January 24, 2021, Sunday morning
Good morning.
My last entry was a travelogue. So is this one. Facebook friends will have seen some of this narrative.
I'll not write about the ignominious end to the Trump administration. We've all read the news and you don't need any opinionating from me about it.
Visiting Florida (or anyplace) for a long stay rather than a quick trip is different in mundane ways. With a week-long mid-winter trip, you don't worry about laundry or buying groceries or washing dishes or keeping your abode reasonably neat and clean. The snowbird role, however, requires one attend to the quotidian tasks of life in a way that a "vacation" does not. I asked a few Florida friends, before we left Minneapolis, if people wear masks at grocery stores, Target, etc. They told me they do. We have found that to be true, except for Seed to Table (see below); mask wearing is about the same here as it is the Twin Cities. Most of the people of Florida appear to be smarter than their doofus governor.
Another way a longer stay is different, at least for us, is that we needed to realize that we do not have to go pell mell to see places when we're here for two months. Our usual travel life is to see as much as possible in the time we have. In any case, such rushing about is sharply curtailed when living in a pandemic; one cannot (well, we won't) do indoor venues of any kind other than the grocery store and other necessary errands. So no movies, no concerts, no indoor sight-seeing.
That said, I
am having a weird time adjusting my mindset or attitude about being here. Much
of the time I still feel like I'm on a trip, so should be engaged in a lot of
touristy/sight-seeing activities. Then I realize/think that no, it's just a
different place for a few weeks to lead a normal daily life (but one without
any significant household responsibilities). We would not have taken a "trip"
during a pandemic because activities are so limited. (As a persnickety matter
of diction, I do not use the term "vacation" for us and those
similarly situated: it does not fit my concept of a vacation to think that
retired people can take one. From what are we vacationing? I suppose the
humdrum of daily life, working or not, if one wanted to make that argument.
After I wrote the foregoing, I looked up the word. Wikipedia: "A vacation
(American English), or holiday (British English), is a leave of absence from a
regular job, or a specific trip or journey, usually for the purpose of
recreation or tourism." This time in Florida is none of those.)
What we have been doing, absent
anything cultural or crowded, is visiting local state parks and nature
preserves for almost-daily walks. There's been ample research in recent years
about the benefits of "forest bathing," and that's what we're doing. We
have friends in Minneapolis who go walking regularly all winter; they get the
benefit of the walk but not the forest bathing. (Here's one of many sites that
talk about it: https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/thrive-together/live-well/forest-bathing-try.)
The only drawback to walking in parks
and preserves in Florida at this time of year is that the scenery doesn't vary
much. If you're in a swamp, it's cypress trees and ferns. If you're in a drier
area, it's palms, Florida slash pines, and scrub oaks. Nothing is flowering so everything
is a shade of green or brown (tree trunks, dead palm leaves). Nonetheless it's
nice to be walking when it's possible to wear only a light jacket (thus far for
us) and be surrounded by green, knowing what we left behind in the Twin Cities.
One of the places where forest bathing can occur, it is said, is on a beach. We've decided that walking on a beach isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Walking on dry, soft sand, where your foot sinks in an inch or so with every step, is hard on the ankles and knees if you do it for any extended period. If you walk on the harder, damp sand adjacent to the water, you're always slightly lop-sided because, of course, the beach slopes down to the water. Moreover, on a beach you are exposed to constant sun; even if it's not especially warm, the sun (at least for me) has a fatiguing effect no matter how much sunscreen I put on and no matter how much I shade my head and neck. And if it is warm, it's too hot for me. So we don't do much beach walking; when we do, it's early in the day, when it's still cool and the sun is still low in the sky and there are very few people about. (At one of the nature preserves we visited, the powers that be dumped boatloads of sand on the trails, so it was like walking on a beach. We found it unpleasant walking—and besides that, the trails were not well marked and we got lost, so we ended up walking on the damn sand more than we wanted to.)
I have noticed on the beach as we've walked that the houses (which I am sure each cost well over $1 million, if not two or three times that much) are closer together than our houses in south Minneapolis. The Gulf view out the front is great. The view out the side windows—and these are two- and three-story houses—is somebody else's window or wall, an arm's length away. They really jam them in. I suppose gulf-front property is astronomically expensive, so it is divided into pretty narrow lots. (The beaches are public, so the houses are set back 100+ feet.)
Another reason not to walk on the beach: We vowed, before we left Minnesota, that when we walked on the beach we would *not* collect shells. That resolution broke down on one of our walks; I brought home about 30 shells, only what I could carry in one hand. I focused on yellow and green shells and little conch shells and little else. After I got them home, I looked at them and decided they were unremarkable. I threw them away. Phew.
One positive difference between Florida and Minnesota, the result of heading toward the equator, is that there is more daylight. A week ago Elliott texted me: "I just checked the weather and saw 'sunset at 4:56.' That's depressing." I did a quick check and texted back to him that the sunset here was 5:57. I added: "You maybe forget. Sunset Edinburgh [today] 4:12. Sunrise Naples [FL] tomorrow 7:16. Minneapolis 7:47. Edinburgh 8:33." We were in Edinburgh January to May 2006; the days were a lot shorter there than in Minneapolis, much less Florida. When we came south now we gained nearly an hour of daylight on each end of the day.
