out. (I’m remembering a somewhat ill-fated foray down to Sarasota with Abby – while we were staying with Todd in Tampa – when the recently resuscitated Fiesta broke down in Bradenton, and we had to wait for it get fixed).) Melanie and I visited Todd in Inverness (I’ve driven through there within the past couple of years), and then we slept in our car in the Holiday Inn parking lot on Lido Key. Then we drove past Avon Park (where I also went on my book tour) and then stopped on the shores of Lake Okechobee (which Melanie remembered from Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”). There we came across an African-American woman and her grandson who had been fishing on the lake. Somehow the grandson had become trapped in the trunk, and somehow I crawled back through the back seat to rescue him – or something like that. We kept driving along the lake and the canals that empty the northern Everglades into the Atlantic and picked up Cindy at a campgrounds in West Palm Beach. After visiting the Everglades and Naples (which I did not replicate this trip . . . OK – I’ll be frank – Just now I think I’m combining trips. The Okechobee/West Palm Beach trip that included visits to the Everglades, Naples, back to Avon Park, and to St. Augustine was a later trip, after the spring break trip (I think). For spring break 1984, Melanie, Cindy, and I went to Tallahassee, but it was still cold and rainy there. So around Wednesday we got back in the car and continued south. We wound up in Fort Myers on Thursday morning. We drove over to Sanibel Island where we stayed on the beach. This situation became three’s a crowd a little on the beach. Even though it was a little cloudy, we got a little sunburnt and a sea shell – at the world’s third best seashell – cut her foot and was bleeding. We wound up staying in a cheap motel in town – the Korean-owned and run Green Wave Motel (I remembered it partly because of the Green Wave is the mascot of Tulane University in New Orleans – probably an unintentional connection). Sunburnt and all we went to Fort Myers Beach to eat dinner. Probably the next day we headed down to Naples to connect with Andrew and Jane there.
One more trip I remembered: In very early May 2000, having just returned from Ohio and finished (for the most part) my dissertation research, I went for job interviews for one-year jobs at central PA’s Bucknell, where Abby had taught (I bombed), at central Michigan’s Albion (where Andrew taught), and then – at a school I had always wanted to teach at – Sarasota’s experimental, progressive, four-year public liberal arts college, New College. I remember I flew down to Tampa Sunday afternoon, rented a car, and drove on Interstate 75 to University Parkway, and found my motel (in the Day’s Inn which ended up being blocks away from where I lived for the year). Then I hopped back in the rental car and drove the three or four miles to St. Armand Circle, which my family and I had visited several times when I was a child – and had supper there (before heading back to the motel for one of my TV shows). In the morning I met the person who became my sponsor/mentor the next year, Penny (a sociologist) for breakfast, talked with a sociology class about my research, had tea with some students, and had lunch with Sarah, the person whose place I ended up taking for the next year (and who I’m still friends with). I remember walking around the campus (and being ferried around by Sarah). I sat in on Sarah’s class in the building on the bay (where I soon had an office – though I never taught there) and sat in a great class, a social theory class taught by David – in the same building – which I compared favorably with seminars at Swarthmore and the New School – and which helped save me on the college. It was a beautiful early May day – and I wore the same clothes more or less that I wore at the conference last week at Hollywood Beach – and I left with a good feeling (somewhat unjustifiably good in hind sight) about teaching in New College and living in Sarasota (Penny also showed me the house where I ended up living for a year). Amazingly, a week later I was back in NYC agonizing about which of the three offers to take (I ultimately picked New College). Interesting trip with several features I was to replicate this past week (flying out of Tampa, rental car transaction there, driving over the Skyway bridge, walking around New College campus, etc., etc.)
Interesting memories throughout.
Once as a family we visited the Fort Myers area, but I only remember going to Sanibel Island. During the mid and late 1990s and while I lived in Sarasota, I visited the Miami area several time: Once a flew there and stayed for 4 ½ days, doing research for my book – leaving Columbus, Ohio, just minutes after turning in grades. I thought about this trip when I was planning this trip, for it’s the only time I had contact with the Fort Lauderdale airport (I flew into there) and stayed on Miami Beach. A few years before I stopped in Jupiter and driven to Tampa before and after five days on Miami Beach for my first American Sociological Association meeting. And before that I had flown into Miami to meet Abby, whose parents were staying on Miami Beach. That ASA experience was memorable for a variety of reasons: One was – I flew into Miami, even though many tourists were having trouble renting cars and then getting carjacked. And, sure enough, one of my New School classmates got carjacked in a rental car. Last week was the first time I’ve flown into Miami since then (although I tried to route our Guatemala flights through Miami – unsuccessfully – note that in the book trip that followed my ASA trip I flew into Fort Lauderdale, not Miami). On the ASA and book trip I got to spend a decent amount of time on South Beach, on the second trip interviewing people around the beach. I also visited various friends and their families, including two I visited this time (Andrea and Daniel) and one I didn’t (Greg and his family subsequently moved to Texas). At some point in there I went to Miami Beach for “family weekend” at the Barbara Brennan school, which was then meeting at a hotel in Miami Beach. Then weeks before I headed to Tallahassee, then to Minnesota, away from Sarasota (and two months before 9/11), I visited Daniel and Andrea again.
