I wanna go home.
When I first got to Florida, I could not even entertain the thought of returning to New York. I was so glad to be off the treadmill I had been on, so happy to bask in the warm weather. I had a house, a yard! Why would I want to return?
Now I wanna go home.
Look, making fun of Florida is easy. Too easy. Everyone does it. It’s like calling Las Vegas tacky. Vegas knows it is tacky and revels in it. Florida revels in itself as well, whatever exactly that self is.
So I’m going to take the high road! I won’t dwell on the local library that carries the Cliffs Notes for Hedda Gabler but not Hedda Gabler, or the twenty minute drive to the nearest bookstore (a Barnes & Noble where the entire first floor is cat books and calendars). I’m going to talk about what I like about Florida:
1) The lizards. I’m not kidding. They’re awesome. If you look at a square yard of Florida real estate long enough, you’ll see a lizard. They mind their Lizard Business, doing their Lizard Things. But it intimates a whole other world, a sense of scurrying life all around.
2) The birds. Stunning. Herons and egrets and anhingas and hawks and vultures and pelicans swirling around the sky day and night. Gorgeous. Takes my breath away.
3) The sky. Every sunset is stunning. The sky is huge and filled with a never-ending dramatic swirl of clouds.
There are other things, too, particular to my neighborhood. The house we rent is next to a downscale old folks home which is ludicrously named “Crest Manor”. The Spartan conditions have created a certain tension that is heard in fights over cigarettes and chairs (it occasionally sounds like a geriatric prison yard). But when I bring my son Henry out in the yard, they all stop and coo.
There is one person in particular, a Japanese woman who speaks not a word of English (how did she get stuck there?), who has become Henry’s favorite. She has an amazingly kind, wrinkled old face, long grey hair, and not a tooth in her head. When she sees Henry she lights up, and so does he. She walks as fast as she can over to the fence (it can take a full five minutes to cover 10 yards). She claps her hands in front of his face. He giggles and reaches out to touch her. Her face explodes in a smile. It is a little magical.
Then there is Ricky, who lives across the street. He is the epitome of a particular kind of Floridian driftwood. He is drunk most of the day, and prone to the kind of tiresome things that most drunks are prone to (forgetting that they met you, launching into endless diatribes of how they’ve been wronged, etc). But seeing Ricky out on the steps of his driveway (it’s the only outside he has), posing with a guitar (I’ve never heard him play so much as a chord), trying to cajole one of the neighborhood stray cats to come to him, I’ve come to feel great empathy for him. Walking into my house with my wife and baby, I see him over my shoulder and am almost embarrassed by the richness of my life. I think about him. I hope he is okay.
There are others on my block, too. An amazing assortment of people. Florida is kind to eccentrics. But it is not my home. And I think being here has made me appreciate the incredible place I live.
As you get older, your life simplifies. My priorities are very clear to me. There is my wife and son, and there is my work. Recently, I had started to fool myself into thinking that these things were easily portable, that I could take them anywhere. I didn’t realize how much my life was enriched by where I live. Not just by my friends, which I knew about, but by the incredibly vibrant city I breathe in every day.
Life is uncertain. I don’t know how long I will live in New York. But I do know this - I love where I live.
And I wanna go home.
