Tube Dude

Finally, a proper piling of snow, although the timing could have been better. Impelled by equal parts filial guilt and "No, really" nudging from my job's HR department, I'd schedule some vacation time and plunked down for a flight to and hotel room in Sarasota. Two birds, one stone, my thinking went: I can see my grandma and get Nina some sunlight. And maybe I'll drink a margarita or find some fossilized sharks' teeth or something. I am not immune to the idea of vacationing, babies, but like many things in my life, I find it hard to engage with it if I'm not fully sold on the idea; examples: John Kerry, backpacking through Europe, writing a proof. At any rate, we were scheduled to fly down to Florida on Feburary 9th, which is exactly when Winter Storm Nemo landed in New York and Boston.

Delta promptly canceled our flight. Which was not a problem, really, since it gave us the following day to observe Nina's birthday, which she'd been trying to duck as usual. That night, though, we put out a call to our friends in the neighborhood to the effect that we had hot chocolate and whiskey and would people like to brave the storm with us stranded as we were in our rickety apartment by the bridge over the part of the Canal where the sick dolphin died in shit. And we were expecting that they would pass on it, but instead our house filled up with our friends and we set up an assembly line to boil milk, mix in Swiss Miss, and spike the result with Glenlivet. Everybody had some except for Tom, who had strep throat and asked for tea instead. I thought of another time he'd had something similar, right around the time we were graduating from college, and how sick we all used to get back then because we didn't have jobs or health insurance and you'd just walk around suffering for weeks. We all piled onto the couch and I put on the dreadful movie Vibrations, which almost but not quite captured peoples' attention. The storm howled outside, blasting the street with powder: The front door was adrift in fresh snow whenever I went downstairs to let someone in or out. And when the last people had left, Nina and I stood by the front windows, between the toasty warmth and the cold, and looked out over Union St. Small curiosities! One of the casket companies had hired a tiny earthmover to scoop snow out of the driveway. Nina edited together a short video of it. It was really zipping around!

The next day, Nina had to endure receiving her birthday presents, but after that we were at loose ends. She'd been waiting all winter for an opportunity to go sledding -- for real, with a proper sled, not just some cardboard from the recycling. Okay, I said, sure. Let's do it. In the late afternoon we walked over to Save On Fifth for a sled, picturing something luxurious, a two-seater Rosebud. But all they had were these enormous circular sleds shaped like dinner plates with ass prints, like they'd been sat upon before being fired in the kiln. We bought a blue one, and, disc in tow, we trekked up to the Park and trudged out to the north meadow through the gray brown purple darkness. A guy hollered at from the base of a snowy hill near the 3rd St. entrance to lend him the sled for his kids, but I told Nina we should ignore him. "He didn't ask nice," I said. When we got close to the middle of the meadow, we saw that someone had built a snowman there, leaving it in the dark, featureless like an obelisk on a dead planet. It was very cold. Nina took out her phone and turned on the lightbulb to get a better look, and we saw that somebody had hung a cardboard plaquard around the thing's neck that identified it as Ed Koch. Ha! We pulled our sled up the slope on the eastern side of the meadow where the lights were and readied ourselves for the ride, Nina taking the helm and me behind her, motorcycle-style, with my legs wrapped around her torso. Oh man that thing went fast! It was at least as fast as the greased cardboard we'd used last year for the same purpose. We worked through several variations: Her behind me, each of us on our own, a little bit north where the hill was steeper, a little bit south (The Bunny Slope) where it was less. We called it quits after an hour, my tailbone bruised and our clothes caked with snow. Anyway, we had plans to visit Sean and Kate at their apartment in Crown Heights. We didn't know their precise address, and our cell phones had both died by the time we got to their building, so it was only through a stroke of wild luck that a woman happened to be leaving a building that looked like it was theirs and was willing to let us in. And that she happened to be Sean and Kate's next door neighbor and thus could tell us their apartment number, well, that was very improbable as well. We left our sled in the hall with our snowy boots. Kate welcomed us into the kitchen, where there was a bolognese sauce simmering on the stovetop, and up to the second floor of their duplex where, no shit, there was a fucking fireplace with a fire burning in it. "He's in a truculent mood right now," said Kate of Sean, by way of warning, I guess. "He's been drinking whiskey since noon." He was up there with Jon, and yeah he was tight, but we got fucked up ourselves and watched WarGames by the fire and ate spaghetti.

The next morning it really was time for us to fly, so we hustled out to Laguardia and hopped our flight, and three hours later we were at Sarasota-Bradenton Int'l, another world, everything turquoise and smelling faintly of sulfur. We walked up to the Mote Marine kiosk above the baggage claim and chased a stripey lobster around the tank. We'd planned that Nina, a recently-legal car renter, would rent a car to get us around, and she did: Level up! José from Enterprise gave us tips on what to see and do, although I already fancied myself a pro. The first thing we did was drive to the Sarasota Holiday Inn, down by the ocean. On the way, we passed by necessity through St. Armand's Circle, a large rotary that forms Sarasota's downtown. The businesses along its perimeter are inconsequential (okay restaurants, galleries for terrible art), and the interior of the circle is decorated with white marble and limestone statues of a gauche variety of classical (the "Seven Virtues of Sarasota") and non-classical (several busts of John Ringling, town patron / tyrant). It's a perfect display of vapid, new-world pretentiousness. The room we'd reserved faced inland, giving us a direct view of an array of cranes and earthmoving equipment performing surgery on a row of unfinished villas across the street. (Winter is "building season," a local informed us.) After dropping off our stuff, we got back into the car and drove back up the Tamiami Trail to visit my grandma at the retirement community where she lives. My dad was there to greet us; he flies down periodically to help her keep track of her finances and other things. My grandmother is obviously losing the thread, but she's armed herself with a mirror frame wedged full of snapshots so she knows who everyone is. She asked Nina for one to add to her collection. We drank Jim Beam with her in her room, and then took a stroll around the grounds. She pointed out a pelican diving for a fish in Sarasota Bay: "You see how he plunges? He can see a fish from way up there and he plunges." She told us again a minute later. In the evening, my dad took me and Nina out to dinner at The Crab & Fin. The last time I'd been there was with my grandmother. I'd found a mussel pearl.