A year before this, in late August 2000, on Stephanie and Vincent’s first amazing trip to visit me in Sarasota, on Sunday we drove down to Fort Myers, where her great aunt and family lived (with their Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs and the dog that helped inspire the Frisco acquisition – with all those famous pictures from that trip) – lived in Fort Myers Shores (where she and her extended family lived for some 25 years before Lana and Dick moved up to Tennessee (pictures to be posted eventually) – there are still cousins there – some of them drove up to Ohio for Aunt Catherine’s funeral – but I didn’t look them up – on a Thanksgiving visit by Papa Larry to Tallahassee and Bradenton – he rented a car one day and drove down to Fort Myers Shores to visit with them.) We stopped by the Ford-Edison mansions (before a renovation). Then we happened upon the Shell Factory store/attraction, on Tamiami Trail in North Fort Myers on our way home, which she had visited with her grandmother and father in past trips she made to Fort Myers, when her grandmother was alive. In and around Bradenton and Sarasota – and even around Tampa and St. Pete – I thought of various other visits they had made to see me in Sarasota and in turn me to see them in Bradenton (including that worldwind Memorial Day weekend Saturday in Tampa and St. Pete (eight years ago this coming weekend) and then – critically – the next Sunday – when we drove to Myakka Springs state park with the dog, through Arcadia (where Aunt Lana had once lived), and then Stephanie urged us to keep going to visit Zora Neale Hurston sites – putative, at least – around Lake Okechobee and in Fort Pierce (not all so putative, as it turned out). (Of course, don’t forget our trip to Orlando several years ago, when Mom (and sometimes) me were at the Florida AAUW meeting, Vincent was at an anime convention, and Stephanie and I visited the botanical gardens in Orlando and then Eatonville, where Zora Neale Hurston grew up.
(Of course, just 1 ½ years ago – I think – was my last visit to Bradenton and Sarasota, when I drove down from Tampa – hours before a conference I was attending was to start there – and did my favorite widest arc through both of our old neighborhoods and out on the beaches – Anna Maria Island, Bradenton Beach, Longboat Key, St. Armands Key, and Lido Key – Several times my family came from Gainesville to visit Sarasota, including the Ringling Museum and Asolo Theater, St. Armands Key and Lido Key, and even the antique car museum and New College. On this trip I overlapped with where I went 1 ½ years ago – but I purposely did something things – skipping some things I did last time (before I got my digital camera and before blogging – the beaches, the Presbyterian church, and downtown Sarasota)).
And then there’s another gripping Memorial Day memory. Four years ago today (Tuesday) or tomorrow, Grandma Martha arrived in Bradenton to help us finish packing – and several of the people I visited with in the past 24 hours (Marilyn, Emma, and Caroline) also helped us pack – while Vincent said good-bye to his Manatee School for the Arts friends – including in a party after school Friday) – and then we pulled out Saturday morning. The way I tell the story isn’t literally true – but of course I thought of it as I was driving across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge at lunchtime today. At lunchtime on Memorial Day Saturday 2005, I was driving the big rental truck over the bridge – on the way to Louisville) – overlapping the beautiful Tampa Bay and Fort Desoto Beach on a sunny morning – and turned to Stephanie and said: Now, tell me – Why is it again that we’re moving away from here?
(Six months later – the last time Stephanie, Vincent, and Frisco have been to Sarasota/Bradenton – the four of us visited a few days before Christmas – we didn’t really visit my New College friends then – but visited Marilyn. Stephanie was in Orlando a couple of years ago with Angie, for a conference, and Marilyn, Brantley, and Emma drove over to visit – but Marilyn told me she felt pretty sick during that visit. (Marilyn’s mother loves the Kentucky Derby, and they’ve all talked about getting up there, but getting Marilyn and her family up there would be quite an undertaking.) One month before, Stephanie and Grandma Martha met at the Orlando airport, and then they drove to the AAUW in West Palm Beach – which I thought of as I drove past West Palm Beach on the freeway (back in Gainesville days my family and I only went there once and I skipped it for my book trip. After 4 ½ days in Miami, I stopped in downtown Fort Lauderdale to interview Mom’s AAUW friend, the Broward County historian, before heading across Alligator Alley to interview Andrew and Jan’s old diving instructor. Instead of trying to get to Ford-Edison (since I knew it closed early), I detoured and drove through Immokalee (site of agricultural worker organizing) before making it to the Tampa area.)