As my Facebook friends (and a few others) know, one day we thought to stop at what looked to be a marvelous grocery store, Seed to Table. It looked to have wonderful fruits and vegetables and to be an interesting food shopping experience. Walking to the store from the parking lot, we encounter this sign:
Well, OK, fine. So we go into the vestibule and get a shopping cart. Inside the inner doors, about 10-12 feet in front of me, atop a large stand full of eggplant, is a life-sized cardboard cutout of Donald Trump. I thought maybe it was a joke. I look up, and on the balcony railing of what appears to be a second-floor café is a large Trump-Pence sign. Then we look around and realize that almost no one has a mask on.
We turned around and walked out.
An attorney friend commented on the post. "Frankly, I don't think it a problem under either HIPPA or the 4th amendment to ask that question. Maybe the ADA, but even that is doubtful." I responded that as I thought about it, of course that's correct. They can ask about medical conditions. Doing so does not violate the search-and-seizure provisions of the 4th Amendment nor of HIPPA.
Another friend who's spent much time in Florida wrote that "The owner of this operation is notorious in Naples, Alphie Oakes (he also owns the original operation Oakes Market). He attended the 'insurrection' in January 6th in Washington DC and claimed in the Naples paper that antifa types infiltrated the peaceful protest and initiated the violence." Another wrote that "I should have warned you guys. He's a pariah. I used to shop at his original Oakes Farm grocery. Great produce and fish. BUT NO LONGER! He took a bus load of folks to the insurrection! He's a radicalized American under the leadership of DJT. I will never shop there nor do any of our friends and relatives. Nor will we."
A Facebook friend, on the political right, wrote to me asking "You have every right to walk out. But curious to what makes it so stupid. The cutout, the banner, or nobody wearing a mask?" I wrote back to him that I was "surprised any retail outfit would make such a political statement—Trump, Biden, whoever. Of course they have the right to do so, as a private business, but why alienate potential customers. But most important your last point. We are very careful about masking because we're in a high risk category for COVID (age). Being in an enclosed space with a lot of people not wearing masks is scary for us. P.S. I didn't use the word 'stupid.'" (Other Facebook friends had used the term "stupid" in their comments on my post.)
Two auto-related travel notes. First, I almost forgot that on I75 in northern Florida, on our way here, I saw a car with white sidewall tires. I can't remember the last time I saw white sidewalls. Second, one day as we were driving to our local park for our walk, we had a white, convertible, two-seater Bentley pull up next to us at a stoplight. We didn't even know Bentley was still making cars, much less little two-seater sports cars. We wondered what the price on that little number is. When we returned home, I found a Car & Driver website with prices. I think we saw a Bentley Continental. The 2019 Continental sticker price started at $220,000; for 2020 and 2021, the price starts at $207,000. I won't be buying one any time soon.
Even in the midst of a pandemic, we socialized outdoors and distanced with friends and family over the summer. That came to an end with the cold weather. Now that we are in a warmer climate, we've resumed "safe" socializing. We have a lot of friends on the Gulf Coast who either live here or who come down for part of the winter. So we've gotten together two or three times per week for outdoor lunches or outdoor walks. Even then, sometimes we've felt uncomfortable because we're not far enough apart from either our friends or those at the next table. It's always been fine (well, we don't have COVID thus far), and with a breeze outdoors, the risk is extremely low. But we are still a little nervous about proximity.
Apropos of social events, a friend with whom I stay in regular touch wrote to me recently. "I totally applaud your decision to go to Florida. Weather matters to Minnesotans in the winter, and you'll go next year also. But with your aggressive social schedule, I think that the 'seeing people' part of this matters more. My question is, how does all this feel? Normal? Clarity that there is light at the end of the tunnel? A little scary? Tentative? Euphoric? All of the above? I'm interested, because I spend a lot of time thinking about what next spring/summer will look like." I suspect my friend isn't the only who harbors those kinds of thoughts and questions.
Probably no surprise, I wrote back that it's "all of the above." When we can eat outdoors, distanced, and especially if there is a light breeze, I and those with me don't feel that the situation is at all threatening. I told him that I can't tell if he's right in speculating that seeing people may be more important than meteorological conditions. It's really both. The latter is more pandemic-driven; we just didn't want to stay cooped up inside all winter and we had the liberty to leave. We'd see people here regardless of the pandemic just because that's who I am; the pandemic merely curtails the conditions under which we can do so (although not by much--we just won't go into anyone's residence nor allow them into ours, which isn't that big a constraint in Florida). The contrast the pandemic provides, in terms of social life in the winter, is that we can have one here but we cannot in Minnesota. In a normal year, of course, that would not be true.