The next day we visited granny again. I re-introduced her to Nina before she could ask. We spent a few minutes with one of her friends within the facility, who showed us a piece of sculpture made by a local craftsman known as Tube Dude. In the afternoon, we drove up the trail a bit further and visited the Jungle Gardens. When I was a little kid and my family would stay in a bungalow on Casey Key, we would go there every year, and I remember thinking it was exotic and manicured. As a grup I can see that it's a little exotic and a little manicured, but it's also, you know, a roadside zoo: Musty smell, threadbare animals, bird shit everywhere. Whatever -- they take in abandoned pets and critters that get hit by cars. They're great. We watched a little show in the amphitheater featuring a coffee-colored skunk named Mocha (Nina got to hold her like a baby at the end) and some birds with clipped wings did tricks like riding little bicycles across a table. When you buy your ticket, you can shell out a little extra for a bag of food pellets to feed to animals roaming the grounds. It took us a little while to figure out where the. They were surprisingly gentle, if insistent -- a flamingo nipped Nina's elbow to get her attention when she turned away from a moment. But they'd turn their heads sideways and lay them in your hand to kind of lap the pellets up with of the sides of their mouths. Some of them were a little worse for wear: One had a mangled-up beak, curved out and up like a bruised fingernail about to pop off; another didn't seem to want to its head up off the ground, swinging it back and forth like a clock pendulum to shoo away hungry sparrows. Beyond the flamingo grove was a strange and apparently neglected part of the gardens. It was a small, wooded grotto ringed with little glassed-in dioramas depicting scenes from the Bible: Jesus doing something with lepers, Jesus crucified at Golgotha. The figures in the dioramas had a grotesque look about them, like a harbinger of evil discovered by a character in a Lovecraft story. They were squat and ugly, their faces grotesque and undifferentiated. The dioramas themselves looked like they might have at one time been interactive or light-up or something, but not any more. There was dust and dirt all over everything, inside and outside the glass. Several of the scenes had cardboard "out of order" signs taped over them. We got back to the hotel a little before six. It was already quite dark, but the swimming pool was open and warm. We quick-changed into bathing costumes and borrowed towels from the front desk. We bobbed around for almost an hour, trying to keep everything below our necks submerged, until the cold air made even that untenable.

The following morning we knew we wanted to go to the beach, so after eating oatmeal at the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel we put on our beach things and went across the street. We rented a beach umbrella from one of the leatheriest dudes I've ever seen. But I wanted to roam the beach and find a few fossilized shark's teeth; I'd collected hundreds of them as a kid, but Nina was skeptical. "So they're just lying on the beach? I don't see any." I remembered to put sunblock on everything excepy my ears and so promptly got a sunburn there (February!). But I did find three teeth. Nina found one, too! After that we swam in the pool some more, irking the serious lap-swimmers by playing "Water Taxi" in the shallows; and then we drove out to Mote Marine Laboratory. The live animal shows were all wrapping up by the time we got there, and the grounds were emptying out, but that was maybe a good thing: No lines for the touch tanks! We prodded and inspected decorator sea urchins, small horshoe crabs, a racing circuit of slimy rays. A team of divers was cleaning the shark tank (partitioning it first with a weighted, heavy net) and we watched them, mostly old men, their hair clouding away from their skulls like algae as they buffed the glass and repositioned the various ornaments in the tank, occasionally giving a friendly pat on the flank to a curious fish. Back to St. Armand's Circle, where they were celebrating Mardi Gras. An awful band (teenagers) played Beatles covers ("Thanks, everyone! That was 'Let It Be,' by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.") at the head of the rotary. We poked our heads into various shops, looking for trinkets to reward our friends who were feeding the cat. We made the mistake of entering a commercial gallery of blown-glass surf art -- end tables hoisted onto the backs of translucent sea turtles and small dolphins. An array of flat-screen TVs showed a documentary about the mercenary hack responsible for some of the glittery crap, and as we stood momentarily transfixed, an imbecilic salesman approached and started slobbering about how the artist was going to be coming to the store in person next week and how lucky the staff was to be graced with his presence. We escaped to a nearby fudge shop, where we bought fudge, and then to a store that specialized in hot sauce, where we bought salt and vinegar-flavored crickets.

We drove out to Fruitville for dinner, to a place recommended by a friend of Nina's family. It was called The Old Packinghouse Cafe, and it turned out to be a real (well, real to my gullible eye) "road house." Which is to say it was deserted except for a party of black leather motorcycle people sitting at a wooden table outside and complaining loudly about Barack Obama, and the guy playing a guitar on a stool inside the restaurant also worked in the kitchen. We opted for an outside table as well. A fearless tabby cat came over and lay down in the dust next to the table. Nina ordered a catfish sandwich that was unbelievably good. I had some kind of chicken thing. The bikers roared. We drove back to the hotel, parked the car, and then returned to the Circle on foot to take care of some unfinished business: Fruity drinks at the Daquiri Deck. It was chilly, so we parked ourselves squarely under a palm tree-shaped propane heater. I had a piña colada. Nina had something called a "green parrot."

Did we try the snacketizers? We did not.