There’s one very important trip I left off. During spring break 1984 (25 years ago – if I’m counting right), Melanie and I headed to Tallahassee while Cindy and one of her brothers headed to West Palm Beach. Melanie, Cindy, and I were all housemates in the “Red House” in Swarthmore, and Melanie and I were starting to go out. (I’m remembering a somewhat ill-fated foray down to Sarasota with Abby – while we were staying with Todd in Tampa – when the recently resuscitated Fiesta broke down in Bradenton, and we had to wait for it get fixed).) Melanie and I visited Todd in Inverness (I’ve driven through there within the past couple of years), and then we slept in our car in the Holiday Inn parking lot on Lido Key. Then we drove past Avon Park (where I also went on my book tour) and then stopped on the shores of Lake Okechobee (which Melanie remembered from Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”). There we came across an African-American woman and her grandson who had been fishing on the lake. Somehow the grandson had become trapped in the trunk, and somehow I crawled back through the back seat to rescue him – or something like that. We kept driving along the lake and the canals that empty the northern Everglades into the Atlantic and picked up Cindy at a campgrounds in West Palm Beach. After visiting the Everglades and Naples (which I did not replicate this trip . . . OK – I’ll be frank – Just now I think I’m combining trips. The Okechobee/West Palm Beach trip that included visits to the Everglades, Naples, back to Avon Park, and to St. Augustine was a later trip, after the spring break trip (I think). For spring break 1984, Melanie, Cindy, and I went to Tallahassee, but it was still cold and rainy there. So around Wednesday we got back in the car and continued south. We wound up in Fort Myers on Thursday morning. We drove over to Sanibel Island where we stayed on the beach. This situation became three’s a crowd a little on the beach. Even though it was a little cloudy, we got a little sunburnt and a sea shell – at the world’s third best seashell – cut her foot and was bleeding. We wound up staying in a cheap motel in town – the Korean-owned and run Green Wave Motel (I remembered it partly because of the Green Wave is the mascot of Tulane University in New Orleans – probably an unintentional connection). Sunburnt and all we went to Fort Myers Beach to eat dinner. Probably the next day we headed down to Naples to connect with Andrew and Jane there.
One more trip I remembered: In very early May 2000, having just returned from Ohio and finished (for the most part) my dissertation research, I went for job interviews for one-year jobs at central PA’s Bucknell, where Abby had taught (I bombed), at central Michigan’s Albion (where Andrew taught), and then – at a school I had always wanted to teach at – Sarasota’s experimental, progressive, four-year public liberal arts college, New College. I remember I flew down to Tampa Sunday afternoon, rented a car, and drove on Interstate 75 to University Parkway, and found my motel (in the Day’s Inn which ended up being blocks away from where I lived for the year). Then I hopped back in the rental car and drove the three or four miles to St. Armand Circle, which my family and I had visited several times when I was a child – and had supper there (before heading back to the motel for one of my TV shows). In the morning I met the person who became my sponsor/mentor the next year, Penny (a sociologist) for breakfast, talked with a sociology class about my research, had tea with some students, and had lunch with Sarah, the person whose place I ended up taking for the next year (and who I’m still friends with). I remember walking around the campus (and being ferried around by Sarah). I sat in on Sarah’s class in the building on the bay (where I soon had an office – though I never taught there) and sat in a great class, a social theory class taught by David – in the same building – which I compared favorably with seminars at Swarthmore and the New School – and which helped save me on the college. It was a beautiful early May day – and I wore the same clothes more or less that I wore at the conference last week at Hollywood Beach – and I left with a good feeling (somewhat unjustifiably good in hind sight) about teaching in New College and living in Sarasota (Penny also showed me the house where I ended up living for a year). Amazingly, a week later I was back in NYC agonizing about which of the three offers to take (I ultimately picked New College). Interesting trip with several features I was to replicate this past week (flying out of Tampa, rental car transaction there, driving over the Skyway bridge, walking around New College campus, etc., etc.)
Interesting memories throughout.
-- Perry