I needed some leisure reading, so one day after lunch with friends we went to an enormous Barnes & Noble in a local shopping center. I was looking for light summer material, like murder mysteries. So what did I get? To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw, Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants by H. W. Brands, and The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan President by Noah Feldman. Someday they can adorn Elliott's bookshelves, although I have reason to doubt he'll ever want to read them. I posted on Facebook one quote from the Madison biography (OK, my one oblique reference to politics):
June, 1787, Constitutional Convention. "Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts proclaimed that the people, although virtuous, were 'the dupes of pretended patriots . . . daily misled into the most painful measures and opinions by false reports circulated by designing men.'" From The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President, by Noah Feldman, 2017, p. 112.
I'd seen this before on trips to Florida: Fifth Third Bank. That has to be the most inane name for a corporate financial entity in the entire Western world. Maybe it makes sense in some corporate naming scheme, but to the casual driver-by (me), it strikes me as utterly stupid. Perhaps Florida locals have some logical explanation. I noted this institution on my Facebook page; a friend informed, via Wikipedia, that "The name 'Fifth Third' is derived from the names of the bank's two predecessor companies, Third National Bank and Fifth National Bank, which merged in 1909." Several friends in the South (more or less) reported knowing of the chain, in 10 states; one wisecracked that "5/3 would be 1 & 2/3 in Mn."
In my last travelogue—three days after we arrived—I commented that we brought way too many jackets and sweatshirts. That turned out not to be an accurate statement. We have worn, repeatedly, all of our outwear (and jeans and sweat socks) repeatedly. About the only outer garment we haven't worn is our winter coats. We have the cocktail hour outside, even when it's cool (by Florida standards); we're darned if we're going to be inside when there are palms and ferns and other greenery to sit among. (Early in January I whined that "I am unamused that this morning it is only 19 degrees warmer in Bonita Springs FL than it is in Minneapolis MN.")
Kathy commented one night that "we are living the life of snowbirds." My response was that the option to be one was limited to a small percentage of the population who were sufficiently lucky and worked hard and had been born with adequate intelligence so they could get high enough on the economic scale to be able to afford to do so. I also remembered that if you had asked me 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30 years ago, if I would be a snowbird, I would have poo-poohed the notion. "We are Minnesotans, we can handle the winter. It's only wimps who are snowbirds." Funny how one's perspective changes with aging. I hope that Elliott and Martha are a position, in 30 years, to be able to do the same thing if they wish (assuming they still live in a northern climate with real winters—assuming there are winters of any significance in 30-40 years).
Now for the totally trivial. I notice car license plates when I'm driving. I always have but I have no idea why. A number of state plates I can tell without seeing the name on it: Wisconsin, New York, Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, and perhaps a few others. Others I recognize once I see the state name. In Florida that is not possible. Florida must have 25 different license plates.
Kathy observed that the people in Florida do not speak with a southern accent. That seems odd, because it is certainly in the south, next to Alabama and Georgia. So I emailed a few local friends about what they thought. They were kind enough to explain in a set of joint emails. "It's rare that you meet someone who was actually born and raised in Florida—at least in our area. Everyone is from "somewhere else!" "Yes, they do have accents—not real twangy, but southern nonetheless. . . . I've become a pretty good judge of where people 'came from' during the first conversation. Wisconsinites are a dead give-away!" "They don't. Don't know why." "I agree with [one friend] . . . everyone in our little corner of Florida is from 'somewhere else'—lots of folks from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan and Canada (now there's an interesting accent!)." One of the friends, who'd already answered, finally did what I usually do: resorted to an Internet search. "Hi all y'all, I looked up 'southern accents in Florida' on my trusty iPhone and the article I read said northern Florida has discernible 'southern' accents the closer you get to Georgia and other nearby southern states. But since my time is spent in SW Florida I don't hear these accents. If someone here does have an accent and I ask—it's usually a snowbird or transplant from a southern state. :-)" My conclusion is that it all depends on who you're talking to and where you are in the state.
We have confirmed something while here in Florida that we were pretty sure we already knew. We have reached the sad conclusion that our two cats, Jenny and Ella (ages 16 and 13), have to have another home. After years of no reaction, Kathy's cat allergy has sprung alive in the last year or so. Her eyes itch constantly and her sinuses run. Those symptoms vanished when we were in Australia and New Zealand for 3½ weeks, returned when we were back in the house, and have now disappeared again now that we're in Florida. I have told her all along that if her health requires removing the cats, then we will remove the cats. But where to? Who adopts old cats? We don't have to settle this now but we'll need to do something once we get home. Even when the cats are gone, it will take months of regular cleaning to rid the house of the cat dander so Kathy no longer has any reactions.
A few evenings ago Kathy and I were out for our usual cocktail hour. We were looking out at the little inlet that runs along the back edge of the property when behind us we suddenly heard a loud "bang!" We both jumped. We realized that a coconut had fallen from one of the palm trees immediately adjacent to where we sit. We looked up at the top of the tree; there are a dozen or more coconuts that look ready to fall, and they're probably 20-25' above the ground, so when they fall, they make quite a noise. We now walk a circle around the palm tree; who knows when another one will fall. If one of them hit your head, the injury would be serious.
With our heads still intact, I'll sign off.
-- Gary
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